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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#301

Post by treis »

zorked wrote: post #82
wpietri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is pretty reliable for the most part so I am pretty surprise that the code quality is that bad. I'm not totally surprised because of two factors: very stable product definitions and lots and lots of users. A number of years back, I was talking with people at a famous and popular site with a broad audience. I asked them how much unit testing they did. They said that particular isolated pieces sometimes had tests…

For very, very popular services, a second of being live will exercise more code paths and edge cases than even the most dedicated testing team could ever dream of. We hear a hell of a lot about testing but the most fundamental piece of software quality nowadays is the release strategy: running on tee'd live production traffic, canarying, metrics and alerting, quick roll backs, etc.

>For very, very popular services, a second of being live will exercise more code paths and edge cases than even the most dedicated testing team could ever dream of.

Most of the code we care about is to handle anomalous situations. That AZ going down a week or two is a good example. It's when stuff like that happens that a bunch of code springs to life to keep things running. And indeed, things didn't exactly roll over just fine for us.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#302

Post by dang »

I've changed the title to try to make it less linkbaity and more neutral, in accordance with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If anyone can suggest a better title—i.e. more accurate and neutral, using representative language from the article itself—we can change it again.

Usually this sort of ambiguously-sourced riler-upper doesn't make for good HN discussions, but this thread is extraordinarily good, with many informed comments from all sides of the question, so I don't want to downweight it.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#303

Post by jjtheblunt »

epolanski wrote: post #261
muststopmyths wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP. stack ranking came up in another thread a few days ago and this practice of forced attrition seems like just another way to do the same thing. I thought it was understood that this kind of structure just incentivizes internecine fighting and politics ov…

> It seems like the more employees you have under you, the less you see them as human beings instead of inputs and outputs I mean, there's a department in most companies called "human *resources*" to give away that employees are still resources, just human ones.

well said

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#304

Post by vishnugupta »

salil999 wrote: post #18

Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…

(Disclaimer: Was with Amazon for ~7 years a long time ago).

I've been a customer of AWS across multiple startups and I've seen the overall quality of their products continuously degrade which complements your experience.

While they continue to launch new products at a rapid clip you can see small cracks beginning to appear as the products age. A permission issue that's not documented, a cryptic error message etc., They aren't show stoppers on their own but if you use AWS long enough you will be worn down by the cumulative pain.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#305

Post by [deleted] »

atopuzov wrote: post #284
amazon_throw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

Not gonna dox other people, you can easy figure out my name and reach out with a "real name".

[deleted]

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#306

Post by noodle »

nobleach wrote: post #215

I interviewed with Amazon and Facebook in the Spring/Summer of 2020. The difference was night and day. Amazon felt like I was part of a huge cattle herd. The recruiter contacted me and told me they needed to hire a bunch of people in my area. I was immediately given a course of study, link to common LeetCode questions and told I had a couple of weeks. That fine. I enjoy solving puzzles. Facebook felt VERY different.…

How long ago was this? Its been a while since I talked to either amzn or fb, but their processes were basically the same to me. Your description of amzn was almost exactly what I experienced with fb. It would be nice to hear hiring practices changing at a big tech co though.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#308

Post by saagarjha »

nkozyra wrote: post #173
ravenstine wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.

Some people have a weird tendency to talk up how little they sleep like it's some point of valor. Some people can do 6 hours a sleep a night for a long time and be fine but I don't think there's much support for maintaining health on 5 or fewer for long periods of time. Sleep is important and people need to find ways to get what they need. Even people with infants need outside support so they can get what they need.…

Some people just don’t need much sleep.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#309

Post by awsthro00945 »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #291
salil999 wrote: post #18

Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…

I don’t get this. In this market, if you’re good, why take a job with any on-call work? It’s thankless, shitty work. If you can deliver features, that’s good enough to get paid extremely well at other Amazon-scale companies with dedicated SRE teams. What’s making you stay?

Because changing jobs is really fucking difficult.

I'm probably one of the biggest proponents of "quit your job, you deserve better" that you'll ever find, but even I have to admit that finding a new job is ridiculously hard. Even in "this market", even if you're a top engineer, it's still ridiculously hard to even get an interview, let alone get hired.

There is only a limited amount of companies that will pay at the same level as Amazon, and those companies often have months-long interview processes with ridiculous requirements that, even if you are a top engineer, still require a lot of time and effort be set aside to prepare for the specific interview processes that the new company is looking for. And that's to say nothing of the nebulous "culture fit" that is just as likely to prevent you from getting an offer and is completely unaffected by how "good" of an engineer you are.

Almost everyone I know at AWS is interested in switching jobs/companies, but it really is not just something you wake up one morning and decide to do. It's a long, perpetual process that can take up a huge amount of time and effort (stuff you don't have a lot of when you're working on-call at AWS anyway), not to mention has huge implications if you are relying on your job for something like a work visa.

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