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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#321

Post by joshuamorton »

notacoward wrote: post #157
zorked wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an overly general statement. Can you do that for front-end code that stores all of its state elsewhere? Sure. Can you do it for a storage system? Absolutely freaking not. If you introduce a bug that loses or corrupts data, there's no going back. You will have committed the worst sin that somebody in that specialty can commit. Better to test as much as you can, at every level. Other kinds of code are often some…

Teeing/dark launch/dual write strategies solve most of the issue for databases. Sure you run into concerns when changing the framework that manages that, but that's usually a far smaller surface area than your entire storage layer.

That said, you should have tests anyway.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#322

Post by aaronbrethorst »

hintymad wrote: post #292
tylersmith wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but AWS customer's eningeers have less oncall load because the AWS engineers are doing so much of the difficult and failure-prone work. That's largely what you're buying when paying for cloud services.

What I meant was that Netflix built their platforms and services on top of AWS services, just like AWS teams. Yet AWS teams have brutal oncalls, while Netflix teams enjoy great work-life balance.

Company culture and values flow from the top

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#323

Post by easton »

snarfy wrote: post #213

This article was on the front page for all of 30 minutes before being buried to oblivion.

If the article has more comments than upvotes the algorithm uses that as a signal that a flame war is happening and buries it. If it gets upvotes it'll move back up.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#324

Post by ako »

whateveracct wrote: post #264
dustingetz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipping tech debt should be compared to the realistic alternative which is never shipping at all. The solution is not to ship slower, but to attract a better team and then retain them. They say the CEO's #1 job is recruiting and this is why. Actually more important is growing your revenue faster, if revenue compounds faster than debt then you're good!

I mean you can also ship a lil slower. Startup founders and management types are obsessed with optimizing dev time at a day/hour granularity though in my personal experience, so it's a lost cause.

Can you really ship slower?

In the end it’s a winner takes all market, and AWS needs to out-innovate azure to win.

And as customers of AWS we’re all looking forward to the next re:invent for new features, and we’re voting with our money buying huge amounts of AWS services.

Also, as a potential employee, I would always sign with the company that has positive cashflow through customers that pay for shipped value, rather than a company with a great code base, but a bad sales track record.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#325

Post by abnercoimbre »

tablespoon wrote: post #248
ako wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really problematic is that from a management perspective they're doing really great: company is growing and extremely valueable, stock price is doing great, revenue and profits are doing great, and bezos is the richest person in the world. Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. Probably the opposite, they see this as a winning system, and w…

> Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. It sounds like management intentionally created these practices. This is from a recent NY Times article about Amazon warehouse workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if this attitude was applied to all workers in the company to some degree: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/amazon-wareho... : > 5.…

When did humane treatment, job security, and the worker's collective voice leave the picture? Are we to simply praise everything laid out here?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#326

Post by kaesar14 »

hintymad wrote: post #292
tylersmith wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but AWS customer's eningeers have less oncall load because the AWS engineers are doing so much of the difficult and failure-prone work. That's largely what you're buying when paying for cloud services.

What I meant was that Netflix built their platforms and services on top of AWS services, just like AWS teams. Yet AWS teams have brutal oncalls, while Netflix teams enjoy great work-life balance.

But that’s because the AWS teams are presumably shouldering the burden, then.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#327

Post by dkubb »

hintymad wrote: post #292
tylersmith wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but AWS customer's eningeers have less oncall load because the AWS engineers are doing so much of the difficult and failure-prone work. That's largely what you're buying when paying for cloud services.

What I meant was that Netflix built their platforms and services on top of AWS services, just like AWS teams. Yet AWS teams have brutal oncalls, while Netflix teams enjoy great work-life balance.

Its interesting that Netflix built their systems in a way that assumes the underlying platform is unstable. With Chaos Monkey and other systems they made sure things are resilient to flakey behaviour.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#328

Post by ev1 »

chewzerita wrote: post #297
steelframe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at the point of my career where it's all about the manager, the hours, the comp, and the kind of work I'll be doing. I no longer care as much about the title or level. In fact if the level is lower, great -- I'll have an even easier time getting high perf scores. These days, when I negotiate for a new job in Big Tech, I first and foremost maximize base pay. That's [1] immediate (no waiting for vest or anything),…

> After that, I make sure I won't be carrying a pager that can ever "go off" in the middle of the night. That's a non-negotiable for me at this point in my career. I'm currently in undergrad so starting my actual "career" still seems far enough off for me, but serious question how do people actually accept that? Will I have to accept that when I apply for junior/entry level positions? I don't think I'm asking too muc…

It's entirely dependent. This is also partially why "do you have a good manager" is included. I've had a few that absolutely will be in the line of fire first, and not make their team do anything they wouldn't do themselves.

From experience: a good team/manager, when forced to do this, will often freely be first on call, give you a day off after if you had an incident at night or let you sleep in til noon or later without complaint, etc.

If you are European or similar country with better working conditions/employee laws, it will be less painful. IIRC, in US salaried tech employees can effectively have unlimited unpaid overtime as a specific exemption.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#329

Post by lupire »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #300
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…

Current Amazon engineer: it's far and away the most incompetently run bureaucracy with self-defeating dysfunctions forced on the huge number of layers. The recent "leaks" to Business Insider, pointed out to me by coworkers, are exactly what we see. Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see. Laughably, our middle manager berates us as incapable noobs, entirely unaware that some of us at least actu…

Only Apple is on Amazon's tier of technical success, and half of Apple's tech success is from non software.

So on what basis ia Amazon incompetent at software? It sounds like Amazon is results driven, and pretty well-unit-tested code isn't critical for that.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#330

Post by jjtheblunt »

tazjin wrote: post #311
jjtheblunt wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Amazon engineer: it's far and away the most incompetently run bureaucracy with self-defeating dysfunctions forced on the huge number of layers. The recent "leaks" to Business Insider, pointed out to me by coworkers, are exactly what we see. Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see. Laughably, our middle manager berates us as incapable noobs, entirely unaware that some of us at least actu…

> I contrast it with excellent experiences at Sun, Motorola, Apple and others over the past 20+ years, where in some cases I had very high engineering ranks with fabulous results, in very well run and just healthy orgs. I can understand how junior devs end up in these positions for a while and stay on the ride, but what is making someone with your level of experience you stick to Amazon? Is the compensation that good…

Compensation seems good, but I'm there because I got fooled and plan to quit very soon, when graciously (not screw team-mates) feasible, because it's just a waste of time that could be spent helping positive efforts in healthy orgs.
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