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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#371

Post by awsthro00945 »

YZF wrote: post #348
awsthro00945 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any particular reading material, and my example of the on-call load at AWS that I'm referring to is probably very basic to most people. On my team at AWS, leadership has given specific instruction that we do not believe in on-call runbooks or automation to triage issues, for example. Leadership's reasoning for this is that they think runbooks prevent engineers from applying personal judgement, and every…

There is something to be said for this approach. If the root cause is to be fixed someone needs to look at it in depth rather than running some play book procedure to recover. If you have too many problems though you're beyond the point where that helps. Let's say your software has worked flawlessly for a year, no issues, now an issue pops up, the engineers should definitely spend a lot of time understanding it, unde…

>If the root cause is to be fixed someone needs to look at it in depth

The root cause has already been looked at in depth 999 times when the same issue has come up. It's already been RCAed and the fix has been put in the backlog to be implemented sometime next year. In the meantime while we wait for the fix, we will continue to do a full, ad-hoc RCA every time the exact same issue appears, with the exact same results every time, because managers genuinely think it is a valuable way to spend our time.

I understand your point, but the relative utopia of a team you're describing is not really the situation I'm talking about. We have on-call periods where the exact same issue will appear 10-20 times per week, and each and every time it is treated as a completely novel issue with an ad-hoc response, even though we already know beforehand what the root cause is and what the fix is. It's an incredible waste of time and contributes significantly to on-call engineers being overloaded, and yet we continue to do it and then are baffled when all of our engineers leave the team due to being overworked.

There's also nothing excluding runbooks and root cause analyses from existing together, either. In fact, most good runbooks specifically include steps to determine when an RCA is necessary and how to conduct one. There really is no excuse to not use runbooks as much as possible. If over-reliance on runbooks is having a negative impact due to engineers not applying personal judgement, then that is certainly an issue to be addressed, but the answer is almost never to completely abolish runbooks and documentation.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#372

Post by rejectedandsad »

amazon_throw wrote: post #170
throwaway2037 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so. I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).

Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.

I did digging on this a few weeks ago, this is correct if you add up SDE, SDM, TPM, Scientist etc roles.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#373

Post by fridif »

amazon_throw wrote: post #166

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind. While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations…

>steer people clear of that org

Um, shouldn't we fix the org instead!!!

Very glad that I've been denied from Amazon final round twice now. It was great interview practice and nothing more

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#374

Post by nkozyra »

saagarjha wrote: post #308
nkozyra wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and the short sleep gene people are brought up here in this thread a bunch.

But that's not < 4 hours a night without naps for long periods of time.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#375

Post by approxim8ion »

imwillofficial wrote: post #359
wpietri wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a number of recent articles. Here's one: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...

Business insider is a lying trash rag.

The primary source is the NYT, not Business Insider. They clearly name their source too, "David Niekerk, a former Amazon vice president who built the warehouse human resources operations"

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#376

Post by fridif »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #369
buss wrote: post #223

I worked at Amazon years ago (2010-2012) on the retail website search navigation. I didn't like it, but it was nowhere near as bad as this hyperbolic post. Joining Amazon was the best thing I could have done with my career at that stage in my life. I learned a ton! But the culture does grind you down, especially when your alternatives are much more cushy.

I didn’t get any cushier offers out of undergrad and have worked at Amazon since - do you think that reflects poorly on me? I self harm sometimes because many people think it does…

If you don't desire to seek medical help, the best thing you can do is stop self harming and stop caring about all the possible negatives you are imagining.

I've gotten fat from all the stress of being a working man. I need to stop caring about all of the pitfalls and just live my life.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#377

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

cerved wrote: post #358
lupire wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OP made no mention of software and mentioned Sun and Motorola, so I don't think they made any point specifically about software. It may also be relevant to point out that Amazon is first and foremost a retailer, unlike the other companies mentioned.

> Amazon is first and foremost a retailer

I feel these days that it's more correct to say Amazon was first and foremost a retailer, but these days they are just UberMegaCorp across so many businesses (Amazon site proper, AWS, WholeFoods, Kindle, Echo/Alexa, movie studios, etc. etc.) that it's hard to say they are foremost a retailer.

I have a similar question, though, in that I've heard lots of nightmare anecdotes about Amazon code quality, but obviously whatever they are doing is working on some level.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#378

Post by soared »

ucm_edge wrote: post #258
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.…

I had a similar experience at Amazon. About midway through the onsite at Amazon I kind of decided "I don't think I'd like working here and I already have other offers, so my brain will be going into neutral now." and kind of checked out. Felt very much like the interviewers didn't want to be in the room with me and just wanted me to fuck up so they could click "No hire" in the HR app and get out. Walked out figuring…

Amazon has a hiring status that is basically “probably good to hire, but not a fit for my team”. Other team managers can go check that status and look for candidates that have been through the process already and basically do 1 short interview then hire the person. I think it’s called recycling?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#380

Post by kyawzazaw »

amazon_throw wrote: post #271
tmarthal wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones". Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of t…

I have considered it. I don't see the pattern widely, and I'm watching for it. I've seen teams implode because of it, and other toxic patterns, so it's not that they're not there... they just seem to be in the minority. There are teams I won't send friends to work for, for sure.

Have you visited teamblind.com?
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