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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#381

Post by soared »

yoloyoloyoloa wrote: post #343

Funny to see people ask questions like LSE, lol you can probably figure out if someone on an alt account is a real amazonian or ex amozonian by asking them a few abbreviations. My experience is that everything this guy mentioned in this post is true and more worse things are true that are not mentioned. Working at amazon broke me. I had to go on Xanax after working at amazon and after quiting Xanax lost three jobs co…

Similarly, oracle hates anything not built by oracle (especially google). They built their own version of google sheets, built their own outlook plugin to avoid ms entirely, etc. I’m not a dev but would have to call clients and say “please send me a blank google sheet, then I can use it to set up a doc we can use together”.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#382

Post by throwaway2757 »

rantwasp wrote: post #220
Popegaf wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, IMHO Amazon is going to have a really hard time hiring people with the reputation they created for themselves. The majority cares about money and convenience. If people really cared about reputation then Riot Games, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, that big ride sharing company whose name slipped my mind, Shell, and lots of other companies, would be struggling to hire.

hmm. Do Microsoft or Tesla pay well? Last time I interviewed at M$ I had to turn down their offer because of how bad the comp was.

Microsoft really only pays comparatively at each end of the spectrum, so for new grads out of college and people who have Wikipedia articles.

For the majority of people in their career (the Seniors and Principals/Staffs) MS pays significantly worse than other FAANG-type companies, often being well under half in terms of stock compensation for example.

The company is well aware of this as it's constantly brought up in all-hands (both within individual departments as well as at the all-company level), and they always respond with "we've done research and we believe we actually do pay comparatively in this market segment".

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#383

Post by ab_testing »

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?

Also about a third of Amazon's engineers are on a visa. You can transfer jobs but it is never smooth sailing and full of gotchas.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#384

Post by WJW »

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.…

It's a pretty interesting take given that Bezos himself is the most entrenched person that Amazon has.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#385

Post by softwaredoug »

eric4smith wrote: post #231

Think before you join any large company. Nothing here is unique to AWS. We outside have the illusion that everything is perfect on the inside of these profitable and successful companies, but in most cases it’s generally a lot of broken code and a boiler room. Staff is usually burned out after a few years - why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? The amount of bugs and issues in Facebook advertisi…

Not sure I agree. The tone from the top varies quite a lot across big tech companies, and sets the tone for the culture of the teams. Then within that context, a lot depends on your team, your manager, your ability to connect with stakeholders in the company, and the problem you’re working on.

I work at Shopify, and while we have had intense projects, I haven’t experienced anything like what’s described here about Amazon. Shopify, culturally, is quite different than other large tech companies I’ve worked at. It’s opinionated about tooling instead of dozens of things that do the same thing. We emphasize sustainably doing work and not burning people out. After all, why would we want to burn people out when we want to retain them? We emphasize “building for the long term” and to do that we do seem to put people first. One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#386

Post by Immune »

amazon_throw wrote: post #270
ixaxaar wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience. "I have soft power". Suspicious indeed.

No, far from it; I'm not HR, nowhere close, but I am senior enough that people sometimes listen to me. I'd like to make things better for people if I can, and part of that is "knowing where the problems are". Believe me or don't, it's no skin off my ass, but that's the opposite of my goal.

Like someone else has mentioned. The old fart tool is literal proof of the extremely high turn over rate. From my own experience checking the tool it showed that over %50 of people have been fired or left the company in just 1 year. I suspect that you’re astroturfing.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#387

Post by chewzerita »

ev1 wrote: post #328
chewzerita wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

Good advice about managers, it sounds like it may take a while to settle down and find a team that fits. It's good that you have been able to find a manager and team that actually works as a, well, team.

> IIRC, in US salaried tech employees can effectively have unlimited unpaid overtime as a specific exemption.

Yeah I see that daily with my dad working from home. He works at a local newspaper (wait those still exist?) doing stuff with maps, datavis and page layout/design. He works probably twice the amount of hours he gets paid for early morning until late at night, and can never take time off even with his measly "paid vacation time" allotment. He somehow manages to trudge along, which is unimaginable to me. Generational difference? Or maybe I just don't have the full picture yet

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#388

Post by mathgenius »

steelframe wrote: post #143
pram wrote: post #20

I've had two job offers from AWS for SA and TAM and I turned both down. The actual position was always lower than what I was originally interviewing for (Senior instead of Staff) Literally the only company I've seen that does that. It's like a bait and switch. If I'm not actually qualified just say no lol

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),…

> switched companies just to follow a great manager.

This is gold. I'm starting to realize (20 years in) that who you work with, and for, makes the difference. I really need to make this a priority for my next gig.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#389

Post by ipaddr »

adwn wrote: post #353
ipaddr wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has a lot of money to waste. It is cheaper to hire someone so they can fire them in a few months to keep the rest of the staff scared enough to overwork themselves so they can understaff. They play a good game.

> Amazon has a lot of money to waste. It is cheaper to hire someone so they can fire them [...] So... Amazon has a lot of money therefore they have to resort to money-saving practices? Or is the causality the other way around? How do these two sentences fit together?

Amazon has a lot money. These practices make them additional money. If they didn't have a lot of money they couldn't afford to hire to fire.

How can they do both? - They waste money when they hire to fire and constantly onboard. - They make money by not staffing enough resources but by using fear of being fired to force overtime.

Maybe the hire to fire costs are justified because the savings they get by understaffing outweights the cost.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#390

Post by vr46 »

awscurrentdev wrote: post #121
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 AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not clear to me if it's endemic, these are big orgs with teams run very differently. That being said, the on-call sucks. It's really awful, and something I've never seen before. It's also typically the primary cause of team churn for people in my org. This varies, a…

Sorry to hear about your awful job, is this only in engineering or does it affect professional services like solutions architects etc too?
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