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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#421

Post by mancerayder »

papito wrote: post #115
ghaff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overestimate the appeal of a handful of large companies, taken by itself, on a resume if only because they come with downsides as well.

The level of abuse and mismanagement I put up with before I got older is pretty shocking. Young people have a much higher tolerance for BS, in many cases because they don't have enough experience to know that their workplace is broken.

Or worse, they may internalize it as normal and unreflexively continue breeding the problem. Those olderish managers of young people were young people themselves, once.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#422

Post by throwaway210620 »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #371
YZF wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Yeah, this sounds like a very bad situation where management won't let you do something that reduces ops pain because it isn't the most desirable solution, but they won't let you prioritize the right solution either. The next thing that happens is that on-call folks develop ad-hoc quasi-runbooks and share them amongst a subset of people (or just keep them to themselves to make their own life easier) and those quasi-runbooks become critical to ops, but not documented or shared by everyone. It's pure dysfunction.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#423

Post by Seattle3503 »

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),…

What did you do in your career to get to a point where you could ask for those things?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#424

Post by papito »

mancerayder wrote: post #421
papito wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level of abuse and mismanagement I put up with before I got older is pretty shocking. Young people have a much higher tolerance for BS, in many cases because they don't have enough experience to know that their workplace is broken.

Or worse, they may internalize it as normal and unreflexively continue breeding the problem. Those olderish managers of young people were young people themselves, once.

Yeah, it's much easier to end up in a malfunctioning workplace than a good one. The number of healthy workplaces where everything seems to just work is shockingly small, and you are actually lucky to end up in ONE through an entire career. And then you can never go back.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#425

Post by franczesko »

There are only two instances when you're happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren't worth it.

I can assure you that in the other areas of the company (non-SDE roles and not exclusively in India) things are WAY worse.

Avoid it at all costs. You've been warned.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#426

Post by cleandreams »

Anecdote. I used to work for Microsoft from the Bay Area and I was up in Seattle once for a business trip when I took an Uber somewhere. I struck up a conversation, "I bet you drive a lot of Microsoft employees around." The driver said, "Yeah. Also Amazon." I asked him if he observed any differences between these two groups. "Yeah," he said. "The Amazon employees are often crying."

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#428

Post by taway_zonian257 »

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…

> Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see.

Current sde1 bluebadge. I also see exactly what the parent comment mentioned. I also saw a few nasty episodes such as L6 managers quitting in less than a year in because they hated the pressure they were subjected to, and a yellowbadge say during a all-hands to a bunch of newly arrivals that he was at the company when they joined and he will still be at the company when they all left. I know of a team where SDE2s and SDE3s felt the need to pull in all-nighters and even work the entire weekend to meet the deadlines that their L7 leadership pulled out of their ass. I myself felt compelled to work close to 12 hours a day and weekends during a period just because my senior manager wanted to shine. And yes, I've already see a fair share of colleagues disappear.

Of course YMMV but I'm baffled why I'm seeing accurate descriptions of what I'm personally experiencing on a daily basis being faced with such a sense of incredulity.

> because the engineering quality is so shoddy and the business plan prioritizes maintaining system uptime,

I've created this throwaway account just to comment on the issue of engineering quality being shoddy.

It's true that engineering quality is shoddy but the problem is caused by Amazon's structure and not by the engineers themselves. For example, each and every single engineer is expected to deliver major tasks alone as part of their evaluation process, and this means that by design we are placed on tasks where we are way over our head and we are still expected to deliver things out of thin air. This sort of trial by fire is sold under the premise of allowing us to deliver consistently at the next level before being considered for a promotion, but in practice if you screw up that's expected to also be held against you.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#429

Post by mancerayder »

amazon_throw wrote: post #221
atopuzov wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you mine, L7. Seen and experienced personally things the author describes.

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?

> Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

Would you truly ask that? And have someone's personal name be searchable forever? What is the impetus?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#430

Post by ignoramous »

cleandreams wrote: post #426

Anecdote. I used to work for Microsoft from the Bay Area and I was up in Seattle once for a business trip when I took an Uber somewhere. I struck up a conversation, "I bet you drive a lot of Microsoft employees around." The driver said, "Yeah. Also Amazon." I asked him if he observed any differences between these two groups. "Yeah," he said. "The Amazon employees are often crying."

> "Yeah," he said. "The Amazon employees are often crying."

Ex-AWS. Can confirm. More often, those were tears of joy from rising stock prices. /s

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