Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

leetcode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 589 posts

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#441

Post by kazen44 »

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.…

> Company data showed that most employees became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need,”

If this was truly the case, humans would have evolved very differently (and it's needs would be substantially smaller.

Also, what about all those people working for little gain?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#442

Post by rantwasp »

throwaway2757 wrote: post #382
rantwasp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

lol. “i actually did my reservations and your compensation is not competitive”

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#443

Post by taway_zonian257 »

ako wrote: post #204
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…

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.

SDE1 here, I might be completely wrong but I'm inclined to believe that upper management is kept practically blind about the real struggles and issues experienced on lower-levels, and this scenario is abused by managers to scapegoat their way out of problems they have to deal with, specially the ones they created. I'm not going to provide examples as they could be easily traced back, but I can say that I've witnessed a L7 overpromissing on a project in spite of callouts from lower levels, and once postponing the delivery of some milestones started to become inevitable then I've started hearing said manager frequently mention "firing offenses" on dailies.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#444

Post by harshalizee »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #418
Immune wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain the high turn over rate that can be easily seen using the old fart tool?

I'm not sure that it's fair to ask a random employee (myself) to explain the employee churn for an employer that has over 1 million employees. That being said, it is largely based on the org you're in. My org (AWS support) has a high churn rate because it's largely seen as a stepping-stone to other places in AWS. People get hired into my org, learn AWS really well, and then go one of a few different places: - AWS ope…

And yet, as a random Amazon employee, you feel empowered to dismiss other's cautionary tales as hyperbolic and regurgitation of blind posts?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#445

Post by YZF »

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…

This does sound pretty dysfunctional. You'd think that for something that's causing 999 on-calls getting the root cause fixed would be a priority. What I described obviously falls apart when the team has no ability to actually fix issues. Perhaps the original intent was to get those issues fixed but that somehow got lost as the org grows larger.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#446

Post by kazen44 »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #160
kottapar wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. wow, honestly this is surprising. For me as an end customer I was always impressed with the way the services are engineered. Kudos to people like you for making this happen. But then I was also under the impression that AWS h…

> Wouldn't interim patch-ups cause stability issues in the long term? No matter what people tell you or put on their marketing blog, it feels like this is the state of play for 99% of software teams. The only time it doesn't end up like this is when you leave time up front to pay down technical debt (like Intel's tick-tock model), and almost no one does that.

my senior once said to me that the world is held together by two things.

Ducttape and shellscripts. This was a while ago, but the older i get the more i tend to agree.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#447

Post by brtkdotse »

softwaredoug wrote: post #385
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 Am…

> One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye.

laughs in Swedish 480 parental days

Seriously though, good to hear sane parental policies are spreading to more and more companies. Are those 10 months paid for by the employer?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#448

Post by rodgerd »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #180
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…

>Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. AWS engineer here and I confirm everything you say, but this quote really struck home with me. The thing I've n…

> The thing I've noticed at Amazon is that not only are the pre-existing conditions awful, but nobody has any interest or willpower to fix it.

Jeff Bezos can afford a private space program because - in part - his Amazon retail model is based on working people until they are mentally and physically broken, while paying them a pittance, discarding them, and moving onto the next group of people. He would rather spend money on crying booths and astroturf campaigns and buying newspapers than change that.

Why would he think about the expendable meat-units in AWS any differently?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#450

Post by mavsman »

taway_zonian257 wrote: post #428
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…

> 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 a…

Former AWS/Alexa engineer. Totally forgot about the whole badge color thing. Can't stand that crap.

Things are very dependent on team and manager and org but I will say that one of the things I'll never miss is our Re:Invent launch. That was horrible. Our team (startup acquisition) basically had a giant retro after the launch to figure out how we could avoid doing that again. Most of the startup members left the team of the company 2 years in. I learned a lot.

Post reply on HN