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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#461

Post by yibg »

markus_zhang wrote: post #85
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'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with somethin…

Apparently it works though. Since both examples are described as "industry leads".

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#462

Post by nimabo »

mavsman wrote: post #450
taway_zonian257 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What do the badge colors mean?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#463

Post by dbt00 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #85
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'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with somethin…

> This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s.

Only one? :)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#464

Post by wpietri »

sreque wrote: post #155
wpietri wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I really appreciate excellent rollout strategies, although I suspect a lot of them are more developed out of self defense by SRE teams. I see it as a series of safety nets: I'm still going to write tests for my code so that I don't have far to fall if I make a mistake. But I also want a safe rollout so if I miss the first net I don't splatter on the pavement. And I totally agree with out about developer product…

Agreed. I was an SRE for over a year and the philosophy is that anything that is shipped can be broken. SRE is all about detecting, limiting, and mitigating damage. I think this is the right philosophy for SREs but should not be the total picture in the org. I am also agreed in that I anecdotally often see a disregard for automated testing. I am still trying to understand how to eliminate this tendency. I know that i…

For sure. I'm still trying to understand it too. Two things that have helped me:

To contain time pressure, I like a kanban board with small units of work. If the team has a history of steady delivery of small lumps of useful stuff, managers are more willing to trust that we know what we're doing.

To mitigate the natural human lack of humility, I start with the rule that every bug requires a test before fixing. People may act as if they won't make mistakes, but it's much harder to claim that when we have a live bug. And then I like to introduce pair programming. Collaboratively adding failing tests and fixing them (as with ping-pong pairing) makes it fun.

What approaches do you use to shift things over?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#465

Post by singlewind »

When a company grow bigger, it was have this issue? This is a management problem. The bigger they grown, the more cost for management. Really prefer the Google structure that you have alphabet to manage each product individually. However, Google is too big to be split now. The brand is more valuable compared to the parent company.

Looks like Amazon try to do the same thing as Huawei does. 10% refreshment of Human resources particular on 40+ employees. 30% looks is really crazy, it is hard on development team, which will dramatically affect the code quality.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#466

Post by rejectedandsad »

fridif wrote: post #376
rejectedandsad wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're obviously right. I started going to therapy and it helps (and I've stopped) but it still hurts.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#467

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124

I worked at a company that hired several people out of Amazon. Amazon is a big company, so there is significant variation from team to team. However, several of the ex-Amazon employees were clearly scarred from their time working at Amazon. Whenever something went wrong (delays, outages, missed deadlines) one of them went so far as to spend hours or days preparing documents showing how it was actually someone else's…

Ex-Amazon here: indeed the level of skills, management, code quality and so on changes a lot across teams.

Unfortunately people outside of Amazon make sweeping generalizations about the company.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#468

Post by singlewind »

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…

Exactly, big company works for Wall street not for their founder, employees and small investors.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#469

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

nimabo wrote: post #462
mavsman wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do the badge colors mean?

Length of tenure

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#470

Post by EarlKing »

nimabo wrote: post #462
mavsman wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do the badge colors mean?

Former contractor here...

blue = full-time/permanent employee

white = seasonal/temp employee

yellow = vendors (and DSP employees, if I remember right).

It's more or less their way of tagging you with a yellow star so they know who they can treat like shit. Hah, just kidding, they treat everyone like shit.

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