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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#481

Post by amzn-throw »

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…

Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward.

Drama gets heavily upvoted.

If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had.

I'm one of those people.

I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, worked on a half dozen teams. Sure, there were outliers and a couple bad managers I've worked with, and some folks who left the company on bad terms.

But by and large, the experiences I had in 2 different countries on 2 different continents were mostly positive.

Yes, my job is tough. Yes, the oncall can be challenging sometimes too.

But I've also never stopped growing in the last decade, and have achieved bigger things than I ever thought possible.

Every single product and feature I've shipped have been immensely successful because of Amazon's deeply ingrained "Working backwards from the customer culture". And since that's what drives me - shipping cool stuff and having users on Twitter go crazy for it, I have never been more fulfilled.

Amazon is huge. There are now >60,000 Software Development Engineers worldwide. I'm not in Seattle but I'm in one of the largest offices outside of it.

So I'm sure every single horror story is true. But even so, they are a minute exception, and not most people's rule.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#482

Post by andreilys »

amzn-throw wrote: post #481
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…

Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had. I'm one of those people. I've been at Amazon for almost 10 ye…

Why is it that amongst all the tech Co's, Amazon seems to have the highest proportion of horror stories? It's almost a meme at this point.

I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture.

Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit".

No other Tech CEO has said that.

So perhaps your story is the anomaly?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#483

Post by Torn »

EarlKing wrote: post #470
nimabo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is incorrect: https://blog.aboutamazon.eu/discover-whats-behind-the-amazon....

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#484

Post by dan-robertson »

andreilys wrote: post #482
amzn-throw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had. I'm one of those people. I've been at Amazon for almost 10 ye…

Why is it that amongst all the tech Co's, Amazon seems to have the highest proportion of horror stories? It's almost a meme at this point. I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture. Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit". No…

I find it easy to believe that Amazon is a shit place to work (as a SWE) and that Amazon is a massive company with different bits being different. But I also find it easy to believe that a meme could just be wrong. It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer. If everyone at Google is convinced at orientation that Google is some great company with great engineering then that can create a brand outside the company by the force of the size of their workforce. Maybe Amazon just has a different employer brand.

Don’t Netflix also hire relatively many employees also? Perhaps I’m just misremembering. And wasn’t stack ranking and the like quite popular say 20 years ago? It isn’t obvious that the Google or Facebook of Apple or Amazon way is the best way to manage a business. Lots of people online have complaints about each.

And I’m not even particularly put off by your Jeff Bezos quote: it doesn’t need to be a bad thing for someone to have an incentive to quit something they are not suited to as they could then go on to something they are better suited to, and it’s true that a lot of people (even well-paid with alternatives) will spend a long time going to a job they dislike because it is easier to stay with the status quo than to leap.

I still feel like the hire-to-fire stories are directionally right (and so are eg stories about shipping new products being the only way to get promotions at Google leading to warped incentives)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#485

Post by kyawzazaw »

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…

> why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high??

Pretty sure it's mostly driven by raises not being able to catch up with job hopping offer.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#486

Post by mtmail »

EarlKing wrote: post #470
nimabo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The yellow stars shouldn't be taken lightly. Don't compare badge colors with what Nazis used for holocaust.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#487

Post by EarlKing »

Torn wrote: post #483
EarlKing wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is incorrect: https://blog.aboutamazon.eu/discover-whats-behind-the-amazon... .

I'm genuinely not sure what those are. They appear to have been proposed at some Seattle facility: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-sleek-n...

I've worked at two different facilities in CA and never once seen those. We still used the white/yellow/blue badge scheme.

Are there any ambassadors in this thread who know what those are?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#488

Post by pyuser583 »

ipaddr wrote: post #389
adwn wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It’s a “virtuous cycle.”

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#489

Post by yourapostasy »

vlovich123 wrote: post #315
awsthro00945 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Can you share your knowledge or reading materials for how to reduce on-call load? I’ve worked at a number of big companies but all the problems driving the oncall load seemed, at best, domain specific if not application specific with highly variable fix times and unpredictable occurrence (eg started becoming more of a problem due to unrelated change X). As a result each team has to decide the cost of fixing the pain…

> If there’s actually best-practices here that help that we’re not already doing...

Unless you have a leadership that recognizes the time sink on-call generates, all the best practices in the world are not going to help. This goes back to leadership culture. If they aren't in the trenches taking the same rotations with the on-call staff and at least simply staying up with them when the calls come in, then they will need metrics they believe to understand the deleterious effects of excessive on-call. This doesn't even begin to touch upon excessive on-call environments strongly signalling ignored technical and/or product debt that drags down new feature implementation and innovation. Leadership that truly comprehends this will allocate significant (20-25%) of time to addressing it, and push back on feature demands.

If you get to that point, then 80% of your struggle is over. Once you have leadership backing bringing the necessary time and resources to bear, reducing on-call is mostly lots of bookkeeping and documentation to identify trends and commonalities to prioritize and fix. A lot of the specific implementation details depend upon what you have available to leverage; ideally put someone in the PM role of tracking details for weekly stand-ups who is a relentless detailed note-taker and follow-upper.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#490

Post by aviraldg »

I worked at Amazon India (Retail, not AWS) for about two years straight out of college and experienced pretty much none of the issues described in OP (maybe with the exception of the delayed vesting*) I had the opportunity to work with some pretty smart people (whom I'm still in touch with), on great projects, with manageable oncall, and a good manager who didn't micromanage. In my time there, not a single person in my 40-50+ org was fired. If anything, the problem at Amazon India is that there are too few senior engineers, as most leave for better opportunities in Seattle or at other companies (since better/more important teams and projects tend to be located in Seattle.)

* Something the original post fails to mention is that this difference is made up for by a fixed joining bonus that is roughly equal in value (or at least it was, for me.)

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