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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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531–540 of 589 posts

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. This has not been the case for at least the last 10+ years. I cant speak of the 'product' companies such as Microsoft, Google etc. But for anyone working in the WITCH like companies, only way to get your salary changed is to switch companies. People change their jobs every 2 years or so, especially in their first 10 years. After…

What are WITCH companies?

W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India.

These companies take up sweatshop jobs from companies in US/europe ( manual testing jobs mostly ).

Below are some pros and cons of joining. ( Speaking only for new joiners at level 12 Associate Software Engineer )

Pros -

1). You won't need any skills to get in, if you can speak english you are already in.

2). Provides employment to a lot of undergraduate students ( talking in hundreds of thousands ) who will be probably jobless due to lack of skills in their field.

3). Work is easy, you will get paid around 400 USD a month ( new comers, which is livable in metro cities )

4). Health insurance is given.

5). Good company to work for if you have absolutely nothing in hand, come from a poor background and have to put food on the table. Have to give props to these companies for that. They have created a lot of job opportunities for the lower middle class people who have undergraduate degrees and cannot find job anywhere else.

6). These companies have been doing great, and will not probably fail in the future.

Cons- 1). Shit work, absolute garbage work. ( Predominantly manual testing QA).

2). NO CAREER GROWTH. If you stay long enough you will have to keep working in these type of companies because no one will hire a guy who has been manual testing for years into dev roles.

3). High attrition rates ( why do you think they hire in hundreds of thousands ? )

4). They call you Associate Software Engineer but there is 0 absolutely 0 engineering job. The title is a joke just to make people at the bottom of the barrel feel good.

5). People who stay in these companies for more than 4-5 years stay here for life because they know they cannot probably get a job anywhere else with the limited skillset.

6). The pay for new joiners have NOT INCREASED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME. Its the same freaking money since they started operating in india !! 400 USD a month since probably 2005-2006. Inflation is a hoax to these companies.

End note.

If you are even a bit ambitious and find yourself working here, please work a bit harder and go to a decent enough company which ships actual products and make you write code.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well the good news (for amazon) is that I used to work at a place where I was trying to build a cloud. And management suffered from EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEMS (though for different structural reasons, there was no "build a feature" incentive). And then we hired someone who used to work on amazon cloud who came with rave reviews, even though he completely failed my interview, which basically tested "do you read the spe…

I feel for all of you in this thread that work at Amazon and complain of the poor conditions. There are no shortage of stories that point to a very large problem in that company, for certain. However, I believe the underlying theme, if there is one, is incompetent Management and Leadership. This is systemic in Technology companies because, to me, the “bean counters” try to run the companies like a basic Manufacturing…

You nailed it. At the foundation of the dysfunction at most technology companies is the inability of the leaders to understand that software heavy products just can’t be estimated accurately by traditional “bean counting” methods.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#533

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…

worked in AWS for a while, but it was 5 years ago. you’re right that your manager can make or break your experience. For the first couple of years there it kinda sucked, mostly due to oncall (our ticket queue was at 3000 tickets at some point) and constantly being yelled at when things broke. We would basically only work on sev2s. Having the pager was super-stressful. We “owned” so much cruft/dead projects/experiment…

This is a familiar story. Reducing on call load is actually generating a lot of value by freeing up developers and keeping them stress free. This fact is almost never recognized by product driven managements. Incredibly fucking annoying, considering that fixing such a system is not a trivial task.

I was disappointed to hear that it ultimately didn’t work out. A quiet oncall rotation requires good processes and a somewhat competent dev team.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you’re having a rough time. Hang in there, and if you move on, good luck!

Thank you, I appreciate you saying this. I don't want to give the impression it's all awful though. We are reasonably well compensated (you do a lot better if you're based in certain countries than others). There are part of this job that were a lot harder than I could have imagined. The aim of my earlier comment was to make this clear to people considering AWS. When the hiring manager interviews you and mentions the…

> The on-call time is also unpaid

This is why on-call should never be unpaid. There is no incentive to reduce cost and improve that way.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#535

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…

> 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 mo…

Because We are knowledge workers, Not manual labourers!

/s

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

When did humane treatment, job security, and the worker's collective voice leave the picture? Are we to simply praise everything laid out here?

Honestly ? When communist stopped being a real threat sometimes in 80s.

As horrific as communism was, the average worker in the west probably indirectly benefited from capitalist being scared of something similar happening closer to home, and gave concessions.

After the fall of communism that trend reversed and workers are steadily loosing ground.

As someone who was born in one of those communist countries I am glad that its dead, and I don't want it to ever come back, but It did serve as an example of what can happen if you try to squeeze too much out of people.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we've done research and we believe we actually do pay comparatively in this market segment". Sounds like market fixing and likely illegal, however I can imagine poorly paid employee wouldn't be able to afford a lawsuit.

the 'poorly paid' employees can definitely afford a lawsuit. here's the thing though: if you know what the situation is and continue to work there who is to blame? also, most stories I've heard is that the sub-optimal comp comes bundled with pretty good WLB. So maybe if you were to double the number of hours worked and double the comp M$ would blow other BigTech out of the water. Maybe this is the play (half the mone…

Do you base affordability on what? The type of lawyer average employee can afford will be easily crushed by a top law firm with virtually unlimited funds.

The fact that one can change job shouldn't enable companies to continue like this.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#538

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…

You can blame agile and product development on that. It's always build build build and not maintain or improve. Agile manifesto literally says to ignore bugs and keep developing.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#539
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed there twice and both times the first step was an automated coding assessment. Not leetcode but very similar. You're given a prompt and the expected function signature, and your code must pass a dozen or so test cases.

But again, the parent comment was it was ironic because it was posted on leetcode. If they're using some other platform there's no irony there, notwithstanding any alanis morissette-directed conversation.

Agreed! Just giving my experience with them for the HN record.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#540

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…

how many months of work does it take to get the "stamp"? I'm assuming employers would be wary if it's only 6-12 months

If you're brand new to the industry I'd say stay for at least 2 years. I worked on a service which operates an enormous scale and while I'm thankful for the opportunity it takes several months to ramp up (I'd say about 6-8 months for my team). But obviously YMMV.
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