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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#551

Post by sreque »

wpietri wrote: post #464
sreque wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it's much easier for greenfield projects than existing projects because you can lead by example. Also, with these projects there are opportunities to define team rules and culture for the project from the beginning.

Perhaps the greatest inertial force against improving test automation is the truth that any change to a in-production product incurs risk, coupled with the fact that adding tests often requires refactoring to make the code more testable. Techniques like writing tests as you refactor never get employed because there is resistance to any refactoring occurring at all in the first place. The general principle followed is: "make the smallest change possible to accomplish the objective".

I feel like overcoming these forces requires bravery from management or the team, coupled with a longer term vision for the project. For some projects, which are limping along on life support, it may not even be worth it to improve code quality. However, for most other projects I believe there is a better balance to be had between not unnecessarily breaking the product and not being afraid to make relatively risky changes to improve maintainability of the product.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#552

Post by rejectedandsad »

singron wrote: post #502
rejectedandsad wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the system is that engineers operate what they own, that's fundamentally different from SRE. It allows for significantly greater organizational decoupling. At Google, they had to go through an entire ceremony just to get Rust into the monorepo (I actually don't know if they ever ended up doing that outside of the Fuschia repos) while at Amazon someone just created a build script that wraps cargo and now…

This is really orthogonal to SRE. Google, in many ways, prefers centralized infrastructure. They invest in a few ways of doing things and integrate them all together. Devs have a few tools/libraries/services etc. to pick from and they mostly work together very well. This makes SRE easier since devs can throw various applications over the wall and SRE only has to learn a few different pieces of infrastructure. But in…

I mean by this logic all tier1 service engineers are just rotating SREs anyway (though I do know some services already have dedicated SREs for operations work)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#553

Post by imwillofficial »

wpietri wrote: post #459
imwillofficial wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NY times I can get behind. Business insider is like citing the national enquirer.

I said that there were a number of recent articles. When you decided you didn't like the one I gave you, did you look for any of the rest?

I had already read the No times article when you posted your comment.

My issue with not with your point, my issue is with business insider being cited as an authority for any news.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#554

Post by akarma »

whakim wrote: post #515
akarma wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jeff Bezos wants to pay the least for the most amount of work, and the workers want the most money for the least amount of work. It sounds like both parties should meet themselves half-way as opposed to living in what is effectively modern-day slavery. The way it currently works is what you describe here. Amazon pays the least they can for the most amount of work, and workers work the least they can for the most am…

Where "the equilibrium" ends up changes over time though. Over the past 40-50 years in most developed countries, capital's (i.e. businesses') share of gross national income has been rising and labor's has been falling. This means that on average "the middle" has been trending towards companies paying less for the same amount of labor.

This is true, and it wouldn't suggest anything is amiss.

In the US for example, there's a lot of factors in increasing labor supply: (1) From 1955 to today, women have gone from 36% labor force participation to 59%. (2) The percent of immigrants in the US in the 1950s to 1970s was less than 50% of what it is today.

When the labor supply grows, it'll push downward on wages as the equilibrium price shifts.

America's a country designed to be optimized for freedom, which includes women having the ability to participate in equal numbers to men in the workforce if desired, and immigrants having the ability to come and build their lives here if desired. That will lower wages, which is just one part of the picture in terms of economics and policy.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#555

Post by matz1 »

nzmsv wrote: post #519
matz1 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you sure its a lie ? Not common? How do you know? Eating nothing but pizza is not healthy? I disagree, Pizza has carbohydrates, protein, vegetables, vitamin, etc. Not always but it can be healthy.

How can you be sure it's not a lie? What I meant by "lie" is this: let's say you ask someone how much they sleep. Currently society tells us that working as much as possible is a virtue. So they tell you they sleep 4 hours every night. You have no way of verifying this information. For all you know they could be sleeping 8 or 9 hours. But it is very easy and tempting for them to lie for a small boost in social standi…

Just because its easy/tempting to lie doesn't mean they are lying.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#556

Post by northern-lights »

kablow wrote: post #209
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 in non-AWS and things aren't any better here. It is very much dependent on the manager and team, and I've been optimistic (~3 years now), but it gets harder as time goes on. > I'm just not 100% sure about the whole PIP scene. Our service was extremely critical and we were extremely understaffed. So I don't think it applied to anyone in our org but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fres…

Same. My team was down to 4 people and they put the L6 external hire in Focus (the informal coaching plan precursor to PIP) and he left. And we own critical services.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#557

Post by whakim »

akarma wrote: post #554
whakim wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where "the equilibrium" ends up changes over time though. Over the past 40-50 years in most developed countries, capital's (i.e. businesses') share of gross national income has been rising and labor's has been falling. This means that on average "the middle" has been trending towards companies paying less for the same amount of labor.

This is true, and it wouldn't suggest anything is amiss. In the US for example, there's a lot of factors in increasing labor supply: (1) From 1955 to today, women have gone from 36% labor force participation to 59%. (2) The percent of immigrants in the US in the 1950s to 1970s was less than 50% of what it is today. When the labor supply grows, it'll push downward on wages as the equilibrium price shifts. America's a…

This isn't actually true because the growth of Gross National Income is proportional to the size of the working population. I'm also not talking about wages in absolute terms, I'm talking about the wage share (the percentage of GNI which goes to wages, as opposed to capital). Definitionally, the wage share has been declining since the 1970s because rates of growth have been slowing, which increases the capital/income ratio and (assuming return rates on capital remain relatively constant) will increase the capital share of income (and thus decrease the wage share). I'm not necessarily claiming to know what the correct value should be for the wage share, only that it's significantly lower than it used to be (and will probably continue to decline for the forseeable future). That being said, the wage share is obviously closely tied to inequality; if you reduced returns on capital and/or increased growth, you'd likely also increase the wage share.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#558

Post by northern-lights »

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…

It's called Survivorship bias. Before coming here, I too thought the same. That the stories were exaggerated, that those experiences were outliers and a minority. But then I saw my team's L6 SDE get put on Focus within a year of joining and leave. If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. But no such thing.

This place puts you in the middle of the ocean when you don't know how to swim. You either sink or swim.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#559

Post by intricatedetail »

rantwasp wrote: post #547
intricatedetail wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

my point was that the people know the deal they are getting. if they still work there they are okay with it. to play devil’s advocate (from a top lawyer firm): how can one force a private entity to pay a certain wage that is way over what the minimum wage is?

People have no choice if all companies are doing same thing.

The minimum wage should be tied to company revenue to reflect the value workers generate. I mean revenue, not profit, because those companies are masters at hiding profits to avoid tax.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#560

Post by dang »

xref wrote: post #399
imwillofficial wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m genuinely curious how saying good luck gets down voted. Fuck the HN crowd for this shit.

Comments like “good luck!”, “me too”, and “hi James” will get downvoted because they don’t contribute to the conversation

That's not appropriate, as pg made clear back at the beginning:

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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