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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#231

Post by ZephyrBlu »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #176
decafninja wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs? I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong. The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.

Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.

Damn dude, I've seen you talk like this a few times over the last few months.

You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#232

Post by chris11 »

codezero wrote: post #174
hintymad wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.

This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery. Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not th…

> Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs

Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#233

Post by TideAd »

throw8881 wrote: post #217
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits. Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people…

I've seen "lines of code" used against someone at Amazon before. I'm sure the manager knew that it isn't a performance metric, but the manager had to hit a Unregretted Attrition (PIP) target so they just threw whatever they could think of at the person.

The institutional mechanism behind this insane thing is the URA target, just like many other insane things posted in this thread.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#234

Post by unclekev »

seahawks78 wrote: post #215
slumpt_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morons at Google do it, too. I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review. He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself. Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty man…

Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x…

> programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers

Programmers at Google make no decisions. The only people 'making decisions' are the product owners and project managers.

> Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard.

A hard coding interview is not a valid metric on how good a place is to work.

> Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life"

I've known people who feel like this as well. Some of them are still at Google and it's the best thing they ever did for their career.

On the other hand, I know people who felt this way, got a job at Google and it completely destroyed any passion for programming/computers that they had, to the point where they never worked in tech again.

Personally I feel it's dangerous to attach "you made it in life" to getting a job at Company X.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#235

Post by at-fates-hands »

paxys wrote: post #59
joshe wrote: post #43

The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have…

It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazo…

The current company I work at uses stack ranking. I had no idea what it was until I joined a new team and was told, "Well, no bonus for you, because you're the new guy. Mark always uses the new devs to rank against so he can give out bigger bonuses to his cronies."

Sure as shit, for three years, it didn't matter how awesome or shitty a job I did, I got the same middle of the road review. One year, I got a paltry bonus and no salary increase. The next was neither and the final year I got a pittance of both. By the second year, I knew what was happening and just completely checked out. I went full "Office Space" and did the exact minimum in order to get my work done and not get put on a pip. Would come in around 11, get my stuff done in a few hours and tell my team I was going to be "WFH" the rest of the day.

Finally left that team and two years since leaving that team, I've had several large bonuses and salary increases.

Stack ranking is some toxic bullshit and managers use it to make themselves look better to their own skip managers. Fucking corporate politics man, it ruins everything.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#236

Post by koheripbal »

outside1234 wrote: post #230
EarlKing wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.

yeah, they are already leaving in droves.

No, they are not. Amazon logistics employees get paid significantly higher than any other blue collar job in the region.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#237

Post by at-fates-hands »

hintymad wrote: post #186
wiz21c wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those who can't stand stack ranking Do you imply that standing stack ranking is a quality needed to work at big tech ?

No, I don't think stack ranking is necessary. It, however, could be a consequence of bad management or of the belief that stack ranking is the most effective way of continuously improving teams.

>> could be a consequence of bad management or of the belief that stack ranking is the most effective way of continuously improving teams.

I've never been at a company who uses it where the teams improved at all. Most of the time those regressed since people were actively working in silo's and shitting on other people's work to make their own work appear better.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#238

Post by eyjafjallajokul »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #194
myroon5 wrote: post #163

Highly Valued 1 (HV1): we expect 35% of Amazonians are HV1 Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY

That doesn’t sound right, I was HV after promotion and still got 2%.

That 2% is putting you slightly higher to the new bottom of band.

So to clarify, if previous years bottom of band was 100K, and this years bottom is 110K, your base bump + your projected stock value (current year + 15% increase planned YoY) will be 110K.

Source: Former Amazon Manager.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#239

Post by bob33212 »

throw8881 wrote: post #228
bob33212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"

I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here. Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic. Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles wher…

I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#240

Post by VRay »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #193
VRay wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a…

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

haha, this was at Microsoft, and the dash button was a glowing success compared to the project I'm talking about

I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA..

What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering, though, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect us grunts to pull it off..

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