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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

#371

Post by sgerenser »

subsaharancoder wrote: post #345
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 Zune music player?

Zune was actually pretty popular and had its fans for its time, despite getting completely outsold and outshone by the iPod. I think it didn’t get cancelled until smartphones were clearly starting to replace dedicated music players.

If I had to guess it would be the Kin devices that evolved from the purchase of Danger, those things clearly fit the OP’s description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

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

#372

Post by RoyTyrell »

slumpt_ wrote: post #206
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.

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…

> I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting,

I don't understand why it matters what people wear as long as it's not offensive...

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

#373

Post by sgerenser »

astrange wrote: post #315
asdfman123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I failed Amazon like three times in a row (along with other smaller companies). This last year I expanded my search and got into Facebook and Google, despite failing Amazon again. Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.? If I wer…

Amazon's culture is nothing compared to the stories I've heard about Microsoft's Mac software teams. I can't repeat them all but supposedly they weren't allowed to read any sample code including Stack Overflow questions.

I find that really hard to believe. What would be the motivation behind that policy, and how would it be enforced?

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

#374

Post by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye »

VRay wrote: post #161
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.

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…

It has to be the microsoft mood bra, right?

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

#375

Post by codezero »

chris11 wrote: post #347
codezero wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies ( Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?

I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff. Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.

Got it, we are very much on the same page.

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

#376

Post by northern-lights »

mulander wrote: post #144
lakevieew wrote: post #111

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…

> had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates Hope this makes you feel slightly better: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... It is impossible to measure someones productivity using metrics like commit counts and SLOC. There are times where I don't commit for weeks and provide actual business value by solving direct client issues without even a ticket being present. At one time at my…

Unfortunately at Amazon, that is the norm. When the review time comes, 90% of the orgs will use the no. of Code Reviews raised and no. of commits pushed as the first line metric. Impact, customer focus and everything else is secondary.

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

#377

Post by northern-lights »

wildfire wrote: post #304
throw8881 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are lies, damned lies and CRUX statistics. EVERY manager I've interacted with at Amazon looks at CRUX statistics -- it is the actual reason that they exist. My current manage (5 year badge employee btw) is counting my code. We are both L6s and he has shared with me the various target CR each level is expect to do (per week). For L6 it is 4 (in the AWS org) per week. The leadership principals also say "hire and…

This has been my experience and every org that I know as well. Blind agrees too. The guy above you seems like an HR plant.

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

#378

Post by jokethrowaway »

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.

Getting into the FANG interview process doesn't seem that complicated, recruiters reach out to most developers / graduates on LinkedIn. Passing it requires learning a specific set of skills.

I would say the bar is pretty much the same for all FANGs. If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple. I see people that apply to multiple FANGS tend to pass some of them. Once you put in the work to learn those exercises (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), failing them or passing them becomes a matter of luck (the right set of exercises, the right interviewer).

As to how this translates to intelligence - I personally don't care if a candidate is able to pass a FANG interview or not (I've seen plenty of bad employees who were FANGs or ex-FANGs and plenty of geniuses as well), but I definitely will think of them as being driven individuals who achieved what they set up to do.

Incidentally the best employees who made a difference in the companies I've worked at were, incidentally, never ex-FANGs, just talented individuals who decided to put in the work.

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

#379

Post by HarryHirsch »

xibalba wrote: post #29
HarryHirsch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

The size and growth of AWS' customer base and financial success is a very strong counterargument to your claims. Is it possible you are confusing your personal preferences for the goals of the AWS business? AWS may seek to advance the state of the art, but this is not the end goal, per se, but rather one factor that may or may not achieve the end goal. The end goal is more customers and greater revenue and profit. >…

The reason why industrialization took off in Britain and not in India or China is unclear, but a regard for science, an undersupply of labour and internal stability all play a role.

You don't have any of that at Amazon, there is firefighting instead of research, they aren't running out people willing to work for them yet, and personnel turnover is stratospheric.

Yes, they do make money, but you can't buy advancement.

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

#380

Post by discodave »

throwme1234 wrote: post #149
discodave wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience at Amazon, line managers (5-20 people) still often act as if they have unregretted attrition goals. It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.…

My impression is that most teams have high enough natural attrition that it doesn't really matter and some teams even seem completely immune to any sort of real change, even if they do extremely poorly on their deliverables. I know a few teams that other teams actively avoid working with, even preferring to reinvent some of their solutions, yet, more or less the same people have been working on these underperforming…

I never asserted that Amazon's performance management system was effective.

(although I worked at a place that never fired anybody and I'm not sure I recommend that either)

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