I won’t comment on whether the action is justified or not in this instance, but: Never hang up on a colleague. Ever. As far as social phone etiquette goes that’s probably one of the most egregious things you can do. Instead, humble yourself, politely disagree and document over email, copying another colleague who witnessed, or if unavailable the manager (in this case the skip).
I kinda agree but when one side is hell bent on being dishonest and toxic right from the beginning then does it really matter whether you actually hung up or not unless every such call of yours is getting recorded and monitored precisely?
If you don't wanna give them more ammo, yes.
If someone is hell bent on that, you must minimize your vulnerability surface.
So just distance yourself emotionally, act professional and document stuff.
I've been fired from a few positions for various reasons, though never explicitly for saying anything in particular. At least one for probably raising many obvious issues with my useless manager over a longer period. I think in retrospect, what I'd take away is that it can be a very difficult position to be in — especially if you have dependants — to try and stick with a job you know will try and ruin you. In my expe…
I also work at Amazon, and I can tell you, your experience was pretty unique. Some teams are worst than others, of course, but no one expect you to pick up a project by yourself, fresh out of onboarding and own it end to end. After you clear your interview loops, you get the chance to match with several teams (not always) and that is your chance to figure out what the team does, whats the situation over there, etc...…
> I also work at Amazon, and I can tell you, your experience was pretty unique. Some teams are worst than others, of course, but no one expect you to pick up a project by yourself, fresh out of onboarding and own it end to end. I am a SDE at Amazon and I can tell you for a fact that so far the majority of the projects I've been involved roll out exactly like this. The excuses vary, and fortunately I haven't seen the…
> I have to call bullshit on this. Either you play that out in stealth mode...
Again, that depends on your org and team. I know many people(including PMs, UX, Data Science roles, etc...) who have jumped between teams in the first few months of being hired, and even after several years of working at the company. That doesn't make it "bullshit" , your experience is just different. Before I was hired, I read all the horror stories in TeamBlind as well, and I was surprised to see a different environment. Maybe, is survivorship bias, sure, but it just haven't been the case. For example is well known, that AWS is way more cutthroat than Devices, Retail, and the other orgs, but again, depends on your team as well. Most stories come from people who were PIP-ed. As I said before, Amazon is no Google or Microsoft regarding how they treat their engineers, TC, or WLB, thats for sure, but I have heard first hand stories at Facebook(for example) that are way worse than OP's. You can switch teams very easily, even across countries, my manager was able to move to a team in the US from India, being L4, so, there is definitely opportunities.
That's actually very false. Amazon is not hard to get fired from, but it takes time since there's a mandatory pip process (for performance based firing) like in many tech companies (about 4 months in the US, longer in some European countries; it's often shorter if the candidate agrees to take large severance and leave).
I thought he was referring to the fact you don't have to be particularly clever or competent person to keep your job. Amazon isn't known for firing people on the spot for honest mistakes (CoE gets filed and life goes on). It's usually more along the lines of people are not doing the work they were assigned to do.
I wish that was the case. I've seen brilliant people forced out of their jobs because a particular project was botched: a principal engineer, a former founder of a company bought by Amazon, an amazing director. And those were just the people I encountered on my journey.
Amazon certainly won't "fire you on the spot" in most cases; that gets them all sorts of trouble. However, if something got screwed up and your name is on it, I'm sorry to say it's just a matter of time before it comes up in a review cycle.
There are good folks at Amazon. Really. But as a whole, I don't see evidence of a company that even attempts to see the long-term value of people.
“Working at a FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) company is the holy grail for software engineers.” Is it, though? Personally I prefer to be a big cog in a small machine.
To each their own, but it does seem to open more doors at companies big and small.
Bottling-up anger is unhealthy and exploding is unprofessional. Inform them of thoughts tactfully in real time, whenever possible.
I did, very tactfully. I was about as non-defensive, transparent, and professional as you could imagine. When I realized what was really going on I told my wife I was going to quit. About 30 min later this meeting happened and during the meeting made the decision to make it easy for them to fire me if they wanted to.
If you got fired over this it's highly likely you said something pretty bad. The only times I have seen anyone get instafired at Amazon is when they have done something that could be deemed as harassment. (eg. making sexual or racial advancements towards a direct report) Anybody else who gets fired for performance reasons knows they are thin ice for a long time.
“Working at a FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) company is the holy grail for software engineers.” Is it, though? Personally I prefer to be a big cog in a small machine.
It is when they’re paying you 800k annual compensation
> Working at a FAANG company is the holy grail for software engineers Wot? Really? What on earth makes the author think that is true for all software engineers? It certainly isn’t for me.