People say that working for Amazon for a year is enough “training” to serve as a resume badge. However, I’d like to provide a counter to that: when I see Amazon on a resume, I actually discount the candidate. In my opinion, the branding has suffered tremendously and I view the candidate as a compensation maximizer beyond all costs- why else would you join Amazon despite the well known horror stories, as well as their complete disdain for human life in the name of “customer obsession?”
Amazon Pip Horror Story
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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#12I personally wouldn't choose to get blackballed by every MAGMA/MAAAM if I was living in the US and taking that sort of career path. Glad some folks are making this decision.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#13Why are people who do this never named? They should be named. This type of behavior perpetuates because despite this employee revealing a company issue.. the individual perpetrator can still hide behind anonymity. CALL these ass holes out.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#14I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.
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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#15>I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.
Who tracks that?
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#16I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…
No idea how things work at Amazon, but why did you accept such a tight deadline? Have you provided your own estimates for dev time?
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#17I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…
Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot? In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in p…
You will learn more if you're working under a competent lead in a similar situation.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#18I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.
Never worked for AWS, but I'd imagine its different depending on division/team. Before starting a job once I had an ex-colleague warn me against the company, saying he had friends there and it was brutal (none in the team I was joining, but its a big company). Turned out to be the opposite for me, and in fact was far nicer than the company I worked for when I was working for him.
Big companies are often far less consistent across teams than you'd expect/they'd like it to be, for better or worse
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#19People say that working for Amazon for a year is enough “training” to serve as a resume badge. However, I’d like to provide a counter to that: when I see Amazon on a resume, I actually discount the candidate. In my opinion, the branding has suffered tremendously and I view the candidate as a compensation maximizer beyond all costs- why else would you join Amazon despite the well known horror stories, as well as their…
Um, you realize people need a job to put a shelter over their head and food in their mouth--right? For everyone below vice president Amazon is just a J-O-B to them. It's not their lifestyle, it's not their worldview. You're missing out on an unbelievable amount of good candidates with that view.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#20Same thing happened to me. After 8 years working at amazon including multiple raises and promotions, I got piped. I was trying to transfer to a new team led by a new senior manager who was a peer of mine at one point. Exiting the pip requirements were vaguely defined and included tasks with dependencies I knew wouldn’t be fulfilled. So I took the 50k they offered me to leave and I left.
There are some great directors and executives at Amazon. I enjoyed my time there. There are also some toxic, toxic people with too much power and ambition.