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Amazon Pip Horror Story
21–30 of 771 posts
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#22People 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…
I joined Amazon after being laid off towards the beginning of the pandemic when many companies had hiring freezes in place and having happened to be contacted by a recruiter during the same day. I also left for mostly the same reasons everyone else does.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#23Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazo…
I logged in simply to comment a huge "thumbs-up" to any Brian Cantrill reference. I've got an entire playlist of all his various talks around the interwebs, just to listen (and re-listen) in the background while coding. It checks off all the education, tech, history and, critically, humor boxes.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#24>I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.
It’s not a useful metric. Starting a new project with lots of generated code will have thousands of lines of code & it won’t do anything useful.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#25I’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?
amazon has Leadership Principles (corporate koolaid) that makes deadlines top-down and non-negotiable, otherwise you are deemed as not meeting a bar
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#26I’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…
My go-to aphorism in for questions like these is "you learn more from success than from failure".
People like to talk about how great a teacher failure is, and how it teaches you valuable lessons... and it's true! Failure does teach you lots of valuable things, including things that you don't learn by succeeding. However, succeeding at something challenging generally teaches you more.
Or to cast it in ML terms... you need examples of both success and failure in your data set, but the "success" data points are more valuable.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#27I’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…
I’ll be honest, I learned an absurd amount. Like more in those six months than in four years if previous work. It was real software development, with actual distributed systems problems. But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#28And I thought this would be another Python package management horror story.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#29I’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?
I was naive but it wasn’t really negotiable. Don’t meet the deadline by a large margin? Expect to be out of the company relatively soon. I think this particular team was much more hardcore than other parts of the company. Most of the horror stories come from the core amazon services
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#30>I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.
It’s not a useful metric. Starting a new project with lots of generated code will have thousands of lines of code & it won’t do anything useful.
i've never seen people to include the large swaths of generated code into their LOC. Exactly because it takes away whatever little meaning LOC has and makes it absolutely meaningless.