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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#61

Post by atoav »

BossingAround wrote: post #10
greatpostman wrote: post #3

I’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…

In my experience you can learn from such stress situations, but the goal of a company is usually not to form a bootcamp for new employees, but to have it's devs create great, lasting, secure and stable software.

And like any great, secure, lasting and stable engineering giving you the knowledge and time is key here.

When a company overloads the safety officer with tasks, so they and up not being able to do their work propperly and an incident happens, the company is at fault because it failed to provide the officer with the resources needed for the job.

If they don't give a dev the resources to do their job it is not different in my eyes. The fact that there might be some magical dev who would be able to get something working out of the same circumstances doesn't matter — maybe it has a company crippling flaw in it because of all the haste.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#62

Post by speedgoose »

gnfargbl wrote: post #53
trhway wrote: post #9

>I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.

My first thought when I read that was yikes, that's a lot of bugs for the rest of the team to fix . Unless this is generated boilerplate, it just isn't possible to create that much code, that quickly, and have it be correct.

And it's a problem too if it's generated boilerplate.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#63

Post by deltaonefour »

Areading314 wrote: post #55
adomanico wrote: post #54

As much as I feel sorry for this person and their experience, it seems to me this wasn't the best way to handle this situation. It would have been more pragmatic to fire up leetcode, take a few interviews, and leave the job professionally. This probably would have come with a small pay bump, even with this persons limited professional experience. Maybe I'm just lucky and I've never had a bad experience like this, but…

100% agree. Everyone knows Amazon is toxic but I sure as hell wouldn't hire someone who posted this

I get where you're coming from. But I have to tell you, even though both you and I would never hire (I'm not a technically a "never hire", but definitely less likely) this guy has balls of steel and speaks his mind and the truth.

I "won't hire" him for selfish reasons, but this guy is a patriot and speaks out against bully's. I hate to admit it, but people like us perpetuate the behavior.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#64

Post by akomtu »

goldenkey wrote: post #49
yrral wrote: post #8

Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right? Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?

HR at Amazon is a shit show. I had $100 of pizza stolen from the fridge at Amazon and I mentioned it casually to HR, as something notable but not too important. And HR then decided to tell my manager without my knowledge. The manager then berated me over communicating about a "trivial matter." So yeah, wouldn't put much stock in HR at Amazon.

You should've played the game and claimed you've never said what HR says you've said and in fact (here goes the distraction part of the lie) you heard another guy was talking about pizza, so HR must've overheard that conversation and misremembered the details.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#65

Post by chronogram »

xorandor wrote: post #50

(dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check... Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved. PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatis…

Performance improvement plan. Either a manager writes a plan of measurable goals focused on improving, or a manager and the target employee both work on the plan together. It can be used for actual performance improvement or it can be used as something the employee cannot meet as a way to fire them or get them to a different team.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#66

Post by dec0dedab0de »

goldenkey wrote: post #49
yrral wrote: post #8

Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right? Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?

HR at Amazon is a shit show. I had $100 of pizza stolen from the fridge at Amazon and I mentioned it casually to HR, as something notable but not too important. And HR then decided to tell my manager without my knowledge. The manager then berated me over communicating about a "trivial matter." So yeah, wouldn't put much stock in HR at Amazon.

I know it's not the point, but how/why did you have $100 worth of pizza in the refrigerator?

Edit: I'm trying to imagine scenarios where that could happen, I have two so far. You ordered pizza for a meeting that got canceled, and the office refrigerator was huge. Or you ordered from a fancy pizza place that had waygu or something as a topping. I'm sorry, I don't know why this is bothering me so much.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#67

Post by MattGaiser »

deltaonefour wrote: post #47
slt2021 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazon has Leadership Principles (corporate koolaid) that makes deadlines top-down and non-negotiable, otherwise you are deemed as not meeting a bar

What if the deadline is fundamentally impossible? No room for leeway here?

At one company I worked for, they fired the product manager, then fired all of them.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#68

Post by oblio »

tgv wrote: post #45
slt2021 wrote: post #21

How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423

That first post, is that the acceptance speech for a Nobel prize?

I would like to thank my cat, Mr. Freckles, for being there for meow.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#69

Post by beachy »

operatingthetan wrote: post #38
qbasic_forever wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I probably wouldn't want to work for a manager who filtered out names from their list based on previous employers alone. That seems like petty and self-sabotaging behavior.

That's actually one of the strongest signals that recruiters look for - who do you work for currently/ previously.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#70

Post by photon12 »

theli wrote: post #7

I'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.

I worked in a role at Amazon that required me to interact with a different team every 1-3 weeks. I would often sit directly with the teams as I was doing work with them for the duration.

There are teams at Amazon full of some of the best technical and professional managers on the planet. There are teams at Amazon that are so brutally driven that they will sacrifice anything, even accepting an incomplete pentest audit and a forgoing week's worth of sleep, to hit a launch date.

I personally had a close friend on my team get PIPed and it was obviously a play from management to get rid of him. I have another friend who had to take months off after leaving because of the abuse she experienced. I have other close friends who have stayed for years.

It's such a big organization and the leadership chains are so decentralized that you get a wide variety of emergent patterns, and the decentralization makes it hard for people across the organization to know about the experiences of other teams.

Edit: in general I wouldn't say the horror stories are the norm at all from what I've seen.

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