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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#71

Post by MattGaiser »

chronogram wrote: post #65
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.

You would be nuts to treat it as anything other than loading the bullet into the gun that terminates you. All it is is to make sure that the bullet is legal.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#72

Post by oblio »

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…

You're lucky.

The rest of us are just (well paid) cowards.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#74

Post by 2sk21 »

slt2021 wrote: post #51
Mandatum wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who tracks that?

IBM and Microsoft used to do that a little bit more than a decade ago. Not surprisingly it turnes out that counting LOC leads to shitty spaghettincode and copy paste all over the place and complete ignore of DRY principle

I mostly worked in IBM research but once spent a few months on assignment in a product developed group in the mid 1990s. At the weekly group meeting, each developer would mention throw many lines of code had been reused. Turned out that there was a big monetary incentive to reuse code so developers would randomly include enormous libraries to pad out their numbers!

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#75

Post by severak_cz »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #59
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

The second post in your second link is shocking too: > One night, when I was a dev manager at Amazon, another dev manager in Seattle sent me a 20-page design document at 11:30 pm and told me that he wanted me to get him feedback by 5:30 am the next day. How fucking rude is that? It’s indicative of an absolutely staggering level of toxicity. Honestly, what a waste. Imagine how much better Amazon could be if they didn’…

I expected some timezone difference was here but no - this is a just a toxic person.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#76

Post by t-writescode »

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…

What are your thoughts about when the wives of the EA developers came together and sued EA?

“Perhaps they should just be quiet”?

When are the abused allowed to speak?

Edit: nevermind. Comment history suggests I’ll never get a response.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#77

Post by Moru »

bodge5000 wrote: post #18
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.

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 cons…

It can even be different in the same team. It's about who wins the bully lottery just like in school. Some will go through school totally oblivious to the fact that some people gets so bullied that they decide to end their lives a few years down the road.

Once I came in to work in the evening, I had forgotten to bring my phone with me. There I find one of my coworkers crying his heart out because the women treat him like shit. I had not noticed a thing until then. They thought he was sent there to optimize them away and was making his life hell. He had sold his appartment and moved to our little town to work but couldn't take it and moved back again.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#79

Post by [deleted] »

treyfitty wrote: post #11

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…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#80

Post by winrid »

akomtu wrote: post #64
goldenkey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is the manager would probably start with "did you have a pizza stolen?" without mentioning HR
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