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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't suggesting anyone should "just be quiet", in fact, I'm happy this person was able to express themselves and their situation openly on LinkedIn. My point was simply this wasn't a very pragmatic approach to handling the situation. Some employers may not like to see this type of content on their professional profile and it may hurt their career.

Goven the shortage of devs I hope there will be smart employers who hire this guy, he has a spine and core principles.

David vs Goliath story

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#133
post #98
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm also curious about that. I'm just starting out in industry and am confused if most people are expected to do that. Do future recruiters go through your old linkedin posts for stuff like this? Or is it just a general update for their personal circle - basically the corporate version of instagram stories.

It's just people being happy about something that's happened for them. Given how capricious a company like Amazon is, though, the professional speech is probably to avoid giving Amazon a different reason to complain.

It's gonna be a different situation for someone taking their first programming job out of college, and someone who's been doing it for long enough that they don't care (and would probably fire a company like Amazon before being fired themselves).

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#134
post #60

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

His job history agrees with you. It has been less than 2 years since he graduated, in which he has held 4 jobs. 3 months at his first job, then 4 months, 5 months and 10 months at Amazon.

I would not take his given statement at face value.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#136

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…

It's always kind of amazing the level of privilege that can be displayed in HN comments.

Not everyone has the opportunities you have had. Some people actually have to struggle to climb for X reasons, and make tradeoffs to enable them to survive / grow.

Some people actually need money and can't just ignore wads of cash being thrown at them for the first time in their lives.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#137

This is a phenomenon common to all low grade/incompetent dev managers: When a dev asks for a team change they view it as a slap in the face because it has happened to them so often in the past and they take it as a personal offence. The fact is they are lousy managers and usually incompetent and nobody wants to work in their team. So they go on the offensive and try to manage the dev out before senior management real…

Then senior management should be wondering why so many low performers are ending up with certain managers...

Instead they’ll be wondering why these managers are so good at identifying poor performers. /s

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#139
This comment killed me :

Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story…

I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down!

However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment?

It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue.

But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away.

Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#140
post #28

And I thought this would be another Python package management horror story.

pip needs to be put on a PIP (although to be fair pip and the python package ecosystem has come a long way in the last few years)

I'm a data person so I haven't cut any big code with Python, but the package management issues I have had have gone away with conda virtual environments.

So - curious; where does that break down?

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