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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#171

Post by tgv »

pm90 wrote: post #151
vultour wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not on Linkedin? This self-aggrandizing cringe is 95% of the content in the feed, I'm always amazed people can write this with a straight face.

It’s normalized on the platform because that’s how people higher up the food chain speak like. Eg when a VP switches companies. Most of the time these things are written by a PR person to be as grateful and inoffensive as possible. But then it caught on because everyone loves to humblebrag.

True. Reminds me of the time stackoverflow had hired someone for "developer relations". I think the title was "VP", and the recruit was described as "a veteran story-teller". Now having a VP send emails to developers is already a bit of stretch, and why you'd need someone at the level of Hans Christian Andersen to do so is anybody's guess, but the press release started: "We're beyond excited to ...". Was the CEO really yapping around the office, drooling from the mouth, barely controlling his bladder out of joy over this new hire? So yes, hyperbole just seems not to cut it any longer, and the answer is going into overdrive.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#172

Post by pm90 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #31
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 have noticed on HN a weird idea that most programmers are insanely rich and can pick and choose any job they like (I even saw one person say "lets be honest, none of us need a job..."), so I guess they're going by the logic that if you work for them you either endorse their worldview or don't care, which as you say I doubt is true for the majority of us

Well, not insanely rich. But let’s not pretend that the profession doesn’t compensate way above average and lots of options to choose from. definitely favorable for labor in this market, which is unlike most other labor markets.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#173

Post by hughrr »

slt2021 wrote: post #25
cabirum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s why I never touch a new Amazon service for 12 months.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#174

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I mean, you even attempted it. I would've looked at it and told them their deadline or scope was unrealistic.

I mean I don't want to do any project with a deadline, ever again, if possible, and I haven't even been exposed to the level of stress and pressure that people get at certain companies.

I thought deadlines had gotten rid of a decade ago in software engineering with the rise of agile software development and the realization that software is difficult to neatly scope, and development time is almost impossible to predict.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#175

Post by emptyparadise »

MattGaiser wrote: post #56
deltaonefour wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a way to name these people anonymously. Maybe drop the ass holes name on blind or make a "shitbosses.com" where we name these jackasses and vote. Heck I'll stand behind my words. If you ever apply to a company called Anduril. Watch out for a childish manager named Calvin Hareng. This MF: https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Calvin-Hareng/-1964480350 Anduril is hiring and if you're coming on board watch out if h…

We could create a developer filibuster. Create lists of terrible teams and tell people that they are good for interview practice, but little else.

Wasn't there a website for rating college professors? Seems like a similar idea.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#176

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #42
greatpostman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now This is the normal approach. You are experienced and wise now.

But also scarred and likely burnt out. After that kind of experience, it can take a year or more before you're back to 'normal', if at all.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#177

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MattGaiser wrote: post #39
cabirum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At least everywhere I have worked, deadlines generally come down from on high, often with no real developer input. If you are lucky, your manager will be successful in fighting for more time. If you somewhat lucky, the missed deadline will be ignored. If you are unlucky, the deadline will approach and people will suddenly disappear.

I mean the project management triangle comes into play then, and when it comes to SWE, throwing more money at a problem usually doesn't make it go faster.

Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#178

Post by xmprt »

klodolph wrote: post #26
BossingAround wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't that simply because you experience failure many more times than you experience success. In fact on your path to success you are almost guaranteed to experience multiple failures. So by that metrics one success teaches you the lessons of many failures.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#179

Post by chronogram »

sofixa wrote: post #84
MattGaiser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get this. From what I've heard, in the US, you don't need an excuse to fire anyone. Why bother documenting an excuse then?

While the US has been traditionally fire at will, over the latter half of the 20th century exceptions had to be made where you can’t fire people for various discriminatory things or becoming a parent anymore. In the early 20th century organisations also couldn’t fire people for unionizing anymore. And not all unions accept fire at will policy.

Companies may additionally prefer to have more standardized procedures. Hiring is expensive, training is expensive, and cohesion can only be gained over a long time. By needing multiple steps to fire someone you reduce the chance you throw the baby out with the bathwater. And even if you’re sure someone is a negative factor and want to fire them with little prior notice, the people who you think are good are not mind readers and might even have a different opinion of their colleague and will question their own employment security.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#180

Post by dininski »

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture.

It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far.

One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.

The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.

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