211–220 of 771 posts
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…
This makes it.
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A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.
This is exactly why I think contract work is the most honest form of employment in the software industry. "Mission statements" and "customer zeal" are meaningless when you're having to do endless weekend and evening hours. If it means so much to you, pay me by the hour first, then we can talk about devotion to the customer.
Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…
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> But some people pretend that’s how all their work is, when in reality they take a week to fix a css misalignment, or take a week to refactor some simple python script and add one new command-line argument, and they average 50 LOC or whatever. You already know what the problem with these people is (e.g. they can take a week to add a new command-line argument). Tying that to the LOC count is counterproductive. Shitty…
> Shitty managers like you That's rude and against HN guidelines. Don't make this personal. I'm not attacking you. You think I'm taking an extreme position ("Managers should measure developers by their LOC"), which I am not. Are you actually taking the opposite extreme position, that a developer's LOC tells you absolutely nothing about their productivity? That there's not even a correlation or a hint of a connection,…
If someones LOC is very low, but they complete all their tasks on time, not only is there no problem, it is even beneficial as the work is being done without creating too much burden for future development. If someone commits a large amount of code without completing any tasks, that's clearly not useful.
If you think LOC is a useful metric, I would disagree that someone calling this "bad management" is attacking you. A hospital manager that measures staff performance by incisions per day is clearly misguided.
Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true: > The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package. > 50% of his CRs are merged without approval. > So, yeah, there you go !
> no one's challenged it so presumably it's true Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. Aren't you being too generous with an anonymous comment that you provide no link to? Is not possible that is just Amazon propaganda?
I left amazon 5 and a half years ago, but never heard anything while I was there about defending the company online.
Could you elaborate on this?
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A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.
I imagine that's a good place to be, but I don't know if it's possible without going through a lot of trauma and building up substantial mental scar tissue. Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.
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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.
tl;dr; everything in a large corporation is a game of telephone where everyone is incentivized to muddle the message. So any deadline/commitment handed through multiple levels of management is really difficult to negotiate. And the more unrealistic it is, the harder it is the negotiate. Nobody wants to tell their boss that the thing they want done in 3 months will actually take 2 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.
I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang. Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev. They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no…
Why are people who do this never named? They should be named. This type of behavior perpetuates because despite this employee revealing a company issue.. the individual perpetrator can still hide behind anonymity. CALL these ass holes out.
Stop with the needless hate. We are talking about people in the top 8% of the income bracket in US. Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood. If you have Amazon on your resume, no matter what, you will have no issues finding another job, because the acceptance rate by itself to Amazon is The biggest drawback of something like this is maybe having to wait an extra few mon…
>> Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood.
Can you provide source for this claim?
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.
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?
PIP is a tool in manager's hands and above L6 no one gives a squat. They even encourage using it.