Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Pip Horror Story

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 771 posts

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#231

Post by mattbee »

urthor wrote: post #223
octagonal wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

700 a day??? Why did you undercharge by so much. I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money." Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.

I know! I did a sharp I take of breath at that number too!

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#232

Post by urthor »

pm90 wrote: post #141
mytailorisrich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it really? Seems an unnecessarily stressful way to get experience. I kinda agree with the OP, I would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me.

I'm convinced human beings are naturally designed to operate at 120% for 6-12 week long periods. \

Hunter gatherer survivalist genes just kick in.

YMMV, but I consider it a healthy thing for, at least for some part of your career, to work "Amazon hard." Aka, all the reasons that people list when they say you should really try working for a startup.

When you push yourself to your limits at your profession, a lot of stuff clicks into place and you learn so much.

You can't procrastinate, you can't do it wrong, there just isn't the time.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#233

Post by urthor »

atoav wrote: post #61
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…

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…

Amazon's mentality is pretty clever I think. The entire company is designed to repeatedly test all its employees till failure by piling on the workload until they say uncle, then backing off 20% if they push-back.

It's a crazy approach that probably falls apart if you're unsuccessful. But they're very successful so they can just keep burning money to attract new hires. Also, I imagine it's a huge career builder if you work in FMCG or development to have "Amazon retail" or "Amazon Web Services" on your resume. Since everyone uses those platforms.

I imagine what is left at the end is a residue of "born again" workaholics, who're probably pretty great at their jobs. Who then ascend to and form middle management.

And the global express trundles on, powered by these workaholics.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#234

Post by sp332 »

kitd wrote: post #202
hughrr wrote: post #188

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.

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.

If my health insurance weren't so dependent on employment, I'd agree more.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#235

Post by ajb »

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.

That's a really interesting idea, it would also be interesting to set up an experiment to see if you can tell the difference between good teams and bad teams by interviewing there.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#236

Post by joconde »

ActorNightly wrote: post #167
amrocha wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect him to not have worked anywhere longer than 4 months considering he just graduated and those were internships

The Full stack developer and ML engineer seem like full positions, considering he listed internships specifically in his prior experience as explicit internships. Also he has a background in bio, and managed to land a full stack and ML engineer positions, implying he is self taught, and therefore should be already fairly intelligent...but he decided to go get his MS in CS, without even doing any research project and…

> If you are that smart to have a background in bio, and land the jobs that he did, your career would look very different.

Is that really so impressive? Bio people do a lot of coding, and good dev practices can be learned on the job. ML is probably also something he played with during his studies. Full stack + some ML experience is probably enough for a junior ML engineer.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#237

Post by urthor »

sandos wrote: post #229
urthor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

700 a day??? Why did you undercharge by so much. I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money." Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.

Well, cobol is special of course. The more specialized you are... But for a generic c++, java or c# or web dev I would say you can't charge specialist money at all in the EU.

Well it's a negotiation. Those guys succeeded at asking for 2500, but you would start at a number they are guaranteed to say no to, and work your way down.

Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up.

Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k.

Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#238

Post by mprovost »

selestify wrote: post #210
xerox13ster wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be bought and killed by the capital system just like Glassdoor was.

How was Glassdoor killed?

Presumably Glassdoor started as a place to leave honest feedback about companies. But they had to make money somehow, and individuals aren't going to pay to access those reviews. So their customers are now the companies themselves, who can buy "employer accounts". While it still exists, their business model did a 180 degree shift.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#239

Post by bregma »

altacc wrote: post #100
deltaonefour wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then either the people given the deadline are being "managed out of the business" or they should be managing their own way out And yes, I've been a manager in a company where the phrase "managed out of the business" was used. I no longer work there.

The term that is usually used in law is "constructive dismissal".
Post reply on HN