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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#251

Post by DarylZero »

hughrr wrote: post #205
square_usual wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlem…

But your life is spent at work, so if you don't care, your life is spent doing something you don't care about.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#252

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

denysvitali wrote: post #248
Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who you using for DNS? iirc archive.today had a falling out with Cloudflare DNS because of a way they passed the requests onto archive.today so they stopped answering requests from Cloudflare DNS. EDIT: See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204 for more info and https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-does-not-re... from a few years ago. They may of "made up" since, but I've not been using CF for DNS…

Oh yes, that's it. It seems like Google DNS is blocking it too for some reason: https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.fo Weird. I have now switched to my provider's DNS to overcome the issue :)

> Google DNS is blocking it too for some reason

iirc, its not CF blocking the domain, its archive.today returning "bad" info when queries come from CF because disagree with the data CF give them.

For me, (I just checked) I get a valid ip for archive.today when I dig via CF however the server it returns is hosted in Hong Kong but a query via my ISP's DNS servers returns a server in the Netherlands.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#253

Post by xvector »

urthor wrote: post #237
sandos wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hundre…

This, always throw out a big number. Sometimes they'll just bite and not negotiate (or barely negotiate) down.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#254

Post by cletus »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #107
transitory_pce wrote: post #6

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...

In my experience it almost never works like this. The fish rots from the head.

I've found bad managers are able to exist, even thrive, due to a culture of loyalty. Having worked in several countries this is a very Corporate America thing (IME). Loyalty is the only trait that matters. Fealty might be a more accurate description.

So that bad manager's manager looks at a situation where people are leaving. Those people are disloyal and thus bad. The bad manager is completely loyal and thus good.

Seriously.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#255

Post by Hokusai »

mijoharas wrote: post #214
Hokusai wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. 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?

"After years of ridicule and harsh press coverage, Amazon has finally disbanded its Twitter army. Part of a perplexing guerrilla PR campaign, the Amazon FC Ambassadors were a group of Twitter accounts belonging to employees who were paid to respond to posts criticizing the company." https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/amazon-fc-ambassadors-t...

- https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ambassadors

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#256

Post by minxomat »

i_love_limes wrote: post #230

I have a question for other former/current employees of Amazon. I worked there for 4 years on the AIV / Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn't hear my colleagues talk about it either, "under-performing…

It's pretty much standard practice: https://www.teamblind.com/search/amazon%20pip

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#257

Post by DarylZero »

southerntofu wrote: post #192
pm90 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me. You should have trust issues with "management" in any corporation because these people have the interest of the shareholders at heart, not of the workers. It's just sad some of us have to go through a traumatic burnout to learn this lesson. Of course, what i said doesn't apply in a self-organized workers cooperatives where management…

They don't have the interest of the shareholders at heart, they have their own career interests at heart.

The shareholders try to build a social control structure that aligns these, but it never fully succeeds.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#258

Post by DarylZero »

xmprt wrote: post #178
klodolph wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#259

Post by Jolter »

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.

Where do you live that 700€ a DAY is low pay? It’s, that’s MORE than 700$ a day, not less.

Consider that most parts of the world have lower cost of living than the Bay Area.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#260

Post by throwaway09223 »

flr03 wrote: post #191
makerofthings wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s how you fire people in tech companies. You put them on a PiP, give them some tasks to do and then fire them when they don’t deliver. Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip, taking 9 weeks on an 8 week project is pretty good, but on a pip 9 weeks for an 8 week project is a failure to deliver and you’re out. Obviously this is evil bullshit, but I’ve been in this industry for a very…

That's not how you fire people in tech companies. Not all tech companies are Faang/American. I've been working in several "tech companies" in Europe and it was not a thing. Let's not normalise this awful, inhuman process like there is no other alternative.

It's a documentation process. All companies have a documentation process when they want to terminate an employee. Every single one.

The objectionable part is the magnitude, not the subject matter.

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