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

291–300 of 771 posts

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#291

Post by Nextgrid »

1ef211383f1e92e wrote: post #164
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.

You should try to consider it from the company's perspective as well-- hiring an engineer is very expensive, takes a long time, and any new engineer has takes time before they can start to fully contribute to a codebase. If you're a manager in a situation where an employee has a problem and aren't meeting the job requirements, you'd probably much rather that they fix the problem and contribute to the team than fire t…

> that they fix the problem and contribute to the team than fire them.

> And for an employee on a PIP, they should think hard about leaving the company (or at least the team); it'll be better for their career.

Considering both of these statements, a PIP is never the right answer if your objective is legitimate performance improvement.

Even if you're an unexperienced (or outright stupid) manager that doesn't understand this and wants to use a PIP as a legitimate performance improvement tool, the target employee is never going to be on good terms with you or your company and it's very unlikely you'll actually get the desired results. If you do, it's only because the employee has literally no choice but that loyalty will be out the window as soon as he is in a better position to make a move.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#292

Post by ctvo »

i_love_limes wrote: post #264
minxomat wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This unfortunately didn't answer any of my questions.

Senior managers at AMZN have shared privately that there was a time after the NYT story where this was removed or not as strictly enforced.

That time is now gone, and goals are tied to your percentage. A team failing to meet its yearly goal can be expected to be asked to let go 15% vs. the standard 10% say.

It’s real and as messy as people are sharing. Some teams are better off than others.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#293

Post by alecco »

phgn wrote: post #156
sgt101 wrote: post #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…

I've read this before, it's likely not by "Will Ye Will Ye" ;)

> —— > I now work at Cohere (cohere.io)! Give it a spin

Recruiter/spammer

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#294

Post by goldenkey »

cerved wrote: post #89
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's not the point, but how/why did you have $100 worth of pizza in the refrigerator? Edit: I'm trying to imagine scenarios where that could happen, I have two so far. You ordered pizza for a meeting that got canceled, and the office refrigerator was huge. Or you ordered from a fancy pizza place that had waygu or something as a topping. I'm sorry, I don't know why this is bothering me so much.

it's clearly a lie! The value of pizza is inversely correlated to the time it's been out of the oven. Once it's in the refrigerator it's worth max 1%

I for one like leftover pizza if it hasn't hardened into a rock. In this case, the pizza had only been in there for less than a day.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#295

Post by goldenkey »

danjac wrote: post #266
goldenkey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$100 of pizza? Isn't that a whole AWS service's worth?

I was making good money. And this chef makes pizza to die for: https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/serious-take-out-ballard/

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#296

Post by serial_dev »

hughrr wrote: post #188
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…

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.

One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee.

It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.

Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).

It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#297

Post by ThinkBeat »

hughrr wrote: post #188
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…

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 a great comment and how one should evolve to stay sane and healthy.

My BS filter is highly developed now.

"We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives.

"If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)"

"Give it 110% people"

"If we dont get this done ....... "

This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it.

I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project.

This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant.

I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time.

After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming.

I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin.

I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple.

> ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#298

Post by [deleted] »

khazhoux wrote: post #204
quadrifoliate wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#299

Post by tkot »

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…

> he decided to go get his MS in CS, without even doing any research project and just opting for the GTA instead of GRA route.

Could you elaborate more on this? I'm assuming this is a detail of the US education system of which I don't know anything :)

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#300

Post by danjac »

goldenkey wrote: post #295
danjac wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 of pizza? Isn't that a whole AWS service's worth?

I was making good money. And this chef makes pizza to die for: https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/serious-take-out-ballard/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-...
Post reply on HN