This reminds me of a place I used to work. I used to get my real work done between useless meetings. A couple months after I left, they laid off like 20%.
Laying myself off from Amazon
171–180 of 374 posts
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#172This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.
But the problem is, fixing existing broken stuff might not be rewarded as much as working on the "new feature". This means that if I focus on just fixing the broken stuff, I'd be managed out. Even say I put in the extra effort to fix the broken stuff, and deliver my new features, other thousands of engineers won't do that same- meaning I can't make a meaningful dent.
(i dont work for amazon, but I can imagine it's similar everywhere)
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of internal teams don't use the AWS software for various reasons. So like, CodePipeline might be great, but there's an internal analogue (I'm not sure the detail I can go into here) that is awful that a lot of teams use. There's been an internal movement to try to get all teams onto AWS services, but it's incredibly slow moving and there's no timeline that I know of.
Clearly a mistake. They should be dogfooding their offerings. A lot of tooling will probably just be better if they can host it on AWS.
Maybe they are dogfooding their future offerings, hence the experience.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope no approval required
that can't be right (but i have no idea). In the new group, nobody has any desire to at least do a reference check with the previous group? That would be the first thing as a hiring manager i would try to check for, say "this person is a d-bag that the entire group hated, and we were about to pip him/her anyway"? That would be kind of an equivalent of an approval, even if there is no formal approval.
[deleted]
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#175This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.
I'm sorry but you honestly have no idea of what you are talking about. The tooling in Amazon is developed by hundreds of engineers and it doesn't suck because of small bugs here and there but rather because of systemic issues related to how it's been architected.
It's not something that is fixable at all, let alone by a lone engineer.
That said, I also want to be more tempered than the author, I don't find the tooling to be that bad. Most teams are on full Native AWS now and the few non-native tools actually do make your life easier because of how well they're integrated in the whole Amazon ecosystem.
Some tooling does suck, but it's more like 2% of my time spent fighting bad tools, not 40%.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#176This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.
Easier said than done. Amazon is a top-down org, where each pod's (aka pizza team) work is planned 12-18 months in advance through their OLR process.
OLR is employee performance reviews.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#177Does anyone know what role or title the the author might have had there? They mentioned DevOps but then also in another paragraph they mentioned front-end development.
If you write code at Amazon you also are responsible for the availability of your service. So, you rotate in as an on-call.
There is no central SRE teams, SysAdmins, etc. There is no throwing it over the fence.
There is nobody better to fix a production issue than the person who wrote the code which broke. Plus, you are more motivated to write better code.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#178Only 20% time in meetings? That's nothing if he worked at Amazon unless he was a junior.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#179This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.
Lol. If the author had really tried to fix the internal tooling by himself in such a top-don huge corp like Amazon, he would've gotten himself laid off much quicker.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#180This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.
You are grossly underestimating the effort it takes to change things at a company this size. Ignoring the scope of the technical work to be done, you cannot just send diffs to another team and expect them to just accept them.