101–110 of 365 posts
> We need this to protect our business. > It’s never enforced. If these are true, why would a company with 232.9 billion in revenue be afraid of paying an employee's salary only when the non compete is enforced? If the non compete is almost never enforced this agreement would cost the company under 0.01% of total company wide employee spend. Surely if the knowledge was that important to the business the company would…
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I'm guessing you didn't get to do this interactively? If I interviewed someone and they seemed knew something I didn't and could prove it by actually running the query/code I would be impressed. At the very least the interviewer should have checked your claim after the interview if they were skeptical. I think it's a real mistake when you don't let candidates write actual code and run it during interviews.
In my FB interview I was told I wasn't allowed to run the code, which seemed completely ridiculous to me. It was even more frustrating when my interviewer told me I'd missed an edge case when I was certain I'd covered it - I'm still not sure who was right.
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There is also a thing called unions.
The tech industry has the best horizontal mobility of any other right now. Why do we need the downside of unions when we can just move company and have only the upsides?
I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed. Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they ha…
Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? It just so happens that all of the products produced by Google, Microsoft and Apple that need a lot of blue collar workers are done by contractors in a different country. I bet none of the…
Okay, but we're talking about what Amazon is doing now, not how other hypothetical companies may or may not treat potential employees.
I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…
I'm guessing you didn't get to do this interactively? If I interviewed someone and they seemed knew something I didn't and could prove it by actually running the query/code I would be impressed. At the very least the interviewer should have checked your claim after the interview if they were skeptical. I think it's a real mistake when you don't let candidates write actual code and run it during interviews.
It has made me absolutely loathe non-interactive sessions. Not being able to run the actual code is ridiculous. Some of the best analysts and programmers I know of are "architecture guys/gals" who can create complex systems but may not knock out the actual code so quickly, or, as I like to call it "error message programmers".
Creating an interview test to weed out otherwise-intelligent "error message programmers" is, in my book, poor interview construction.
Perhaps that sounds like overkill but it feels a bit more reasonable and more fair to the employee - if you want someone to agree to a non-compete then you should agree to pay them for their time where they can't work.
Working for amazon is like joining a fascist cult - you made the right decision. Source - worked for a startup that was acquired by Amazon. My team was slowly managed out of the company and replaced by teams in Seattle. Most of my team was let go by PIP, essentially claiming we weren't "performing at a high enough standard" since they weren't willing to reprehend my boss for being incompetent. However, I'm proud of t…
exit interview advice (applies everywhere): politely decline the exit interview. there is zero upside to doing an exit interview
Every time I've talked to AWS Recruiters they've belittled by past experience and just generally made me feel bad about my career. I will never ever work there, no matter how cool their tech stack must be.
I can tell you from experience, the internal Amazon stack is not cool or inventive.
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Call me a naïf, but I think exit interviews are a great way to speak candidly to skip-level managers about dissatisfactions you have—with the aim of making the company you’re leaving potentially a bit better for your colleagues. EDIT: I think “feedback” here is somewhat vague. You guys are talking about issues there would be no point in raising. For me this is not systemic issues. I would bring up more minor things,…
In my experience, the problem with your thinking is that it doesn't play out that way. If management is open to criticism and will actually use that feedback to make changes, you probably realize that fact and have already been giving candid feedback. If they're not open to it, then your openness is just going to burn a bridge. It feels good, and you may not care in the moment, but at beat it's neutral. At worst it h…
Turns out people in that startup knew my boss, didn't get the interview and was blacklisted from my prior boss even though we were on good terms.
Learned that lesson the hard way.
I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed. Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they ha…
It treats its white collar workers like adults, not privileged overly sensitive babies. Only in the Silicon Valley is that considered “dirt”.