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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#141

Post by pm90 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #42
greatpostman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest, I learned an absurd amount. Like more in those six months than in four years if previous work. It was real software development, with actual distributed systems problems. But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now

> 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.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#143

Post by danjac »

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…

That's Linkedin level quality.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#144

Post by Hallucinaut »

Mandatum wrote: post #15
trhway wrote: post #9

>I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.

Who tracks that?

At a Tier 1 Investment Bank, there was a manager (ED/MD) from Bear Stearns who said explicitly in his first meeting with the whole department that he will track and rank people in the IT org based upon their lines of code and fire the losers. Everyone. Business analyst? Better find a way to get some code in. PM? Better make that spreadsheet a Java app.

Managers even bought Java textbooks to put on their desk as some kind of totem as if their days weren't 100% filled with political skirmishes.

Don't think it ever came to pass but this nonsense reaches the highest levels of the wealthiest orgs.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#145

Post by Morgawr »

makerofthings wrote: post #108
xorandor wrote: post #50

(dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check... Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved. PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatis…

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…

> Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip

I can't speak for other companies but I work at Google and I've met several people over the years who've confided with me that they've been on PIP (either in the past or at the moment when talking to me). While (thankfully) I haven't been on PIP myself (yet!) so I can't speak from personal direct experience, I can confidently say that all the people I know personally that were on PIP have successfully re-focused their career, haven't gotten fired, and are still working at the company years later.

Obviously it might be survivorship bias and I might simply not be meeting those that do not succeed, but at least I can confidently say that being put on PIP itself is not necessarily just an excuse to get you fired.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#146

Post by pm90 »

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...

It’s difficult to not feel empathy for people you have a relationship with. Even if a manager is incompetent, they will get the benefit of the doubt from vs a lowly engineer whom the Senior Manager does not have a personal relationship with.

There are very few Senior Managers who take the time to look beyond what’s immediately presented to them.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#148

Post by eesmith »

khazhoux wrote: post #90
devoutsalsa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a useful metric. Starting a new project with lots of generated code will have thousands of lines of code & it won’t do anything useful.

It’s absolutely a useful metric. I have managed many developers who insist their low LOC is in no way indicative of their productivity. They’ll say others are padding their code with comments, or writing bloated inefficient code, or that they themselves were tackling very tough problems that result in small (but tricky) fixes. Yes, we’ve all encountered that killer deadlock or memory leak deep in the runtime that tak…

50 LOC is industry average. See my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29246318 for a list of citations. One was:

> slide 20 of https://www.slideshare.net/ddskier/calculating-the-cost-of-m... ("A world-class developer (e.g. Facebook or Google senior engineer) will write 50 LOC per day")

I also found some two scholarly estimates, one at 81 LOC/day and the other at 16 SLOC.

On this topic, don't forget that negative LOC can be good, as in the -2000 LOC story at https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... .

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#149

Post by makerofthings »

Morgawr wrote: post #145
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…

> Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip I can't speak for other companies but I work at Google and I've met several people over the years who've confided with me that they've been on PIP (either in the past or at the moment when talking to me). While (thankfully) I haven't been on PIP myself (yet!) so I can't speak from personal direct experience, I can confidently say that all the pe…

It was a bit of a blanket statement from me, I’m sure people do survive in good companies, but this is a genuine observation. I’ve never been anywhere near the bottom of the ranking. So I have, over the years, been dragged into a lot of conversations about the people who do end up at the bottom. I’ve heard “Don’t worry, we’ll PiP them out” more than once.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#150

Post by bdlowery »

vultour wrote: post #104
tgv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first post, is that the acceptance speech for a Nobel prize?

Are you not on Linkedin? This self-aggrandizing cringe is 95% of the content in the feed, I'm always amazed people can write this with a straight face.

After grinding leetcode for months, and going through 4 interviews, you feel like you’ve “finally made it” which is why people post cringey posts like that.
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