I work at a company that hires developers out of Amazon. We joke about having to deprogram them, but it's not really a joke. They bring a lot of emotional issues and toxic workplace habits with them. Don't get me wrong, the Amazon engineers are fantastic, but there is clearly something unhealthy going on at Amazon.
Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
171–180 of 589 posts
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
For very, very popular services, a second of being live will exercise more code paths and edge cases than even the most dedicated testing team could ever dream of. We hear a hell of a lot about testing but the most fundamental piece of software quality nowadays is the release strategy: running on tee'd live production traffic, canarying, metrics and alerting, quick roll backs, etc.
That's an overly general statement. Can you do that for front-end code that stores all of its state elsewhere? Sure. Can you do it for a storage system? Absolutely freaking not. If you introduce a bug that loses or corrupts data, there's no going back. You will have committed the worst sin that somebody in that specialty can commit. Better to test as much as you can, at every level. Other kinds of code are often some…
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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew someone who went years with 5 hours a night. He was notoriously quick to anger and tended to over react to everything. Toward the end of my knowing him he started to take better care of himself and suddenly he was the nicest man I'd ever met. Sleep matters.
I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.
Some people have a weird tendency to talk up how little they sleep like it's some point of valor.
Some people can do 6 hours a sleep a night for a long time and be fine but I don't think there's much support for maintaining health on 5 or fewer for long periods of time.
Sleep is important and people need to find ways to get what they need. Even people with infants need outside support so they can get what they need. It's not something to be embarrassed about.
Companies should be very cognizant of the types of constraints they may be putting on a work-life balance. Those that don't obviously treat employees as inherently disposable.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
You theory does't makes much sense. Amzon USA - 71% software engineers recommends Amzon to a friend in Glasdoor. 87% Approves of CEO. Amazon India - 87% software engineers recommends Amazon to a friend in Glasdoor. 94% approves of CEO.
Glassdoor is not reliable
What are your go-to alternatives? Blind?
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#175I've had two job offers from AWS for SA and TAM and I turned both down. The actual position was always lower than what I was originally interviewing for (Senior instead of Staff) Literally the only company I've seen that does that. It's like a bait and switch. If I'm not actually qualified just say no lol
AFAIK, there is no Staff designation. On the IC track, L6 is Senior, L7 is Principal, and L8 is Senior Principal.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they "only" need 5 hours of sleep or do they say they need it? Are they as productive as they could be when fully rested, or will they "sleep when they are dead". Arianna Huffington also thought she was being greatly productive at no sleep, until her body told her to fuck off and she collapsed in her office from exhaustion.
They only need 5 hours of sleep. Why is it so difficult to understand that not everyone the same ? There are a lot of variability in human.
Because this kind of reply gets posted every single time sleep deprivation is brought up.
Needing this little sleep is usually a lie or a self-delusion. Perpetuating it has negative consequences for the rest of us. Do some of these unicorns exist? Sure. But they are nowhere near as common as this type of comment suggests. Most of the people in question would be better off with more sleep.
Can they survive on 5 hours? Sure. Most of us can also survive on nothing but pizza. Doing this doesn't make you different, just unhealthy.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not clear to me if it's endemic, these are big orgs with teams run very differently. That being said, the on-call sucks. It's really awful, and something I've never seen before. It's also typically the primary cause of team churn for people in my org. This varies, a…
What is LSE?
Quote-Googling produced "Large Scale Event"
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only need 5 hours of sleep. Why is it so difficult to understand that not everyone the same ? There are a lot of variability in human.
Because these people are exceedingly rare. I get 5 hours of sleep a night because I have some pretty bad lifestyle choices. The few weeks where I have a normal sleep schedule I am absolutely a different person. I mean I can function on 5-hours, I'm able to hold a job and live a life; but my well being could be so much better if I got a normal nights sleep everyday.
How rare?
So you are not the one how can function with 5 hour sleep but doesn't mean other people can't.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#179Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…
I'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with somethin…
It's built into the culture to ship, ship, ship. Shipped code is better than good code, or clean code, or fast code. At my last job, the C-level was fascinated by Amazon success stories. They wanted to achieve the same success, so they urged us to ship, ship, ship. Unfortunately, we were all very seasoned engineers, and we knew the nightmare that would ensue if we purposely piled on the tech debt. The part of this article that refers to "every ticket taking 4 to 5 days regardless of complexity" should be a warning sign to ANYONE attempting to model their startup after Amazon.
The message should be: You are not Amazon, and you will NOT get to Amazon scale by modeling their worst practices.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#180Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…
>Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count.
AWS engineer here and I confirm everything you say, but this quote really struck home with me.
The thing I've noticed at Amazon is that not only are the pre-existing conditions awful, but nobody has any interest or willpower to fix it. Everyone will happily vent to you and tell you how awful things are, but any suggestions to fix it or make things more efficient (even if the fix is very simple and requires low effort) will be met with hostility. And I'm not just talking tech issues, but also process/workload issues.
I've worked across multiple teams and there is an "institutional ego" at Amazon where everyone, especially L7s+, think that Amazon is the best/smartest company in the world and have an attitude of "if Amazon, the best company ever, hasn't already figured out a way to solve this problem, then it must be an unsolvable problem and we won't even try". The thing is, a lot of these problems are in no way unique to Amazon and many other companies across the world have already found fantastic solutions to reduce things like on-call load. But adopting those solutions would require admitting that other companies were able to solve something that Amazon hasn't, which would hurt the ego.
This all applies to the very issue being talked about in the OP, too. Even managers will vent to you about how their team goes through 50% attrition every year, and how everyone is overloaded and finding new engineers is hard. They just accept 50% attrition as "something that just happens every year" as if having such a shitty team is normal, and there is no movement at all to fix it.