171–180 of 292 posts
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They're well known for having one of the lowest hiring bars of the major tech corporations, certainly out of the traditional "FAANG" they are by far the easiest to get hired at. N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty, from my impression. Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and they had massive turnover rates.
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Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do. Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly. Seem…
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I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into…
Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do. Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly. Seem…
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I knew a guy who would passed up working for Apple for a relatively unknown non-FAAANG company.
People have their reasons. It's not that everyone working for Apple is lesser than. It's more that this guy had his own reasons.
To each his or her own.
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There's no surefire way to game the system, and I would even say there is no way to game the system at all, but you just need to understand two things: 1. Your manager is the one putting you in PIP (firing plan). If you're friends with your manager, he won't put your name, even if your performance is below the bar. 2. This is applicable in every single avenue of life, but your reputation is everything. Work hard for…
I've done the stack ranking many years in multiple companies. I rarely have seen (1) come into play. I'm sure it happens, but there is a lot of scrutiny of the stack rank, enough where I think it would be hard to pull off. I think most friend managers would tell their friend months ahead of time -- you really need to do XYZ or things are going to be tight at review time. (2) is very true though. Reputation and percep…
Worked in a company that does stack ranking. Here's how you do 1 (in the opposite sense): Give the person tough tasks, with very tight deadlines. Amplify their failings and belittle their achievements. Repeat till the employee screws up, and start building evidence for a PIP. Get others involved (customers the employee is interacting with, your own manager, etc). In most cases I've seen, if a manager is unhappy with you, the others (customers, your manager) will follow the manager's lead to get rid of the person.
If/when the employee contests this, most HRs will pick someone from the same department to be the investigator. Since it's the same department, it means it's the same culture your manager is exhibiting. They will much more likely believe them than they will you.
Source: I got semi-fired this way. To give you an example: The investigator wanted proof for everything I was claiming in my defense. Not only that, they held it against me if I had not sent emails to my manager saying I disagreed with his behavior. Eventually, I asked the investigator: "So, did my manager show you proof for all his claims?" The investigator responded with "Good point, and once this process is over I will send him and his manager feedback on the mistakes they made." Umm - sure, but why should I be punished and not them? No answer.
I somehow stayed at the company (they made an exception for me and let me change teams) - and over years saw this process repeat over and over. When an employee is in trouble, I immediately start advising them on the steps their manager will take - it usually plays out as described above.
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Maybe Amazon is more confident that they can get good work out of a broader range of people.
This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…
It's not, it's like that everywhere. Every layoff follows the same pattern that you describe.
I don't know the exact reason for it, but if every single company does the same thing, there has to be a reason I don't know, since I've never managed a mass layoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're well known for having one of the lowest hiring bars of the major tech corporations, certainly out of the traditional "FAANG" they are by far the easiest to get hired at. N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty, from my impression. Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and they had massive turnover rates.
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Your account name leads me to believe you've been impacted by this, and I feel for you. I am sorry. I hope you're able to find a new gig relatively stress free and find yourself in a better place.
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The real trick to job safety is to join a core (but profitable) organization. I doubt many (if any) cuts are being made in EC2/EBS/S3/etc.
This. Be willing to do the boring, unsexy stuff that is at the foundation of the business. You'll never be the hotshot, but it's extremely unlikely that you would get caught up in layoffs like this.
It depends on your definition of hotshot. If you stay in the core part of the business and reliably contribute, your star will definitely rise and almost certainly be noticed in some capacity, even at the highest levels of the company.
You're not going to be the poster boy, and trade magazines aren't going to beat a path to your door for an interview, but if job security and absolute authority over your own environment is what you expect.. that's definitely on the table, even in the "boring" parts of the company.
This I've found to be especially true and take less time in any organization that relies on commissioned sales. There's an incentive for internal recognition in those environments that improve the calculus here quite a bit.
I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt immense pressure. These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true…
Including systems engineers ups it to 348.