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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

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Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#181

Post by cbanek »

zamalek wrote: post #156
cbanek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who came from a similar environment (MSFT during the stack ranking days), the forced attrition and manager's arbitrarily blackballing employees are the ingredients of the toxic stew. If a manager hates your guts, there's really nothing you can do, even if you are great at your job.

Does your manager love your guts? Are you good at your job? Hopefully that paycheck can bleach the guilt of your colleagues losing their jobs because you are good at yours. That toxicity could also be because they are either selecting or creating people who are okay with this.

Yes, yes, and thankfully I left that environment. Now I work in the public sector, I guess you could say. Mostly because of the gas-lighting of reviews and performance "feedback." I've been on both sides of it, and seeing that I'm the same person, it really made it obvious how arbitrary it is.

I feel like it's common wisdom now that forced culling is not a great strategy and has lots of perverse incentives, but still not universal.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#182

Post by [deleted] »

curiousllama wrote: post #178

I don't want to minimize what this guy went through - anything that takes you to the edge is too much - but I can't help but interpret this story as a story of professional & personal growth rather than an example of why Amazon sucks (Sidenote: I happen to agree they suck, just not for this particular reason). How many people in other professions have had similar experiences from the perspective of intensity/amount o…

[deleted]

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#183

Post by mrep »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #128
MattGaiser wrote: post #3

A former colleague of mine suspects that Amazon is going to eventually run out of developers to hire because of how rapidly they burn through them. Yet to know anyone who lasted more than a year or two there. Obviously some do, but they go through an enormous number of people.

No, they won't run out of people to hire but the cost to hire them will go up. At a certain point, they may have to pay more and offer more perks to attract the level of talent they want. The culture will mellow once the payroll expense starts climbing.

Yeah, I'd probably go back if they started paying more than G/FB/N.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#184

Post by DonnyV »

hinkley wrote: post #166
samirillian wrote: post #4

This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they w…

I have a suspicion. If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies. The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look ha…

^^^^ This guy right here, just cracked the code. Agree 110%

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#185

Post by AnonWorksAtAWS »

dudul wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #18

The on call stuff sounds outright dystopian to me, it's not even legal in my country. More places should think about adopting something akin to France's El Khomri law's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect ) and ensure that every citizen has enough time to recuperate from work and isn't pestered by their employer 24/7.

I don't understand what's so dystopian about it. Some systems are critical and need to be kept online at all time, or at least have very minimal downtime. The description in the post is not even that bad. A page a week is nothing. And it is clearly state that your workload is reduced during your on call period.

On my team, net workload is not reduced, it just becomes radically different. It's only your time spent on longer term projects that gets reduced (to zero).

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#186

Post by jkingsbery »

aripickar wrote: post #39

I have had a different experience with working at AWS. I've heard really terrible things working in retail, but AWS has been a pretty good place to work, with normal 9-5 hours. I can go more into detail about how my experience has been different from the article if people want.

I'm a software engineer at Amazon in Retail. (This is just my opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity, etc.)

Different software products have different severity levels. For my team, the oncall burden is not so bad. We have an internally facing tool. When we do get paged, it's usually requires acknowledging a ticket, a few minutes to validate something, sending an email out, and that's it. For teams with more externally visible products, a particular page can be stressful, but my understanding is they also spend a lot of time in ensuring system robustness in order to limit the number of pages. The "15 minute" response time the post referred to is generally to acknowledgement - the expected time to resolution can be quite variable.

The working hours are generally pretty good as well. The general expectation is that you're not working crazy hours.

I've ran into "project crunch time" at Amazon, but the experience at Amazon was like everywhere else I've worked. This also will vary by team: teams that need to make changes to support Black Friday obviously have a pretty hard deadline. Or if your team is getting ready for a re:invent announcement, there's no way to work around that. But from what I've heard, teams that have such a hard deadline also have a corresponding quiet period in December or January.

Most people I know within Amazon that get burned out on one team and feel like there's no resolution within that team (or just feel like they've had enough with one area) solve that by switching teams. This is generally pretty easy, since most teams are hiring at any time, and they would rather take an internal transfer than an outside hire.

Amazon has a pretty good system around having a senior individual contributor track (I haven't worked for any of the other big tech companies, my understanding is that they're similar). Part of the benefit of this system is that SDE1's/SDE2's have someone to reach out to for helping navigate management. Anyone at Amazon who reads this who is experiencing something similar to the OP should feel free to reach out to one of the senior engineers for help.

Overall, I don't doubt that the post in the original article is that person's experience, but it has not been my experience.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#187

Post by jedberg »

dlp211 wrote: post #180
jedberg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how a competitive labor market makes any difference. They all have to pay the same payroll taxes. If anything it's a great equalizer -- all companies must bear that employee cost. So they will all take it out of their employee's earnings equally.

In this context, we are talking about the Seattle Head tax, which is NOT applied equally. In the larger discussion of payroll taxes, to disprove that workers bear the entire burden of payroll taxes, just go through the thought experiment where we eliminate the employer side of the SS tax and whether wages would rise 6.2%. They wouldn't. Workers were willing to work for $N previously, there is no reason that they woul…

Of course salaries wouldn't go up. Because you removed the cost from the equation.

But now do the thought experiment where the employee must explicitly pay the extra 6.2%. Now of course you have to give them a 6.2% raise, because they would demand it to cover their increased costs.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#188

Post by dfinninger »

dudul wrote: post #73
throwaway24857 wrote: post #30

> After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call rotation I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call can be brutal, even if there are no incidents during your week (which is rare.) Just the fact that you have to be 24/7 _ready_ during a whole week sucks, especially when you have a family. During my on-call week, I can't go get groceries, I can't take my kid t…

The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after 10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page happens during the 45 minutes where you…

Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents. This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare, but has happened), etc.

I’ve found that just having someone else to commiserate with at midnight, if needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#189

Post by DonnyV »

holler wrote: post #100

When my Uncle found out how much the average entry-level Amazon software developer at Amazon makes, he was completely shocked, because it's higher than his salary as a physician in practice for many years. So all things considered, when it's mentioned how doctors are the only other profession where the employees are on-call 24/7, most FANG devs are making more than the average doctor.

Also your Dr Uncle isn't generating 4 to 5 times his salary.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#190

Post by sixstringtheory »

julianlam wrote: post #144
TrackerFF wrote: post #114

Lots of IT jobs that deal with critical infrastructure have on-call duties. Try working for some IT firm that supports healthcare, utility, defense, or what not, and I can assure you that there's rotation duty where you need to be on-call within xx minutes, 24/7. During college I was interning for IT firm that provided networking for local hospitals, and they had the same rotation. My friend who got me the gig, worke…

Yeah, I also thought the on-call/pager thing was a little overblown. It immediately raised a red flag about how wet behind the ears OP is. Not to say that there aren't toxic on-call rotations and such, only that it's a lot more common than you'd think, and is not limited to just doctors eyeroll Any time a business unit needs to be accountable to another party after-hours, some sort of call schedule is created.

> During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way other than the usual salaried catch-all "are you willing to work nights and/or weekends."

It should be very clear what the actual expectation is, though, instead of a nebulous "we may need you to work extra sometimes." It's a guarantee that you will work extra at a fixed interval, and that extra work happens to be psychologically draining.

I ask for quite the premium in salary if I know I'm going to be on call.

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