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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

benadam.me

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#201

Post by BikiniPrince »

yonig wrote: post #136
netizen-936824 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does PIP stand for? I haven't run into that acronym before

Replies laid out what it means on paper but what is the employees actual best move? Sounds intentionally impossible to climb out of. Are they given a buyout option to leave or just sit in purgatory for 6 months?

It depends on the manager who constructs the pip and goals.

The manager might lean towards salvaging or maybe documentation. Usually, an honest manager would give some hints as to the nature. Like, maybe it’s best you look at other opportunities kinda nods. Some people are also just bad as reading the crowd and would ignore a written sign that stated “you will be fired.”

I’ve seen bad managers give a junior work that needed a whole team to resolve. I stepped in during reviews and fixed that train wreck. However, on their second chance with simpler work it didn’t turn out much better. At that point we probably soured the engineer. Later we removed the shitty manager. He took off as soon as he received his PIP.

One of my first batch of directs I took over was in the latter group. He made no connection that this could lead to termination. I would love to have heard the conversation with his previous manager. Also, he might have been feigning ignorance for more time. He quite simply just needed direct coaching on interacting with people. He went from the worst engineer to someone I tried to give the highest rankings. My manager wouldn’t have it, but we did compromise.

A lot goes on in the background, but something I never did was bend to statistics. I didn’t care what HR thought was the expected target. Some people are spineless and just rollover. Drives me mad. What are they going to do? Fire me and send me some place else for more money?

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#202

Post by thebean11 »

tablespoon wrote: post #111
ryanianian wrote: post #66

> The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics. Of co…

> Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy. Which is another reason I'd never touch A…

Can I volunteer? I'll make it super easy to fire me and not even show up, just collect a paycheck for a couple weeks.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#203

Post by mikestew »

prirun wrote: post #173
kahrl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance Improvement Plan: "We're trying to fire you but need to do it by the books as to mitigate liability."

I don't understand why people keep saying this. Every state except Montana in the US is "at will": the employer can fire you at any time with no reason. I suppose you could try to prove discrimination because of age or something else, but just like you can walk out and never come back, the employer can ask you to leave and you're done. Companies have no liability if you are fired other than a discrimination lawsuit.…

the employer can fire you at any time with no reason

And in the U. S., anyone can sue anyone at any time with no reason (though there should be some semblance of a reason, or good luck finding counsel to take the case). Maybe you fired me because I'm black, maybe you didn't, but without any documentation of what the real reason was, the company stands a good chance of settling to avoid the time in court.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#204

Post by andrewguenther »

masterof0 wrote: post #17

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this: - RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...) - Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, wh…

> Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.

Surprised to read this. The tooling is what I miss most from Amazon, but I was in AWS the whole time, I've heard the retail situation is quite different.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#205

Post by mc32 »

Jemaclus wrote: post #102
netizen-936824 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does PIP stand for? I haven't run into that acronym before

Performance Improvement Plan. On paper, it's a program where management works with you to improve your weak points so you don't get fired. In practice, it's HR protecting the company by documenting reasons to fire you before they fire you. It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on…

Good advice.

No matter how much you might try to "ace" it and put in your best effort, more than 9 out of 10 times, the person will not come out of it. Anything and everything no matter how minor is likely to be used as supporting evidence. So interpret it as a notice of eviction of sorts where they pay you some months to find a new job.

Yes, there are exceptions. Thing is do you want to try your luck with HR?

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#206

Post by spaceisballer »

Jemaclus wrote: post #102
netizen-936824 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does PIP stand for? I haven't run into that acronym before

Performance Improvement Plan. On paper, it's a program where management works with you to improve your weak points so you don't get fired. In practice, it's HR protecting the company by documenting reasons to fire you before they fire you. It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on…

I’ve only worked in the public sector and have only had to PIP people a few times. It’s almost always a sign that you need to get out. I’ve only done it when I’m at wits end with a person. They all ended up quitting before we got to the 90 days but yeah as said it’s basically a CYA move. Likely the people are low performing enough by some measure you can fire them but it’s sort of a last chance thing. And it documents where they need to improve and what they need to do, so all that is good for the employee if they want to improve (and I do believe nobody wants to do a bad job).

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#207

Post by ithinkso »

MattGaiser wrote: post #120
matsemann wrote: post #62

> When I read through they offer they were pushing aggressively for a start date (2 weeks from the offer). Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn't swept away from under your feet one day.

3 months? So if you accept an offer today, it would be customary to stay until April? That's incredible. How are job tenures in Norway? Where I am, lots of people stay 14 + or - 4 months typically.

Poland also has 3 months (on the most popular type of job contract). If you just joined you are on a 'test period' of sorts where the notice is 2 weeks and after that ends (3 months as well I think, but maybe this may vary) you have the 3 months notice.

Note that if both parties agree it can end sooner, they can also fire you straight up and forbid you working if they don't want you to but they still need to pay your salary for the entire notice period.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#208

Post by kentonv »

kentonv wrote: post #167
kentonv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.

Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally…

On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected.

The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not cached, in which case people will get the old HTML which refers to a CSS file that is now 404.

This is a classic problem and we need to find a better way to solve it. In principle, though, you could manually avoid it by preserving older versions of the CSS such that they continue to be served under new versions of the site.

Alternatively, if you change the config on your domain so that it doesn't cache at all (or at least turn off the "cache everything" option), and instead rely on Cloudflare Pages itself to manage caching, that also should mostly* avoid the problem. Pages does do its own caching, so adding a second layer of caching on top of that shouldn't be necessary.

* There's still a problem if someone is unlucky enough to load the site exactly when it's being updated, but at least a refresh fixes that. We need a better answer, though...

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#209

Post by Salgat »

colinmhayes wrote: post #156
robby_w_g wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then…

> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.

I just wish companies that didn't have the applicant pool of a FAANG company understood this. Leetcode for your average dev company is a great way to lose a massive portion of the qualified talent pool. I can guarantee almost every SaaS developer never touches dynamic programming beyond simple memoization, yet its tested so much. You might as well test a French Cuisine Chef on how well his Chinese cooking is.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#210

Post by UncleMeat »

kahrl wrote: post #101
netizen-936824 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does PIP stand for? I haven't run into that acronym before

Performance Improvement Plan: "We're trying to fire you but need to do it by the books as to mitigate liability."

If this were true, why are PIPs not universal across virtually every industry? It isn't like fired employees in software would be uniquely litigious.
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