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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#201

Post by murderfs »

Hokusai wrote: post #119
murderfs wrote: post #85

Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true: > The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package. > 50% of his CRs are merged without approval. > So, yeah, there you go !

> no one's challenged it so presumably it's true Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. Aren't you being too generous with an anonymous comment that you provide no link to? Is not possible that is just Amazon propaganda?

https://www.teamblind.com/post/The-guy-got-PIPed-VBvKiiXu

90% of the point of blind is to shit on your own company anonymously (at least, that's what I use it for). I find it hard to believe that it's false, given that probably hundreds of amazon employees have seen that post and no one's refuted it.

If Amazon is astroturfing blind, they're doing a spectacularly bad job at it, the general consensus (from Amazon employees even) is that it's a hellhole compared to its peers.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#202

Post by kitd »

hughrr wrote: post #188
greatpostman wrote: post #3

I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

This is exactly why I think contract work is the most honest form of employment in the software industry. "Mission statements" and "customer zeal" are meaningless when you're having to do endless weekend and evening hours. If it means so much to you, pay me by the hour first, then we can talk about devotion to the customer.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#203

Post by mytailorisrich »

southerntofu wrote: post #192
pm90 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me. You should have trust issues with "management" in any corporation because these people have the interest of the shareholders at heart, not of the workers. It's just sad some of us have to go through a traumatic burnout to learn this lesson. Of course, what i said doesn't apply in a self-organized workers cooperatives where management…

Yes, exactly my point. I was not commenting that it is normal to have a rather traumatic experience but that it ought to be normal (and frankly, healthy) to have "trust issues with management".

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#204

Post by khazhoux »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #125
khazhoux wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But some people pretend that’s how all their work is, when in reality they take a week to fix a css misalignment, or take a week to refactor some simple python script and add one new command-line argument, and they average 50 LOC or whatever. You already know what the problem with these people is (e.g. they can take a week to add a new command-line argument). Tying that to the LOC count is counterproductive. Shitty…

> Shitty managers like you

That's rude and against HN guidelines. Don't make this personal. I'm not attacking you.

You think I'm taking an extreme position ("Managers should measure developers by their LOC"), which I am not. Are you actually taking the opposite extreme position, that a developer's LOC tells you absolutely nothing about their productivity? That there's not even a correlation or a hint of a connection, in the general case?

As a manager, if one person on the team is committing several times a week, and their code is, even at a glance, non-trivial, meanwhile another developer merged 3 times in the last month and the git diffs are 20 lines each, would you say that the 15 LOC a week (or whatever small number) shouldn't be a major concern that I should look into? And when this developer has been saying in every team meeting and 1:1 the last month that they've been working on tough problems. I'm not going to put them on a performance plan over their LOC, but I'm sure going to dive in if I notice a small number there, and we're going to have a conversation about it if it turns out they're not delivering.

PS: above is not hypothetical. It's happened many times in cases when I take on a new team or a developer moves under me. A couple of cases were great turnaround stories, with the developer extremely grateful that their manager was actually helping them improve their engineering. In one case the guy was let go, because he refused to accept the concept that he needed to deliver more than a couple of trivial python commits a month to justify his $250K/year salary (long story, I didn't hire him).

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#205

Post by hughrr »

square_usual wrote: post #195
hughrr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it.

Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.

It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#206

Post by pid-1 »

BossingAround wrote: post #169
ngc248 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may/may not learn, but living in situations like the OP was put in is horrible. Every day feels like hell, and if you burn out it may take years to recover.

This is my personal experience, which is why I'd advise people not to go through with the above thought experiment. Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this: > How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server") > Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ... > Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5…

In many companies software got so specialized devs won't ever get close to infrastructure stuff.

They ask for a VM or a DB to the DevOps / SRE team, wait a bit days and get a URL. If a team uses CI/CD and K8s, they will write a yaml file from a template, wait a few minutes and app will be deployed.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#207

Post by vletal »

Jasp3r wrote: post #134
nickm12 wrote: post #60

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

His job history agrees with you. It has been less than 2 years since he graduated, in which he has held 4 jobs. 3 months at his first job, then 4 months, 5 months and 10 months at Amazon. I would not take his given statement at face value.

This is a relevant insight, I do not understand why it got downvoted.

Even though Amazon has a history of such events, we should care about the bigger picture, yet be skeptical about the individual claims anyway!

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#208

Post by selestify »

ActorNightly wrote: post #154
yrral wrote: post #8

Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right? Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?

The issue with Amazon is that due to its size, working on a team is essentially like working for a separate company. If you are moving across big orgs, you are just a blip in the system should something like this come up. And just like a group of startups, some are going to be run worse than others. Additionally, because of the internal transfer policy and teams frequently switching out members, a lot of work is desi…

> If you are a talented software engineer, not just a developer and generally know how to navigate around managers, you can hit senior engineer or manager levels quite easily,

How do you “navigate” your way around an 11:30 PM email that contains a 5:30 AM deadline, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#209

Post by eesmith »

khazhoux wrote: post #190
eesmith wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forg…

> 50 LOC is industry average Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm talking about 50 LOC every 2 weeks or so. Like, seriously low LOC of seriously low-complexity (sometimes trivial) code. I don't actually have a numerical target people should hit. Not at all. It's more like this: on several occasions now (all too common), I've taken over management of a team, and in our initial team meetings and 1:1s, some developer talks about…

Thanks for the clarification! I see how I got confused.
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