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My Interviews with Amazon

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Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#231

Post by twistedpair »

wyldfire wrote: post #116
superuser2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.

Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?

Have you tried hiring dev's lately? It's a employee's market. We've made offers to a half dozen people in the last 4mo only to be beaten out by other firms. One guy who turned us down had 12 offers.

Sure, you can compromise and take lower quality people, or pay more than anyone in your city, but if you want great people for top 20% of the market pay, it's a lot of work on the hiring side.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#232

Post by twistedpair »

jc4p wrote: post #50
Bartweiss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes. The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to ver…

I have just under ten years of experience and lead teams of developers, Amazon routinely spams me asking me to do 120 min online coding tasks before even a phone screen too. It's just fucking disrespectful of my time, to be honest.

They only spam you? I've been called, on my desk phone 4 times in the last year by their head hunters. It seems no matter how many times I tell them no, they don't get the message.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#233

Post by aianus »

freyir wrote: post #130
aianus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an internship there and didn't see catch a glimpse of the sun for three straight months. I've never been so depressed in my life. That's the main reason; it also smells like pee, there are aggressive hobos everywhere, the public transit is useless, it rains every day, and everything closes at 6pm.

> it also smells like pee, there are aggressive hobos everywhere, the public transit is useless As a San Francisco resident who recently visited Seattle, I was amazed by how much less it smelled like pee (and other human waste), how polite the hobos were, and how efficient the public transportation was. It seemed like some kind of gleaming urban utopia, although I did visit on warm sunny days.

> It seemed like some kind of gleaming urban utopia

You should visit Toronto or Tokyo then, they'll blow your mind.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#234

Post by nso95 »

gdulli wrote: post #31
larrik wrote: post #3

Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't let friends work for Amazon'. Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I…

You can find anecdotes about how working at any company is a bad experience and others about how it's a good experience. With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent…

Why are the reviews in Glassdoor about the industry average if it's so bad? Genuinely curious.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#235

Post by icedchai »

outworlder wrote: post #89

A whole day dedicated to onsite interviews, plus traveling time. How do employed people manage that? I understand that, from the company's point of view, 1 day is still to short to assess someone. But it is still a lot of time dedicated to an offer that may or may not materialize.

We either call in sick, or make something up. I have used various excuses. Once I said I had to "get some tests on my thyroid" and would be unavailable for most of the day.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#236

Post by jaffa214525 »

kafkaesq wrote: post #221
justinv wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at Amazon (non-tech; 3 different orgs; so literally NYTimes' focus or whatnot). Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there. It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.

Hard work, get it. But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls (which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff)? And once there, talking to each other about work stuff while doing, you know, their "business"? Taken together, these anecdotes paint a picture of a company that's not just hard-driven, but...…

No one takes their laptop to the stalls and they are not packed.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#238

Post by e12e »

envyUser wrote: post #177
jvehent wrote: post #38

And this is why remote work for tech people is the future. Timezones are still an issue, but if you're willing to adapt your work hours to meet the majority, being remote allows you to work for fantastic companies without sacrificing your way of life.

They tried this with India, it failed. It's why we need such a robust H1b "solution".

One of the few interesting presentations I've seen by a top consulting firm, was given by a regional manager in Norway for Accenture - he talked about their experience with outsourcing to India (this was in the early 00s). Basically it came down to a cultural (business culture) divide, communication, and differences in education.

Throwing half-baked specs over the fence to people from a different culture, who's main qualification wasn't that you could get them at all, but that you could get them cheaply unsurprisingly lead to catastrophic project failures. Sending consultants both ways to work locally together for a while, creating real mixed teams -- worked better.

Tell Stackoverflow, Trello and Gitlab that remote teams doesn't work. Of course it can work, but you need to plan for it. Oh, and team members that are any good, will command a high salary. Don't pay them, and they'll jump ship.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#239

Post by amzn-336495 »

inopinatus wrote: post #128
larrik wrote: post #3

Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't let friends work for Amazon'. Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I…

I'm ex-AWS. Actually an ex-AWS hiring manager. My experience is at odds with the negative stories. What Amazon has is a culture with a strong flavour. Like all strong flavours, I think you're going to either love it or loathe it. I had a fantastic team to work with - they were all either ex-tech-sector CTOs or equivalent or they had that level of potential. So as the team manager I had permanent case of imposter synd…

"I'm ex-AWS. Actually an ex-AWS hiring manager. My experience is at odds with the negative stories."

And then there is the Fire TV team who had to work under a director who was indicted for being part of a sex trafficking ring and is currently awaiting trial in King county courts. The women were slaves who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia. Yes, Amazon hired a sex trafficker/pimp into its management org. Parts of Amazon are totally corrupt. We can only imagine how much worse the people that hired this person are.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#240

Post by vonmoltke »

wernercd wrote: post #225
vonmoltke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what were they doing for 15 years and why weren't they replaced sooner?

Basically the company started expanding and their code base started falling apart at the seams. Two coders that each had "silos" with wedges to keep the two sides communicating together. One did web side - ordering, registration, etc on a Webform MVC customized hybrid. The other did floor applications. New customer? New database, website, etc. Sql statements? "If company a then select * from blah where field like '{t…

We probably disagree, but to me "code is shit" and "the company started expanding and their code base started falling apart at the seams" is a far cry from "can't code their way out of a wet paper bag". Sounds like they knew enough to patch together a system that made your company money for years. To me, that puts them squarely in the middle of "can't code their way out of a wet paper bag" and "good engineer I would trust to design my systems".
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