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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#231

Post by eric4smith »

Think before you join any large company. Nothing here is unique to AWS.

We outside have the illusion that everything is perfect on the inside of these profitable and successful companies, but in most cases it’s generally a lot of broken code and a boiler room. Staff is usually burned out after a few years - why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high??

The amount of bugs and issues in Facebook advertising is atrocious.

Google is just getting some of their admin stuff right.

The lesson to take away is that even if you have a small side business - perfection never usually makes money.

It’s more important to get an imperfect product to market that’s held together on the back end by spit and strings.

Or as my dad said, (he was an artist) - “I could continue working on this painting for months more, but I have you kids mouths to feed”.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#232

Post by teawrecks »

amazon_throw wrote: post #166

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind. While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations…

This isn't the first time I've read about Amazon's 30% mandatory turnover rate, how it effects new hires mentally when they can't help but think they might be fired at any moment, and how it effects the ones who actually did get fired. This sounds like the definition of a systemic problem.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#233

Post by satyanash »

nonamechicken wrote: post #217
angry_octet wrote: post #91

This is a great example of culture clash. In the US, being cut means nothing, you've always got to be ready for another job search. Only a few workplaces (Govt, places with strong unions, full professors) have any protection against retrenchment or arbitrary firing. But in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. The cachet of AMZN is great, until you realize they are going…

> In India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. This has not been the case for at least the last 10+ years. I cant speak of the 'product' companies such as Microsoft, Google etc. But for anyone working in the WITCH like companies, only way to get your salary changed is to switch companies. People change their jobs every 2 years or so, especially in their first 10 years. After…

> WITCH

I would presume: Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#234

Post by bradleyjg »

oceanplexian wrote: post #188
bradleyjg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is pretty reliable for the most part In telecom or traditional mainframes, for example, the compute unit itself was expected to be reliable. Individual elements of AWS are not pretty reliable in that context. Check out the single host EC2 SLA. However, today most large or even medium scale software assumes unreliable individual elements and has redundancy at the program level. For that purpose, AWS core service…

Way back I used to work in telecommunications at a place that provided POTS service. They are two very completely different worlds. Software engineers act as if 5 9's is a badge of honor, when really it isn't. When you are responsible for something that people use to dial 911 and can make the difference between life and death a few minutes of downtime doesn't cut it.

Right, and even five nines would be impressive compared to:

AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that each individual Amazon EC2 instance (“Single EC2 Instance”) has an Hourly Uptime Percentage of at least 90% of the time in which that Single EC2 Instance is deployed during each clock hour (the “Hourly Commitment”). In the event any Single EC2 Instance does not meet the Hourly Commitment, you will not be charged for that instance hour of Single EC2 Instance usage.

This essentially forces the use of distributed computing for even small businesses.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#235

Post by hitekker »

amazon_throw wrote: post #221
atopuzov wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you mine, L7. Seen and experienced personally things the author describes.

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

This went from "weird, defensive throwaway" to "possible Amazon HR agent" in 5 seconds.

I think asking for the name of someone's former manager on a public forum without giving any details in return is pretty suspect.

For those who aren't already aware, Amazon has a history of covertly paying its employees to "represent" the company in social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636021

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#236

Post by teawrecks »

delecti wrote: post #191
amazon_throw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "CYA" response really doesn't feel like "us" to me, at least not the AWS side. I can't speak to the experiences on the store side, nor on the devices side. Over in AWS, we practice the "blameless postmortem" model you'll read about from time to time, and it is very rare to see any professional or personal consequences beyond some light joking come about from "breaking prod" To that point, I know personally the e…

Your experience also matches mine from my time in the advertising org. There's no benefit to placing blame, just figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to prevent something like it from happening again. In fact it was one of the few parts of the culture that I tried to take with me after leaving.

Reminds me of that classic parable about the CEO and the worker who just made a $100,000 error. The worker says, "I assume you'll be firing me now" and the CEO says, "Fire you?! I just spent $100,000 training you!"

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#237

Post by Apocryphon »

klyrs wrote: post #194
nzmsv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this kind of reply gets posted every single time sleep deprivation is brought up. Needing this little sleep is usually a lie or a self-delusion. Perpetuating it has negative consequences for the rest of us. Do some of these unicorns exist? Sure. But they are nowhere near as common as this type of comment suggests. Most of the people in question would be better off with more sleep. Can they survive on 5 hours?…

Do you have data showing that it's "usually a lie or self-delusion"? Because there's a genetic explanation[1] for why folks need less sleep. The only way I can sleep 9 hours in a night is if I work up a sleep debt. [1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

It’s incredibly rare though.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#238

Post by tmarthal »

amazon_throw wrote: post #221
atopuzov wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you mine, L7. Seen and experienced personally things the author describes.

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

> seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself

Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones".

Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of the company has been at Amazon for 3 years or less. Do you think that if the normal/average organization/team was a great place to be, that there would be so much attrition?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#239

Post by solarmist »

nonamechicken wrote: post #217
angry_octet wrote: post #91

This is a great example of culture clash. In the US, being cut means nothing, you've always got to be ready for another job search. Only a few workplaces (Govt, places with strong unions, full professors) have any protection against retrenchment or arbitrary firing. But in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. The cachet of AMZN is great, until you realize they are going…

> In India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. This has not been the case for at least the last 10+ years. I cant speak of the 'product' companies such as Microsoft, Google etc. But for anyone working in the WITCH like companies, only way to get your salary changed is to switch companies. People change their jobs every 2 years or so, especially in their first 10 years. After…

What are WITCH companies?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#240

Post by imwillofficial »

AWS employee not in India, less than a year in. I haven’t seen anything remotely like this. So far it’s the dream job. I’ve been the one learning to mature, adjust, and up my game, no the job failing me.

But everywhere is different. If any job is I packing your health and wellness, mental or physical. Get out while you can. Life is short! No matter what you do, there is work that will treat you well and value you.

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