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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

#241

Post by ghaff »

dudus wrote: post #112
cjaro wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance Improvement Plan. It's basically the company's way of saying "We want to fire you, but don't have a reason on the books, so here you go. In six months, pack your bags and go."

I respect your view and while that may be true on a lot of cases that's not what the company represents a pip to be. A PIP is a situation where you are told you are not performing at the desired level and needs to improve. In a respectable company being on a pip can be good for you. In my personal case I was not performing well due to personal issues. Getting on a pip saved my job. It gave me the resources and attent…

The one case I have first hand knowledge of someone put on a PIP, they had done some specific things and also clearly weren't interested in their primary job any longer. I'm pretty sure they could have recovered had they found a way to jump into their current (or another) role again. They had been quite respected for a lot of things.

But it was really a time for a parting of the ways at that point.

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

#243

Post by zzleeper »

benadam11 wrote: post #42
kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

I'm curious, how do they compare against S3? (cheaper, easier to use, ...?)

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

#244

Post by qqtt »

the_snooze wrote: post #147
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. That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.

> That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.

I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad.

It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists.

It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly.

Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.

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

#245

Post by endymi0n »

Salgat wrote: post #209
colinmhayes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You might as well test a French Cuisine Chef on how well his Chinese cooking is.

A way more apt comparison would be evaluating him on his knive sharpening skills.

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

#246

Post by throwawayboise »

"Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)"

Sounds like my first job out of college (it was early 1990s, big consulting shop).

There was a ton of pressure to arrive early, stay late, 55-60 hour weeks were normal, continually document progress on your tasks, but the project overall was well behind schedule and what had been completed didn't really work.

We got paid straight overtime after 40 hours, and I didn't have much else to do with my time, so it wasn't all bad. I only did it for about a year. It was a good reference for my next job.

Young people can afford a few years in the salt mines to get some perspective.

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

#247

Post by Clubber »

throwawayboise wrote: post #227
Clubber wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>an ego-driven hazing ritual Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.

I've never had an interview like this. Get out of SV if you don't want to play those games.

This was in a mid-sized town. The main guy who was hazing was only mid-level talented, and was very insecure about it. On the other side of the table, I've never seen someone who I considered a high-level talent act that way. They may have tough questions but they certainly aren't pricks about it.

This was a long time ago, I get work through my network now, interviews consist of going to lunch and shooting the shit.

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

#248

Post by ss108 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #240
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…

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university. The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spe…

> For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours

I thought working at Google or Facebook was supposed to be a pretty chill "rest and vest" situation, esp at the former (?)

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

#249

Post by aspaceman »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #230
colinmhayes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've never used Leetcode, but it keeps coming up here. I've been interviewer a lot lately and I keep trying to find ways to filter out the candidates that care more about interview prep than solving real problems. Is this a nonstandard perspective?

I think it's pretty common at small to mid sized companies + startups. Your more "trendy" companies and your F500 companies do the type of Leetcode interview you hear everyone on HN complain about.

It typically looks like a 15 minute phone interview with HR, followed by a lengthy Leetcode/ take home exam (that's auto graded, no humans), a computer form where you input your school, GPA, and courses taken (seriously). All of this info gets turned into a number and then HR takes a sample of the top X and hands it to the hiring manager: "Here are the 'viable' candidates".

The hiring manager then has to (basically) interview the candidate themselves. Ensure they actually have the skills for the position, determine their interest in the role, etc. So this is probably what you're doing right now. Just imagine someone filtered a bunch of your resumes first.

Take with a grain of salt, but I have heard of some folks explicitly getting permission to do hiring outside of HR at said large companies. The kids they get out of undergrad and through HR's Leetcode process are apparently complete garbage. Don't understand C, pointers, memory, or Linux at all. Don't even know what files are.

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

#250

Post by majormajor »

geodel wrote: post #151
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…

> It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field. Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.

Now imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time?

EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people with busy schedules anyway.

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