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Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

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Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#251

Post by porknubbins »

malfist wrote: post #211
hn_acc_2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, among the MAGMA companies I've found the _least_ bias for leetcode-memorization at Amazon. My interview with Meta was exactly as you described (a CS riddle taken from a textbook, to be solved without running the code or receiving hints). But in my interview with Amazon, each coding interview also included a couple leadership questions. If you want you can look up the exact questions that they'll give you to…

We have a question bank that we are required to ask from that can be found online. Coding questions and system design challenges are individual to the interviewer. Some are good, some are bad, some are leet code, some are reasonable, it's kinda a crapshot. I saw a bar raiser (a bar raiser!) asking path finding algorithms as his coding challenge which is nuts to me. All that signals is if you've worked with path findi…

Is a leet code question just one that has an obscure clever answer (like use 3 pointers to process the array in time O(n) ) that doesn’t really use broader knowledge of CS?

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#252

Post by iceburgcrm »

whimsicalism wrote: post #234
throwayyy479087 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the highest salary now

As I said, until recently. Now they are a bit more bimodal, but they do not necessarily have the highest (certainly they do not beat netflix).

Can netflix be included as a faang? Where does Telsa fit?

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#253

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

zem wrote: post #199
bgro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They still do leetcode screening don’t they? IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that re…

i've never interviewed at amazon, or even heard much about their interview process, but the sheer amount of recruiter spam i get from them gives off a "desperate for engineers we aren't getting" vibe, so i can see why people think it would be easier to get in there than at the other tech megacorps.

Part of the issue is they can't/won't compete on comp or benefits with other big tech companies, but still have high-ish standards on hiring, relative to the industry as a whole.

That means they need a huge candidate pool, since most won't make it through interviews, and most of those who do won't accept their offer since they can get better offers from other companies.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#254

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of the company, at least).

This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly.

That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#255

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

iceburgcrm wrote: post #252
whimsicalism wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, until recently. Now they are a bit more bimodal, but they do not necessarily have the highest (certainly they do not beat netflix).

Can netflix be included as a faang? Where does Telsa fit?

Netflix is literally the N in FAANG.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#257

Post by rplst8 »

turdprincess wrote: post #230
malfist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a question bank that we are required to ask from that can be found online. Coding questions and system design challenges are individual to the interviewer. Some are good, some are bad, some are leet code, some are reasonable, it's kinda a crapshot. I saw a bar raiser (a bar raiser!) asking path finding algorithms as his coding challenge which is nuts to me. All that signals is if you've worked with path findi…

It could also signal that you got motivated and took many hours out of your busy day to do a meaningless task like memorize a path finding algorithms. This might be a good signal that you will also be motivated to spend many hours doing meaningless things at your job. Actually, if you think about it, the whole concept of getting a college degree isn't much different - its not about what you learn in the classes, it j…

What you should learn in college is how to teach yourself to always be learning. Or at least to be aware of the trap doors that await when you try to solve a problem in the real world.

Learning the Big O Notation performance of algorithms that traverse data structures isn't so you memorize all the different running times in perpetuity. It's so you realize that performance and the type of operations you want to commonly execute are something you need to consider for the data you have to work with.

If you didn't learn that from your college CS courses, I don't want you working on my team.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#258

Post by rplst8 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #236
turdprincess wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also signal that you got motivated and took many hours out of your busy day to do a meaningless task like memorize a path finding algorithms. This might be a good signal that you will also be motivated to spend many hours doing meaningless things at your job. Actually, if you think about it, the whole concept of getting a college degree isn't much different - its not about what you learn in the classes, it j…

"the whole concept of getting a college degree isn't much different - its not about what you learn in the classes, it just shows that you have the capacity to go through an arbitrary social experience, follow a bunch of rules, learn some stuff, and stick with it for a few years - pretty similar to a job" It makes me sad when I hear people say things like this. A college education has the potential to be so much more…

I agree 100%. To add to this, I can't tell you how many engineers I run into who possess amazing programming skills, but can not convey their thoughts and designs meaningfully in written or spoken word. Taking a few more humanities classes might not be a bad idea for most.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#259

Post by somehnacct3757 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #240

Why do severance packages exist? I like the concept, and I appreciate it’s a standard practice and in some cases the law. But what’s the logic behind them?

I can't say I know the full picture, but usually to get the severance package you have to sign away some legal rights and/or sign a non-disparagement.

So on one level it's a bribe.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#260

Post by edmundsauto »

senderista wrote: post #219
Kranar wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While memorization is involved, people make it seem like you need to memorize specific solutions to specific leetcode problems, and that's just not only false but also a bizzare and almost impossible strategy. What you do need to memorize are a small group of algorithmic designs and have a good sense of when to apply each one. The main ones include divide and conquer, greedy, graph, and what seems to be the hardest o…

I have literally seen interviewees expected to come up with Floyd’s linked-list cycle-finding algorithm independently (or rather, pretend they did).

Can you tell a little more about this situation? Because it sounds like you were the interviewer who expected this... Having conducted interviews at big tech companies, I can attest there is variance between interviewer expectations, despite leadership's best efforts to make it objective. So I have to wonder if you've seen it, doesn't that mean you were creating that environment?
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