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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
281–290 of 589 posts
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#282Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…
>Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. AWS engineer here and I confirm everything you say, but this quote really struck home with me. The thing I've n…
Related to part of what you said. I've worked in a half dozen different industries; I've worked in little companies with a half-dozen employees and globe spanning companies with tens of thousands and employees. They all think that they have special unique problems that nobody else has - 90% of it is the same problem I've seen in other companies in different industries, with different industry specific acronyms and words.
Every damn job, the same basic problems over and over, with the insistence that these problems are specific to the industry and usually to that specific company and that specific product.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!
> Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups! I thought start ups were all about letting tech debt pile up like there's no tomorrow, since there might literally be no tomorrow for them.
The truth of the matter is that I've never seen anywhere where this isn't the case to some degree. Long term thinking is rare.
I think it's very safe to assume the level of technical rigor in a given undertaking just falls to the minimum required unless there's a very strong force keeping it in a higher state. Maybe places like NASA JPL or Apple manage to float above the minimum because of a really unified and powerful culture, but outside of that I'm thinking it's more or less universal. e.g. the 737 MAX debacle illustrates Boeing's stochastic search for the lower bound of technical rigor when it comes to flight control software quality.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#284Earlier 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?
Not gonna dox other people, you can easy figure out my name and reach out with a "real name".
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#285Amazon is a loose federation of different teams. Some are fine and some are bad. My counter-anecdote: I worked at Amazon for two years and it was mostly fine. Normal boring job.
If the majority of stock options vest in years 3 and 4, may I ask why you left after 2 years?
You have the strongest negotiation power with other companies at year 2 assuming the stock has done well. Companies need to match/exceed your projected comp 2 years out, and for some reason are more willing to do so when someone else is paying you at a certain level.
At Amazon you may face a cliff in year 5 if you haven't been performing at the 80%+ mark for your level and haven't been promoted in the last 4 years. At the higher levels where advancement is more difficult this increases the incentive to lock in a 4 year compensation package of your 3 & 4 year comp.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#286Who are the people who still dream of careers? I don't know any.
Hi, I'm Nate. Nice to meet you.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#287Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…
What I don’t get about Amazon is that AWS customers have way less oncall load, particularly Netflix, whose engineers could afford oncall 24x7 for weeks or months with perfectly normal work-life balance. Why can’t Amazon, the pioneer of cloud computing, achieve the same level of effectiveness?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but AWS customer's eningeers have less oncall load because the AWS engineers are doing so much of the difficult and failure-prone work.
That's largely what you're buying when paying for cloud services.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#288I interviewed with Amazon and Facebook in the Spring/Summer of 2020. The difference was night and day. Amazon felt like I was part of a huge cattle herd. The recruiter contacted me and told me they needed to hire a bunch of people in my area. I was immediately given a course of study, link to common LeetCode questions and told I had a couple of weeks. That fine. I enjoy solving puzzles. Facebook felt VERY different.…
I had a similar experience at Amazon. About midway through the onsite at Amazon I kind of decided "I don't think I'd like working here and I already have other offers, so my brain will be going into neutral now." and kind of checked out. Felt very much like the interviewers didn't want to be in the room with me and just wanted me to fuck up so they could click "No hire" in the HR app and get out. Walked out figuring…
It's that subtle view into what your life might become that makes it so much easier to decline to move on. I'll admit, it's probably easier when I already had a job that paid well and I didn't hate...
A recruiter that couldn't keep it professional... that is EXACTLY how I felt! I get that when you work for FAANG, you're used to the stigma your company carries. And you're used to people salivating over the idea of working for you. But there are some of us out here who already make a decent wage, and have been in the business long enough that we don't see having FAANG on our resume as the most important thing. I'm at the phase of life now where I really am interviewing YOU as much as you're interviewing ME. If I don't like what I see, I can walk away.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, IMHO Amazon is going to have a really hard time hiring people with the reputation they created for themselves. The majority cares about money and convenience. If people really cared about reputation then Riot Games, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, that big ride sharing company whose name slipped my mind, Shell, and lots of other companies, would be struggling to hire.
hmm. Do Microsoft or Tesla pay well? Last time I interviewed at M$ I had to turn down their offer because of how bad the comp was.
I don't know about Microsoft, but Tesla is well known for having terrible compensation.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!
> Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups! I thought start ups were all about letting tech debt pile up like there's no tomorrow, since there might literally be no tomorrow for them.
I had an experience at a startup where the team was mostly experienced people who had been at larger companies and didn't tend to cut corners. It was a pretty good balance. We focused on doing the job well but didn't have big company meeting culture, etc.
I wouldn't want to work at a place like you described.