291–300 of 369 posts
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At amazon, admitting to a problem will guaranteed lead to having to open a COE, correction of error, which means meetings with executives, inevitable "least effective" rating, development plan, scapegoating, PIP, and firing.
What the hell is a COE? I hate that nobody seems to bother defining their acronyms anymore.
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While on its face PIP is a guide to getting someone to commit to a higher level of improvement, for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go.
> for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go. Patently incorrect. A PIP is management telling you that you need to seek alternative employment, now . Joking/sarcasm aside: I’ve never seen or heard someone who is placed on a PIP successfully “exit” the PIP. They exit the company or they’re exited from the company. PIPs seem to mark the start of the “we are building f…
I guess I'm the poster child for having vision insurance as a company benefit.
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Have worked at AWS before, and I can attest to this. Whenever we had an outage, our director and senior manager would take a call on whether to update the dashboard or not. Having 'red' dashboard catches lot of eyes, so people responsible for making this decision always look at it from political point of view. As a dev oncall, we used to get 20 sev2s per day (an oncall ticket which needs to be handled within 15 mins)…
Wow. If I were in charge, the team running a service should not be the same team who decides whether a given service is healthy. This is pretty damaging info about the unprofessional way AWS actually appears to be run.
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Yeah, had the same experience at a previous company. It's very frustrating that your transparency gets used against you by unscrupulous competitors.
How is it unscrupulous? This sort of shit happens all the time at all levels. Companies use each other’s public specs in their competition all the time. Or capitalizing on features like headphone jacks etc. in their ads before proceeding to remove them from their own products anyway (Samsung and Google) and so on.
what a scam. who can hold them accountable for cheating those who paid for uptime guarantees? I guess the lawyers of those who paid for uptime guarantees...
wah wah wah, my boss is chewing my ear out cuz I can't explain to him that it's a vendor (AWS) outage host on-premise then, and deal with power outages, and infrastructure management, and failing hardware shit happens, drink a coffee and sit back for 30 mins
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Performance Improvement Plan, they are not unique to Amazon, most places have them though the process may differ. Not to be too cynical but ultimately they’re a way to document that you’re not meeting expectations - before being fired. Should there be any sort of employment claim later its a mechanism by which an employer can show documentation that any issues related to your being let go were performance related and…
I think the reason they don’t work is because someone doesn’t just magically become a better employee over two months.
For example, a friend I have that recently left Facebook knew for a good 6 months he needed to shape up. But they hadn't put him on a PIP in that time. They eventually offered him a decent severance to quit, and he took that rather than continuing to try. If he stayed, he probably would have been put on a PIP fairly shortly. It was the best thing for everyone. He wasn't all that happy there anyways.
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Yeah, had the same experience at a previous company. It's very frustrating that your transparency gets used against you by unscrupulous competitors.
How is it unscrupulous? This sort of shit happens all the time at all levels. Companies use each other’s public specs in their competition all the time. Or capitalizing on features like headphone jacks etc. in their ads before proceeding to remove them from their own products anyway (Samsung and Google) and so on.
We hired an engineer out of Amazon AWS at a previous company. Whenever one of our cloud services went down, he would go to great lengths to not update our status dashboard. When we finally forced him to update the status page, he would only change it to yellow and write vague updates about how service might be degraded for some customers. He flat out refused to ever admit that the cloud services were down. After some…
That's opposite of my experience at AWS. It's likely that the culture at AWS has changed over the past few years, it's also likely that there's a difference in culture between teams.
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Amazon was at least aware enough to recognized that AWS circular dependencies were a bad thing. From what I heard they had to make changes. A big problem is the largest services like S3. If part of S3 were to use DynamoDB and DynamoDB used S3, then if one goes down, they might never restart either service. There is strong manager incentive at Amazon to build on other services as a way to ingratiate with other manager…
Fascinating, I hadn't even considered how the org design and incentives in place internally at AWS affects the way some of the outward facing services are designed. Is an example say an up and coming director wanted to build a new service that depends on an existing service to curry favor? Do you have more examples or anecdotes to share?
In reality it was a task scheduler with some logging and metrics thrown in which awkwardly tied user's individual code builds to a third party service where they had to be registered and externally reference for every build. Virtually all SWF functionality was in the client library, not the service which was just a data store and API.
Other cool kid services that managers wanted to force teams to use included dynamodb, kinesis, lambda, etc.