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Amazon Career Choice Program

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Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#31

Post by c2 »

potatolicious wrote: post #28
c2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you just had a bad manager. At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers. I'm sure your opinion would be different if you actually made it to the AWS group like you wanted. You're turning a bad experience with a single manager into a personal vendetta against the company as a whole. I have friends who work there who work normal hours (and have for years) and they even said they…

> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers." This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends. In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of…

Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#32

Post by jsolson »

nirvana wrote: post #23

Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon. I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management. Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop.…

For what it's worth, this is nothing at all like my experience at Amazon. I'm about a year and a half in. My management is technically competent and, in general, has a good feel for where that competency ends. They don't interfere beyond that point.

I don't work nights or weekends unless I want to. Sometimes I do -- I like some of what I'm working on, but nobody is there cracking the whip.

I do know the experience varies dramatically from team to team, but in the last 18 months I've met and worked with people from many other teams (we're a newish group that's integrating with many parts of existing Amazon infrastructure), and absolutely nobody I've encountered has given any indication at all that their team was like the one you describe. There have definitely been teams that I wouldn't want to work on, but that always came down to a giant chunk of legacy code that nobody wanted to maintain (this is actually a pretty big problem -- there is a lot of scary Perl Mason around Amazon).

I don't know when you worked at Amazon or which team you were on, but either the company has changed, yours was an isolated hellhole of a team not representative of the general experience, or you are vastly overstating things. My team is far from perfect, mind you, but I could do a lot worse.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#33

Post by potatolicious »

c2 wrote: post #31
potatolicious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers." This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends. In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of…

Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)

It's weird how many isolated anecdotes from different people, each one passionately vitriolic about the company, that we run into everywhere in the software engineering community.

It's also pretty weird how many ex-Amazon employees I know who would never, ever go back, regardless of the size of the paycheck.

Either there's an organized hit job against Amazon as an employer, and myself and nirvana (among many, many others) are all shills.

Or perhaps the notion that Amazon, as a whole, is a heavily mismanaged company, has some merit ;) Food for thought.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#34

Post by jsolson »

potatolicious wrote: post #28
c2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you just had a bad manager. At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers. I'm sure your opinion would be different if you actually made it to the AWS group like you wanted. You're turning a bad experience with a single manager into a personal vendetta against the company as a whole. I have friends who work there who work normal hours (and have for years) and they even said they…

> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers." This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends. In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of…

Where the hell are all of you people working? I'm about 18 months in, and on my team or any of the other teams I've worked with I haven't seen any of the horror stories people here are describing.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#35

Post by potatolicious »

jsolson wrote: post #34
potatolicious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers." This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends. In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of…

Where the hell are all of you people working? I'm about 18 months in, and on my team or any of the other teams I've worked with I haven't seen any of the horror stories people here are describing.

I was in Ops, but I knew people in RCX, Customer Service, Data Warehouse, Search, Fraud, Identity, and a bunch of other places who were absolutely miserable (and have since left).

I lasted 24 months. Management was mediocre for the first 18 months, accelerating very quickly downwards in the final 6 months after repeated re-orgs.

The seeds were planted early though - one of the major reasons I left was the constant death-marches due to the high attrition rate, and some boneheaded desire to "maximize engineering utilization" by instituting a hiring freeze in the middle of 2010, despite the fact that we already had more work than we could do in 3 lifetimes. It took a little while for the full impact of this to materialize.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#36

Post by yajoe »

nirvana wrote: post #23

Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon. I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management. Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop.…

I want to believe your story based on strong emotions, but there's two things that bother me to the point that I think this is BS.

1. Stack ranking? Nope. Amazon has no desire for "up and out" like Microsoft. They're happy for a competent person to wake up and do the same job everyday for 15 years. Raises are non-existant, so it's cheaper to keep that same person in the same role than hire a new person. The review system is NOT like Microsoft. Firing someone takes 2 months end-to-end, not 12 like at Microsoft.

2. If the guy was really selling drugs in the parking garage, then it would be trivial to prove. If you actually worked at Amazon you would know that the physical security at all buildings is insanely high. Guards at every entrance who look at your badge. Roaming patrols. Off duty police officers. And cameras everywhere. If he was on company property (you said the parking garage, right?) there was a camera recording him. Even if HR was out to screw you they also would put a stop to the drug dealing for fear of a bigger lawsuit.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#37

Post by legoviking »

nirvana wrote: post #23

Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon. I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management. Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop.…

I think the thing to keep in mind is that Amazon is a company of extremes. There are parts of the company, maybe a large fraction of the company, that are at least in the direction of what you described (although the drug dealing bit is a one-off if it’s true). However, there also parts where there are many people that have been at the company over a decade (namely AWS). I’ve been working here a few years, and I won’t deny that I got lucky with what team I work for, but outside of maybe being a college hire you should really get some idea of what you’ll be working on and who you’ll be working with before you actually work there. I work on things that are really interesting to me, and yeah, there are some crappy parts like oncall and occasional bad management, but the first gradually improves and the second tends to resolve itself.

Also, my experience with people leaving/coming in my part of AWS is that people who leave the company entirely almost exclusively weren’t doing very well. The more experienced people tend to just transfer elsewhere within AWS. Also, Amazon hires a huge number of ex-Microsoft employees, whereas I only know of one person personally who left to go to Microsoft.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#38

Post by jmduke »

mathattack wrote: post #20

It's better than nothing, but look at the target... $1 and hour of educational benefit ($2000/year divided by 2000 hours/day) is great for someone making $8 an hour. That's a 12.5% raise off the cuff. Apply it to someone making 100K, and it's a lot less. Some big companies do full tuition reimbursement, but the # is shrinking over time.

I don't expect any Amazon employees who are making 100K to need a subsidized associates degree, though.

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#39

Post by retroafroman »

_delirium wrote: post #24
nirvana wrote: post #23

Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon. I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management. Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop.…

Hmm, if there's a strong political/ideological component to how they operate (I have no personal knowledge of that), that would explain the otherwise puzzling part of the policy where it restricts which subjects you can study. I've been trying to figure out the business angle on that, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, it is normal for employers to restrict tuition reimbursement to things pl…

No, it's a business decision. To get to study whatever they want, they have to stick around for 3 years. They're holding a bonus perk over their head for the first 3 years someone is working. Based on what I've read in this thread and also from the Mother Jones journalist [1], they have a terrible time keeping people in the organization, from programmers to warehouse associates, and everything between I assume.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

Re: Amazon Career Choice Program

#40

Post by _delirium »

retroafroman wrote: post #39
_delirium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, if there's a strong political/ideological component to how they operate (I have no personal knowledge of that), that would explain the otherwise puzzling part of the policy where it restricts which subjects you can study. I've been trying to figure out the business angle on that, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, it is normal for employers to restrict tuition reimbursement to things pl…

No, it's a business decision. To get to study whatever they want, they have to stick around for 3 years. They're holding a bonus perk over their head for the first 3 years someone is working. Based on what I've read in this thread and also from the Mother Jones journalist [1], they have a terrible time keeping people in the organization, from programmers to warehouse associates, and everything between I assume. [1] h…

I can see how that explains the 3-year service minimum, but I'm not sure how that explains the field-of-study restrictions. Once you're there for 3 years, why do they care which courses you enroll in?
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