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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

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Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#311

Post by [deleted] »

linkregister wrote: post #43
kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#312

Post by mrep »

mcherm wrote: post #206
sssilver wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in an Amazon warehouse doesn't have the same vacation options as the person coding the internals of Simple Queue Service.

Based on the (lack of) attention that SQS has received, I'm guessing that the person coding the internals of SQS has LOTS of vacation.

What more are you expecting from it?

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#313

Post by amzn-336495 »

mter wrote: post #306
turar wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human. This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.

The amazon way is not always friendly to normal humans. That's just the truth of it. My team has taken pains to not be that way. The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes…

> No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago.

That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#314

Post by PhasmaFelis »

s_q_b wrote: post #259
amazon_employee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear that. I work for AWS, and I like to think we're pretty organized. I'm not sure what part of your experience was "unorganized". You probably caught the team on a busy day or something. LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really ca…

When I was in high school my father made me work as a janitor in our family's office building. At that point I had been an independent IT consultant a few years, so the position frankly felt like an embarrassment and a waste of time. There was also a condition; I couldn't tell anyone my last name, or that I was related to the building owner. At first I thought it was to teach me a lesson about hard work, which seemed…

I worked at a gas station for a year after college, and it was awful, but I am definitely more thoughtful about how I treat service workers since then.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#315

Post by PhasmaFelis »

amazon_employee wrote: post #42
rdtsc wrote: post #22

I was interviewing for AWS, and it was a circus. Completely disorganized. However, I have to say, I enjoyed the parroting back of "the leadership principles" part. It was like being in the Soviet Union again and singing praises to the great party leaders. Very much worth wasting a day over it. However my nephew didn't have such a fun time. He was working for one of their warehouses in Kentucky and they were ruthless…

Sorry to hear that. I work for AWS, and I like to think we're pretty organized. I'm not sure what part of your experience was "unorganized". You probably caught the team on a busy day or something. LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really ca…

> bad culture fit

I have never been able to figure out exactly what this is supposed to mean. Best I can tell, it means "You're fully qualified for this position, but I don't like you for reasons I can't or won't articulate."

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#316

Post by flukus »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #315
amazon_employee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear that. I work for AWS, and I like to think we're pretty organized. I'm not sure what part of your experience was "unorganized". You probably caught the team on a busy day or something. LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really ca…

> bad culture fit I have never been able to figure out exactly what this is supposed to mean. Best I can tell, it means "You're fully qualified for this position, but I don't like you for reasons I can't or won't articulate."

I think you've figured it out. I can't understand why no one's been sued for racism over it yet.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#317

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

amzn-336495 wrote: post #93
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only stayed at Amazon for one year, but I was told that if I'd stayed for two years they would have offered me more equity. So yes, there are refresh equity grants. I've heard from a good source that they do that at Apple as well.

There are refresh equity grants unless you are on a PIP. Now you know what all the fucking PIPs are all about at Amazon (other than blocking your transfer). You should not listen to what anyone at Amazon tells you.

Did you notice the part where I worked at Amazon in-house for a year? I was a consultant for them for six month before that as well.

And my experience was pretty awesome. I did hear about PIP issues, though. That does suck. I'd probably just quit if it happened to me. I have a low tolerance for crap at work.

I like the "get severance pay" strategy someone mentioned. I was only working there at all because the money and people were great.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#318

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #172
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at AWS for six months as a contractor and a year as an SDE3. Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year. The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered…

> Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. I've been in many teams and I can agree there are many strong developers. > Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. Maybe not like sweatshops, but I've met many tenths of people that left because of the constant pre…

>We too, but phrased like this makes it sounds like Amazon is a relaxed and laid-back company. Far from it.

Amazon is strict about a lot of things, but as far as workload -- well, I'm quite a fast developer, and I almost always was way ahead of the curve in getting things done. Very low stress for me.

Big reason I quit is that I was bored, in fact. Despite asking for more work. Despite taking on random extra team projects to create tooling to improve source control processes. And writing tools that were used elsewhere in the company. Etc. etc.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#319

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

gambler wrote: post #84
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at AWS for six months as a contractor and a year as an SDE3. Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year. The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered…

The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them. I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.

>I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.

It is all automated. To the point of paging you when an alarm goes off. But when the alarms go off, someone has to figure out how to fix the problem. Apparently some newer developers dug into the problem, they were able to fix it so that things were Much More Sane.

On our particular team, the server guys had just set too many alarms without really:

a) Documenting exactly why a particular alarm was potentially bad

b) Documenting what to do when a particular alarm went off

c) Really thinking about alarm thresholds -- frequently alarms were going off just because a client was using the product

The hell of oncall for our team was that we were the client team. We knew nothing about the server side. So if someone on our team was oncall and got paged, they'd basically have to call someone on the server team at 3am or whenever anyway because WTF is this stupid alarm?!

I had the Weirdest Commute Ever [1], though, and was as a side effect exempt.

[1] I live in Colorado. Amazon send me an offer to be an employee that allowed me to work from home ... but not in Colorado, because sales tax. So I rented a house on the edge of Kansas (3 hour drive), worked M-W, 12 hours/day, and drove home for the weekends. I couldn't do any work in Colorado or Amazon would risk having to pay sales tax on all purchases from Colorado. So QED I couldn't be oncall. Amazon has offices here now, so I could work for them without the weird commute. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm currently obsessing over finishing a game.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#320

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

btdiehr wrote: post #310
sulam wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to make that choice is a privilege.

How do you figure?

Not the OP, but:

* Access to educational opportunities as a child (the "easy" path to developing the right brain structures software engineers need)

* Lacking the first point, the extreme amount of time and the tolerance for the effort involved in "learning how to think" as an adult.

* The free time to learn to become a software engineer.

* Ideally the money to get a CS degree or equivalent.

* Raw aptitude. Some people are genuinely not cut out for it.

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