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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#341

Post by doggodaddo78 »

bertday wrote: post #320
EliRivers wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Same is true in academic research (though old-timers catch it often). The common pattern is: * approach “A” was invented in 1970 or so and didn’t work * “B” extends “A” in multiple ways and now works * noobs assume “B” invented “A” and treat “B” as the root of modern knowledge. “B” often has more market presence so noobs (without deep understanding) don’t see the relationship to prior attempts. Examples: * AlexNet/de…

The Emperor's new clothes (TENC). Most people don't do history, especially the Dunning-Kruger afflicted.

Docker (Linux containers) is, like jails: awful, leaky isolation pretending to be virtualization. If you want real resource and security containment, use virtualization. Docker is insecure in so many ways; it's like using PHP to write a TLS library.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#342

Post by ryanSrich »

nobleach wrote: post #215

I 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 interviewed for a Sr. Technical Product Manager role at AWS. This was shortly before Covid happened.

Every interview seemed to go well until the on-site. It literally felt like I was wasting their time. They gave me very bad holier than though vibes. It seemed like every answer I gave was just given a head nod then on to the next question. They asked very basic level PdM interview questions. Things I would expect a first time PdM to know, which surprised me because I was interviewing for a Sr. role.

I assume I didn’t integrate their “principles” enough into my answers because I was rejected and put on a 6 month waiting list to reapply again.

That ended up being the last straw for me. I was already on the fence about working at a BigTechCo based on previous bad experience. I ended up starting my own company. Best decision I could have made.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#343

Post by yoloyoloyoloa »

Funny to see people ask questions like LSE, lol you can probably figure out if someone on an alt account is a real amazonian or ex amozonian by asking them a few abbreviations.

My experience is that everything this guy mentioned in this post is true and more worse things are true that are not mentioned.

Working at amazon broke me. I had to go on Xanax after working at amazon and after quiting Xanax lost three jobs consequetively.

I had to work so hard to regain my self respect and confidence.

The situation described in this post is no different in Amazon Cape Town or any other place.

Btw the internal dev tooling is absolutely terrible and a pain to work with. The dev tooling is a result of "not invented here" syndrome. Forget about using a good opensource library to do a given task if that library is a google open source library.

It is hard to join amazon, but also to leave it. It operates a bit like a prison gang. Your phone tool icons are your prison gang tattoo's. Like a prison gang you will move up the ranks by doing things, sometimes even taking out members of your own gang. The longer you are part of the gang and the deeper you get...the harder it becomes to leave until it becomes impossible to leave.

My two cents is that until amazon becomes customer obsessed with its "internal customers" aka the employees it is bound to fail.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#344

Post by allenu »

nobleach wrote: post #215

I 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 got a similar feeling when Amazon once reached out to me.

I got a recruiter email and I wasn't super interested in working there, but was a little curious, so I responded. They wouldn't tell me what project it was or what I would be doing exactly, but said that once I was brought in for a full interview loop I'd sign an NDA and they'd tell me all about it. I said I wouldn't mind having a conversation on the phone just to learn what I could from the hiring manager since I wasn't comfortable spending time on a phone screen if I wasn't even interested in the job or the project. The recruiter set me up with a call with somebody on the team.

So I had a phone conversation with somebody on the team, expecting it would be an informal chat about what they do and what they're looking for, but after about 20 minutes they started asking me design and behavioral questions (i.e. given situation X, tell us what you would do). I was really annoyed because I just wanted to get a feel for what the role entailed and what they were looking for, but they turned into a sort of interrogation to see if I had what it takes to join at all.

I was already starting to look for a new job at the time and was familiar with Amazon's principles, so was sort of prepared for it and I answered all their questions quite well, and they seemed happy. I kept trying to steer it back to things I wanted to know, however, but it was hard.

Overall, I felt like the call was a waste of my time since I didn't learn anything about the job. I guess you could say it saved me time later since I decided not to respond to any future emails that other recruiters sent me.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#345

Post by maxlamb »

chewzerita wrote: post #297
steelframe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at the point of my career where it's all about the manager, the hours, the comp, and the kind of work I'll be doing. I no longer care as much about the title or level. In fact if the level is lower, great -- I'll have an even easier time getting high perf scores. These days, when I negotiate for a new job in Big Tech, I first and foremost maximize base pay. That's [1] immediate (no waiting for vest or anything),…

> After that, I make sure I won't be carrying a pager that can ever "go off" in the middle of the night. That's a non-negotiable for me at this point in my career. I'm currently in undergrad so starting my actual "career" still seems far enough off for me, but serious question how do people actually accept that? Will I have to accept that when I apply for junior/entry level positions? I don't think I'm asking too muc…

It depends a lot on the company and specific role. As a junior person there is a higher chance that the position you apply for will require this kind of commitment but not all. Just make sure you ask during the interview process.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#346

Post by ipaddr »

ako wrote: post #204
salil999 wrote: post #18

Former 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 is really problematic is that from a management perspective they're doing really great: company is growing and extremely valueable, stock price is doing great, revenue and profits are doing great, and bezos is the richest person in the world. Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. Probably the opposite, they see this as a winning system, and w…

They are doing a great job from a management perspective but it is not good place on average for a developer. Both can be true.

Management only needs to change if all developers go else where.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#347

Post by refactor_master »

lupire wrote: post #329
jjtheblunt wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Amazon engineer: it's far and away the most incompetently run bureaucracy with self-defeating dysfunctions forced on the huge number of layers. The recent "leaks" to Business Insider, pointed out to me by coworkers, are exactly what we see. Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see. Laughably, our middle manager berates us as incapable noobs, entirely unaware that some of us at least actu…

Only Apple is on Amazon's tier of technical success, and half of Apple's tech success is from non software. So on what basis ia Amazon incompetent at software? It sounds like Amazon is results driven, and pretty well-unit-tested code isn't critical for that.

Sure, why test code when you can throw expendable people at it instead?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#348

Post by YZF »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #333
vlovich123 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share your knowledge or reading materials for how to reduce on-call load? I’ve worked at a number of big companies but all the problems driving the oncall load seemed, at best, domain specific if not application specific with highly variable fix times and unpredictable occurrence (eg started becoming more of a problem due to unrelated change X). As a result each team has to decide the cost of fixing the pain…

I don't have any particular reading material, and my example of the on-call load at AWS that I'm referring to is probably very basic to most people. On my team at AWS, leadership has given specific instruction that we do not believe in on-call runbooks or automation to triage issues, for example. Leadership's reasoning for this is that they think runbooks prevent engineers from applying personal judgement, and every…

There is something to be said for this approach. If the root cause is to be fixed someone needs to look at it in depth rather than running some play book procedure to recover. If you have too many problems though you're beyond the point where that helps. Let's say your software has worked flawlessly for a year, no issues, now an issue pops up, the engineers should definitely spend a lot of time understanding it, understanding why it popped up, fixing it properly and fixing the underlying process/org causes that made it pop up. It should not be "follow some playbook to recover". If issues pop up every week this is unsustainable, you're well beyond the point where stuff can actually be fixed. Automation has its own dangers, it is additional software to maintain, it has its own bugs etc. The right amount of automation makes life better for sure.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#349

Post by random_user_9 »

SDE3 here with 5+ years on the retail side. Listen up new SDE1. Here is the score when you get hired at Amazon. You have 2 to 3 years to get promoted to SDE2 or you are gone. SDE2's you are in the same boat but with less risk of a PIP. You'll need to be making a case for SDE3 in 3 to 5 years or you are going to see you comp decrease over time. Once your at SDE3 you now are really Amazon employee instead of a trainee in the eyes of management. You can more easily push back on stupid management decisions at the L7+ level, except hiring, and use your years of history at Amazon as leverage, most managers are new anyway. Most SDE3s however have figured out that the path to Principal is easier by boomeranging. There are too few L7 level projects to go around. If you want to survive this climb then here are some tips.

1. Really own your product. Know it inside and out. Too many devs rely on tribal knowledge and out dated docs to tell them what they own. The code is the truth, read it, poke at it, review previous CR's and SIMs to piece together its history. You will become the master of the truth.

2. Drive your career. Understand what the moving to criteria for your level are and keep notes for how you are achieving them. Focus on taking on work that gives you more evidence that you are on a promo path. Write the documents that make the argument and iterate on them often. You need to actively manage this or it will manage you.

3. Pushback. Many managers at Amazon are just spreadsheet jockeys that are making things up as they go along. If something is stupid or determental to the product or team say so and have evidence for why. Make the argument and build consensus on the team for that argument. You won't win them all but you will erase from your manager's mind that your are a passive code monkey. The more you do this and can demonstrate results the more you'll have the ability to drive your work.

If you want to be spoonfed a career don't work for Amazon.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#350

Post by bradleyjg »

ev1 wrote: post #316
bradleyjg wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and even five nines would be impressive compared to: AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that each individual Amazon EC2 instance (“Single EC2 Instance”) has an Hourly Uptime Percentage of at least 90% of the time in which that Single EC2 Instance is deployed during each clock hour (the “Hourly Commitment”). In the event any Single EC2 Instance does not meet the Hourly Commitment, you will n…

EC2 is absolutely not meant for this, though. Use an abstraction layer like Heroku if you're going to not understand what you're getting into. The amount of times I've had to 'advise' small businesses that are somehow running their small business site off a single EC2 instance's ephemeral boot volume is atrocious.

I don’t have any experience with huroku but what most small businesses need is a (perhaps simulated) reliable box on a fast network. As glorious as the paxos based present is, it’s overkill to the point of distraction for most businesses. The whole attraction of the cloud for them is not needing to hire sysadmins. Replacing that requirement with needing a devops team is even worse.
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