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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

benadam.me

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#361

Post by taurath »

prirun wrote: post #173
kahrl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance Improvement Plan: "We're trying to fire you but need to do it by the books as to mitigate liability."

I don't understand why people keep saying this. Every state except Montana in the US is "at will": the employer can fire you at any time with no reason. I suppose you could try to prove discrimination because of age or something else, but just like you can walk out and never come back, the employer can ask you to leave and you're done. Companies have no liability if you are fired other than a discrimination lawsuit.…

When management starts arbitrarily firing people without the perception that it’s a fair process, absolutely nobody sticks around. The process is for the benefit of retention because of employees perceive they can be dropped on a whim they start to act like it.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#362

Post by FPGAhacker »

robby_w_g wrote: post #125
sharkweek wrote: post #25

Hey congrats on making it 10 months! "Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work" Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on som…

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then…

There is nothing worse than being laughed at in an interview.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#363

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

raiflip wrote: post #347
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #152

I worked at a large, brand name, older company and there are parallels. I think past some size of an organization, it turns into a bureaucracy to get anything done. - Internal tooling was poor and most teams DIY. Any centrally managed thing was horrible and either home-grown and poorly documented or some VP picked it and poorly documented - The companies needs superseded your career goals to the point that very speci…

"Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks." -> ok this one threw me for a loop. I can literally get an EC2 server spun up within minutes inside Amazon. But as others have stated org quality varies a lot. If you are dealing with an org that requires you to say at the beginning of the year exactly what budget you need, I could see that.

This was years ago with their own data centers and yes budgets with server allocations at the beginning of the year or twice a year.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#364

Post by ajkjk »

andrewguenther wrote: post #211
ajkjk wrote: post #90

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used si…

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

Well, the author sounds like they were mostly a designer, so maybe they didn't work with most of these.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#365

Post by ljm »

Elof wrote: post #317
Elof wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in professional kitchens, I can say that any professional chef that isn't comfortable sharpening their own knives isn't there because they love cooking. All of the ones I know take great pride in their knives.

I think a more apt comparison would be to tell a classically trained English speaking chef to write out obscure recipes in French

The HN Law of Analogical Accuracy: for each attempt at an analogy, an attempt at a more accurate yet more abstract analogy exists in a reply.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#366

Post by Xeronate »

ss108 wrote: post #248
that_guy_iain wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university. The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spe…

> For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours I thought working at Google or Facebook was supposed to be a pretty chill "rest and vest" situation, esp at the former (?)

You are misinformed if you think Facebook is a rest and vest company. Google and Microsoft maybe.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#367

Post by masterof0 »

andrewguenther wrote: post #204
masterof0 wrote: post #17

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this: - RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...) - Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, wh…

> Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. Surprised to read this. The tooling is what I miss most from Amazon, but I was in AWS the whole time, I've heard the retail situation is quite different.

in AWS is ok, in CDO is awful.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#368

Post by pb7 »

qqtt wrote: post #244
the_snooze wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.

> That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team. I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad. It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unre…

Blows my mind that there are so many people that voluntarily choose to join a company like this. Sounds completely dystopian.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#369

Post by masterof0 »

TideAd wrote: post #286
tinyhouse wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| - Make it easier to switch teams It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.

Do you still have to go through a full interview loop?

You do, and if for any reason the next manager doesn't want you or change his/her/x mind, you are in a really awkward situation with your team.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#370

Post by darkwater »

ubermonkey wrote: post #313
ryanianian wrote: post #66

> The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics. Of co…

Wow, I thought the horror stories out of MSFT had put an end to stack-ranking forced-PIP evaluations. It seems incredibly counter productive, and leads to things like hire-to-fire that are just indefensible. Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?

What would be the rationale behind this? In their ideal world, why do they need it?
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