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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#391

Post by rejectedandsad »

jmartrican wrote: post #277

Maybe Amazon just needs better SRE. They should read Google's SRE books.

The point of the system is that engineers operate what they own, that's fundamentally different from SRE. It allows for significantly greater organizational decoupling. At Google, they had to go through an entire ceremony just to get Rust into the monorepo (I actually don't know if they ever ended up doing that outside of the Fuschia repos) while at Amazon someone just created a build script that wraps cargo and now AWS heavily uses Rust for several control plane systems and Firecracker. This kind of agility is not easily possible with an SRE system.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#392

Post by throwaway210620 »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #180
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…

>Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. AWS engineer here and I confirm everything you say, but this quote really struck home with me. The thing I've n…

The lack of investment into decreasing on-call pain is a real factor. I work on Oracle cloud (OCI) and at least some of the orgs (VP-down) have figured out that this is something worth focusing on, and the on-call gets better and better as a result. My original team had an average of something like 50 pager-worthy (sev2) events per week until we got moved into a new org that had the right philosophy and we relentlessly drove that down because management realized that engineers made miserable by mundane ops fake-emergencies would eventually get fed up and leave, and that's not what they wanted (afaik, OCI has no such forced attrition). So we got put on a program of relentlessly tracking and categorizing the sev2 counts and committing to improving those numbers over a period of time. 25% of dev sprints were dedicated to improving ops (tools, better alarms, fixing long-backlogged bugs that led to pages), and now that team's ops are pretty easy and they are free to work on new features, which everyone prefers. I've since moved to another team whose ops had already had this optimization done, and I've never experienced a bad week of on call there.

I won't pretend OCI is a panacea (lol google oracle cloud toxic work environment for latest stories) but at least they don't lack this particular piece of wisdom. The sheer number of regions they plan to operate doesn't really allow them to ignore dumb ops problems.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#393

Post by Immune »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #245

Current AWS employee. I haven't seen anything remotely like what is described in the OP. It strikes me as hyperbolic and a regurgitation of common posts on Blind. My work life balance is good. My manager is supportive of me and my org takes mental health seriously. We don't hire to fire; in fact we can't hire enough people to keep up with customer demand. Amazon is a huuuuge place with many different orgs. Maybe you…

How do you explain the high turn over rate that can be easily seen using the old fart tool?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#394

Post by intricatedetail »

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 now see those tests as nothing more than a way to reduce the number of applicants.

More like a way to discriminate neurodiverse people. This is probably illegal, but I have not heard of anyone challenging it. If you create a test that certain people fail, that would otherwise do their job fine, then this is likely testing for protected characteristic and disguised as competence test.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#395

Post by awsthro00945 »

vr46 wrote: post #390
awscurrentdev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not clear to me if it's endemic, these are big orgs with teams run very differently. That being said, the on-call sucks. It's really awful, and something I've never seen before. It's also typically the primary cause of team churn for people in my org. This varies, a…

Sorry to hear about your awful job, is this only in engineering or does it affect professional services like solutions architects etc too?

ProServe and SAs have little-to-no on-call responsibilities, but the general workload issues and mindsets affect those teams as well. Just as an example, resource management (aka staffing) and project scoping are things that AWS Sales is absolutely fucking awful at, and are things in particular that other consulting companies have figured out decades ago, but AWS does nothing to improve the shitty staffing processes because they have essentially just thrown up their hands and think the inefficient, inaccurate, and incredibly stress-inducing process is normal.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#396

Post by intricatedetail »

throwaway2757 wrote: post #382
rantwasp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm. Do Microsoft or Tesla pay well? Last time I interviewed at M$ I had to turn down their offer because of how bad the comp was.

Microsoft really only pays comparatively at each end of the spectrum, so for new grads out of college and people who have Wikipedia articles. For the majority of people in their career (the Seniors and Principals/Staffs) MS pays significantly worse than other FAANG-type companies, often being well under half in terms of stock compensation for example. The company is well aware of this as it's constantly brought up in…

> "we've done research and we believe we actually do pay comparatively in this market segment".

Sounds like market fixing and likely illegal, however I can imagine poorly paid employee wouldn't be able to afford a lawsuit.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#397

Post by mLuby »

intricatedetail wrote: post #394
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 now see those tests as nothing more than a way to reduce the number of applicants. More like a way to discriminate neurodiverse people. This is probably illegal, but I have not heard of anyone challenging it. If you create a test that certain people fail, that would otherwise do their job fine, then this is likely testing for protected characteristic and disguised as competence test.

Would you have to prove only that the test discriminates, or also that it was intended to discriminate? The latter sounds nearly impossible.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#398

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

pram wrote: post #187
__derek__ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, there is no Staff designation. On the IC track, L6 is Senior, L7 is Principal, and L8 is Senior Principal.

Yes whatever is above Senior, I don't have every corporations IC structure memorized

http://levels.fyi is a great reference for converting between levels at different companies. Cuts through a lot of the bullshit recruiters and HR will try to sell you.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#399

Post by xref »

imwillofficial wrote: post #361
imwillofficial wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you’re having a rough time. Hang in there, and if you move on, good luck!

I’m genuinely curious how saying good luck gets down voted. Fuck the HN crowd for this shit.

Comments like “good luck!”, “me too”, and “hi James” will get downvoted because they don’t contribute to the conversation

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#400

Post by [deleted] »

amazon_throw wrote: post #168
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124

I worked at a company that hired several people out of Amazon. Amazon is a big company, so there is significant variation from team to team. However, several of the ex-Amazon employees were clearly scarred from their time working at Amazon. Whenever something went wrong (delays, outages, missed deadlines) one of them went so far as to spend hours or days preparing documents showing how it was actually someone else's…

That "CYA" response really doesn't feel like "us" to me, at least not the AWS side. I can't speak to the experiences on the store side, nor on the devices side. Over in AWS, we practice the "blameless postmortem" model you'll read about from time to time, and it is very rare to see any professional or personal consequences beyond some light joking come about from "breaking prod" To that point, I know personally the e…

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