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Amazon Academy India

academy.amazon.in

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Re: Amazon Academy India

#41
post #4

As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is: 1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time. 2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.

1a - build trust specifically with IIT aspirants who, even if they don't get into IIT, will hold amazon in high regard and consider amazon for employment down the line. 3. get data / insight / early access to top level test takers and build a recruiting funnel before these students start college.

Yeah, I think data is the goldmine. If you know what questions to ask to quickly estimate someones ability to be successful in school/workplace you can just do shotgun approach hiring. As one of the largest software companies in the world that is a savvy move, although for some reason I can't quite figure out it does feel somewhat sleazy.

When I worked for Sybase there was following brain drain pipeline from India office:

* Hire a bunch of people.

* Move brightest and hardest working to U.S. on H1B.

* Use that PR to hire a bunch more people in India.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#42
Old enough to note how the bales of books from Brilliant and Agarwal caused a tinge of excitement and dread of so many things one did not know, has now morphed into daily app alerts.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#44
post #37
post #12

Have always marvelled at Amazon’s ability to do local Innovation at scale. Here is a behemoth for whom India is 10 percent of global revenue, yet launch a service which has nothing to do with their core e-commerce and cloud functions. Is it to get users, hiring tool or make more money. Will be interesting to learn the culture which facilities such decision making - any other large company would have shot down such a…

They have a very flat / horizontal management structure for such a large company. Usually for an IC it goes: You Usually a manager runs a 2-10 person team who they advocate for, and a few PMs interact with the teams that work on the projects they oversee. The PMs are sort of like sales in a traditional company, customer-facing roles who prioritize and occasionally promise features. There are usually enough VPs that y…

My experience at Amazon paints a very different picture.

There's layers and layers of management. There were 12 people between me and Bezos.

Unlike Google, peer feedback is a lot less important at Amazon. Promotions and PIPs are solely based on your manager. If you have a great relationship with your manager, you're fine.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So essentially... Cheap workers?

You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?

Can't speak for other FAANGs but this is definitely not true of Amazon India. They have teams working on everything from Alexa to new AWS services, and of course retail as well. Not to mention Amazon India itself which is pretty unique and innovative in its own ways. Amazon also pays a lot compared to most other tech employers in India - a lot less than Amazon US of course, but it's still not just "cheap labour".

Re: Amazon Academy India

#46

As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is: 1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time. 2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.

So essentially... Cheap workers?

Developing and nurturing human capital doesn't necessarily depress the value of labor...it could also create more demand for such labor (by expanding the economy), evening things out.
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