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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

#441

Post by gcanyon »

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…

I had a similar experience in a college physics class. I was reviewing my solution to a problem (maybe angular momentum?) with the TA, and they said, “I know you got the right answer, but I don’t see how I can give you credit for this when I don’t understand your solution.”

And I replied, “Is it even remotely possible I came up with the correct answer by chance?” They agreed not. “Then why should it be my problem that you can’t understand my method?”

In retrospect I was an ass, but I got credit and passed the class, so…

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

#442

Post by austincheney »

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…

Or even people currently in programming jobs doing real world code all day instead of hand jamming some contrived leet code algorithm fiction that will never be allowed to enter production.

More realistic is to talk through a process that can be sporadically described in various 1-3 line code samples that will eventually be put together to form a program for something boring. A good boring example is something like transmit a file from a file system across a network and perform an integrity check. Boring but enough steps to talk through and demonstrate with a couple instructions. Nobody does this. I would hear a discussion on proper use of APIs and step by step walk towards success than see somebody lost writing for loops and conditions.

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

#443

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

igorstellar wrote: post #396
reaperducer wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I told one that I am a human being, not a circus animal here to do tricks, and if they want me to do live coding, they'd have to pay me for my time. Same result as you: The recruiters stopped bothering me.

Actually, that's not a half bad idea. If phone interview is passed, on-site time should be paid since the market is too hot. I wasted about 5 hours with Google (I did get an offer after the interview) but it was horrible experience (2019). Maybe if I was paid for that time I could at least justify this incredible time-waste. For example, companies do pay for people to fly-in for onsite interviews, so they do have bud…

> "If phone interview is passed, on-site time should be paid since the market is too hot."

And what happens later when the market is not so hot? I was around for both the dot com bust and 2008 recession. The current hot market should not be taken for granted; it isn't going to last forever.

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

#444

Post by ghaff »

dylan604 wrote: post #440
ghaff wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perhaps not hard but the expectation if you take a new job is that you won't be randomly fired in a few months because you don't meet some unstated high bar.

Every new hire has a probationary period to it. If you go into a new job thinking you'll make it past 6 months automatically, then that's a big assumption. While it shouldn't be hard to just do your job and get past the probation period, it's hard to know if the company didn't just hire a bunch of people to get past a crunch without an intention of keeping them.

Implicitly. But there's a difference between "wow, you're a bad hire" and "you're not an 80%er."

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

#445

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

chiph wrote: post #423
sorry_outta_gas wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best part is that when you're done with the on-site you get a survey with a question like "do you think google's making the world a better place?" hah personally I think they do make some pretty cool things here and there but they do have very pretentious vibe all throughout the phase of technology that they own/owned is nearing end soon anyway

> do you think google's making the world a better place? Silicon Valley, season 1 episode 1: "But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." Mike Judge is a genius.

> Mike Judge is a genius.

He really is. Any one of his properties would prove that by itself. Having such keen insights into disparate facets of humanity tells me that he just gets humans on a level not many other people do. Hopefully that doesn’t sound too flowery and pretentious.

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

#446

Post by dymk »

endymi0n wrote: post #245
Salgat wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish companies that didn't have the applicant pool of a FAANG company understood this. Leetcode for your average dev company is a great way to lose a massive portion of the qualified talent pool. I can guarantee almost every SaaS developer never touches dynamic programming beyond simple memoization, yet its tested so much. You might as well test a French Cuisine Chef on how well his Chinese cooking is.

> You might as well test a French Cuisine Chef on how well his Chinese cooking is. A way more apt comparison would be evaluating him on his knive sharpening skills.

I would not trust somebody who calls themselves a professional chef if they couldn't sharpen a knife.

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

#447

Post by dymk »

samstave wrote: post #221
oblio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he did say: > ego-driven hazing ritual :-)

The worst "Biggest Swingin' Dick on Campus" ego-fest I have ever experienced was working at the F in FAANG... -- Such a den of.... you can fill in the rest... I know someone who was literally fired for being "too social" -- and all they did was participate in the stupid parties that were had like "Build you're departments happy hour bar, here is $400 for alcohol to stock it up!!"

I look back fondly on the internal wiki pages documenting all the available "bar space" in the Facebook Seattle office.

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

#448

Post by sbierwagen »

paganel wrote: post #353
pyrale wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine getting fired because your manager is on a leave and their manager sees you as free real estate.

Tells a lot about company politics. Often times I'm left wondering how come capitalism still survives. Actually, writing this down made me think that big companies (like the FAANG mostly are) are quite anti-capitalistic. I'm not sure how to call them, because sure as hell they're not socialist or anything of the sorts, but it's reasonably clear that many of the theoretical capitalistic principles that many of us know…

You might like Ronald Coase's "The Nature of the Firm". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

A business is a socialist command economy embedded in a market economy, which has odd boundary effects at the interfaces.

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

#449

Post by e-_pusher »

ultrasounder wrote: post #348

Worked there from 2011-2012 at the then LAB126(Cupertino) on the kindle Fire and project. Was a total dumpster fire filled with Ex Apple folks who liked to throw their egos adound(this was when Jobs was still alive). Because I was in the devices teams traveled to china 4 times within the year, got burnt out by my next level managers and his managers and finally quit after taking in my singnon bonus. Took me a decade…

Sounds like just another day in the consumer electronics world … Were you working on electrical systems or mechanical? How did the switch to software engineering go for you / what made you switch?

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

#450

Post by sbierwagen »

strgcmc wrote: post #116

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't? I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and…

>I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't?

Nobody is dumb enough to write a blog post trashing Amazon under their own name. He wants to be able to get another job.

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