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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#451

Post by KronisLV »

nickkell wrote: post #336
alistairSH wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s roughly equivalent to 120,000 Euro/year once normalized for taxes (~50% for self-employed, ~30% for employees). I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.

It would be the top range (if at all possible) for a developer working as a permanent employee. Usually the only way to make this kind of money is to go self-employed

Heh, as a salaried dev who gets 1700 - 1800 Euros per month (so around 90 Euros per day) after taxes in Latvia, some of the numbers in this thread are pretty sobering, even if you take the costs of being self employed or taxes into account.

If you take the run of the mill Java dev salary here, the net value is somewhere between 900 - 3000 Euros or so, across all levels of seniority [1]. Really makes one consider the benefits of working for companies in other countries, assuming that there are no cultural or time zone issues that cannot be dealt with.

Or, you know, to acquire skills that are high in demand but relatively low in supply.

[1] - https://www.algas.lv/en/salaryinfo/information-technology/ja...

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#452

Post by yelling_cat »

contravariant wrote: post #406
matthewowen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out. By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical…

I can't really imagine a normal work environment where 10% (or any significant percentage) is actively harming the company.

It would be like middle school with on-call rotations.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#453

Post by actually_a_dog »

coliveira wrote: post #440
snowman-yelling wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I’ve been here for two years, not a long time by any means, and I don’t personally know a single instance of anyone getting pipped. I’ve never felt pressured to work overtime, haven’t had to race to meet an unreasonable deadline, and I’ve been rated exceeds on both of the performance evals I’ve been though. The Amazon I’ve experienced is much different than the one I read about before joining.

Every group is different. It depends on the manager, the priorities, the projects, etc. But I imagine you'll be thinking different in a few years.

So, here's an interesting question: I recently got an email from a recruiter for Amazon saying I could interview for whatever org and whatever team I wanted. What are some sane, reasonable teams? Which teams are the most insane and unreasonable?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#454

Post by amznbyebyebye »

Where is dang on this post. Why do we think so many of these comments and even this post are okay and on topic for HN. Next thing you know this place will revolve into blind. I guess dumping on amazon is on the right side of the line here but anything questioning Covid vaccine efficacy should be banned because it’s not science. This place has become a mockery of itself.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#455

Post by krapp »

amznbyebyebye wrote: post #454

Where is dang on this post. Why do we think so many of these comments and even this post are okay and on topic for HN. Next thing you know this place will revolve into blind. I guess dumping on amazon is on the right side of the line here but anything questioning Covid vaccine efficacy should be banned because it’s not science. This place has become a mockery of itself.

Your username suggests you originally came to HN to dump on Amazon yourself.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#456

Post by MattGaiser »

1ef211383f1e92e wrote: post #164
MattGaiser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be nuts to treat it as anything other than loading the bullet into the gun that terminates you. All it is is to make sure that the bullet is legal.

You should try to consider it from the company's perspective as well-- hiring an engineer is very expensive, takes a long time, and any new engineer has takes time before they can start to fully contribute to a codebase. If you're a manager in a situation where an employee has a problem and aren't meeting the job requirements, you'd probably much rather that they fix the problem and contribute to the team than fire t…

Companies don't treat engineers as expensive to hire or difficult to hire in any other context (beyond complaining about it)), so I am extremely skeptical that they do here.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#457

Post by Hokusai »

abirch wrote: post #305
Hokusai wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one's challenged it so presumably it's true Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. Aren't you being too generous with an anonymous comment that you provide no link to? Is not possible that is just Amazon propaganda?

Let's assume that it's 100% true. This guy is young and it'd be better for him to delete this. I'm totally going to cyberstalk this guy to see where he goes. My number one rule is not to sh*t on former companies with my main account.

> I'm totally going to cyberstalk this guy to see where he goes.

That is a felony in many places in the world. Companies do this kind of harassing, thou. That is one of the reasons that companies need to be taxed way more and use that money to assure that people that lose their jobs can still live a decent life.

There only way citizens well have freedom of speech is if they are not at the mercy of corporations.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#458

Post by andi999 »

moffkalast wrote: post #211
sgt101 wrote: post #139

This comment killed me : Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story… I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down! However, as I…

> $5 gift card This makes it.

This actually proves the story is made up.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#459

Post by malfist »

wpietri wrote: post #413
RHSeeger wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer. Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabot…

Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member. Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outs…

Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political.

Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.

So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.

Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#460

Post by deltaonefour »

commandlinefan wrote: post #447
emptyparadise wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there a website for rating college professors? Seems like a similar idea.

That website didn't seem to do much for bad college professors - if anything, the ones who are called out seem to consider their negative ratings a badge of honor.

I used it. It was accurate though. The website attempted to serve two purposes. To warn potential students and to allow the professors to be more self aware.

It failed on the second purpose, but at least it helped me avoid or anticipate a hard or incompetent professor.

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