Oh, I thought this was a story about a Python installation that had gone rogue.
I did too. I’m grateful my job experiences made me think of Python before a slow-motion firing.
Amazon Pip Horror Story
481–490 of 771 posts
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#482Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazo…
> Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There Still making more money than GCP and Azure (both of which are worse to use, IMHO) so...who cares?
When you're running a world wide service with lots of moving and connected parts this dramatically increases the danger you'll have catastrophes that will cost much or most of that market share.
As a thought experiment, suppose all of AWS was down for a full week? What would happen after that?
More realistically, how many times can us-east-chaos-monkey bring down various global services before a lot of its users start making moves to mitigate or eliminate their exposure to AWS?
For a more concrete example, I'm working on a project that has an easy but critical use of cloud services. The more I read about Amazon following Microsoft into Ballmer era stack ranking madness, and the most AWS fails objectively fails, the lower the priority it gets for which cloud platform to support first and best.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold on, 700€ x 215 days worked (you don't count vacation time when freelance) = 150 500. Now, give it half to the taxman, and you're left with 75 250€ / year. And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc. So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.
Even allowing that junior salaries reach this high (that's in the range for a senior in Berlin at least), that would be the PRE-TAX figure. Remove 40% (again, approximate taxes in Berlin, potentially more if you pay the "church" tax) and you've got 45150€, a significant difference.
Yes, of course, but everyone has to pay income, housing and a few other taxes regardless of employment status.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's true. We really need some service like blind where people can anonymously review and score managers. We need votes to prove that a manager is an ass hole. One anecdotal story isn't enough. Maybe the service leaves the manager anonymous until the review amount crosses a certain threshold... 3 to 4 guys calling him out? Submit this to ycombinator!
> We really need some service like blind where people can anonymously review and score managers Wouldn’t managers just make a service where they review and score engineers too?
Every employee can be reviewed! It's fair. Here's the thing though, I said you need 3 to 4 negative reviews before the entire review profile becomes public.
Each engineer has one manager, thus they have one review. The profile doesn't open up until after the engineer worked for several managers and 3 or 4 of them leave bad reviews.
It's fair. But managers are more at risk. Still this process keeps everyone in line. Don't be a jackass is the key metric here.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not a useful metric. Starting a new project with lots of generated code will have thousands of lines of code & it won’t do anything useful.
It’s absolutely a useful metric. I have managed many developers who insist their low LOC is in no way indicative of their productivity. They’ll say others are padding their code with comments, or writing bloated inefficient code, or that they themselves were tackling very tough problems that result in small (but tricky) fixes. Yes, we’ve all encountered that killer deadlock or memory leak deep in the runtime that tak…
That’s such a horrible metric. I try to mentor my colleagues to solve problems using what’s already there. If they take a week to launch a feature without increasing the code size, I’m incredibly proud of them.
One of my own major wins last year was a big update to a project to strip out legacy cruft and tech debt, and scrapped maybe 5,000 LOC. The end result was smaller, faster, easier to test, and more robust. I count that as a win, by pure LOC, it was a massive failure. (Unless you don’t count code removals against an IC’s score, in which you’re optimizing for churn.)
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> —— > I now work at Cohere (cohere.io)! Give it a spin Recruiter/spammer
Author here. I’m a software engineer who likes to have fun on LinkedIn, not a recruiter/spammer. And yes, I was actually an SDE at Amazon!
I still miss your meme's from my Duke days! Glad to see you on HN
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#487I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively an…
> As a manager, you get verbal (never written)
I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#488How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423
His post 5 months after joining was a repost of someone criticizing Amazon. And then he ended up getting PIPed recently. His linked profile is all over the place too with work experience, he never held a job longer than 4 months. Dunno if I would automatically side with his story from that.
"Why do you hire dead wood? Or why do you hire live wood and kill it?"
At best you're arguing that Amazon is dysfunctional in a slightly different way than the rest of this thread thinks.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's wor…
I wish I had realized your comment was better spaced before slogging through the previous text brick.
That was a very readable comment. I'm reminded of the times I've posted here about "If it's 3 paragraphs or longer, my coworkers won't read it" only to get responses like "Must be poor writing on your part!"
I wish to thank you for proving my case.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#490"hey welcome to your first day at Amazon! We're so excited to have you. Here's your desk, and here's your PIP. Oh yeah, here's your computer too"