Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#491

Post by nwsm » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

nkozyra wrote: post #262

grumple wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the US and have been approached by multiple recruiters who explained the the first part of hiring was a leetcode-like online assessment, and a later part of the process was a full day onsite (which I understood to be leetcode-like, or systems design questions, just like other big tech companies). I did not actually go through the process. They might not be using leetcode.com itself, but they are doing similar…

Well then the point about leetcode doesn't mean much here. Yes, most companies do coding assessments, but that doesn't mean it's ironic that the comment was posted on leetcode itself. My experience with Amazon had no self guided coding assessment, it involved a human guiding you through a problem or multiple problems.

I've interviewed there twice and both times the first step was an automated coding assessment. Not leetcode but very similar. You're given a prompt and the expected function signature, and your code must pass a dozen or so test cases.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#492

Post by throwaway2037 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

amazon_throw wrote: post #170

throwaway2037 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so. I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).

Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.

Thank you for the correction!

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#493

Post by dontTellBezos » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

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…

As an example; the individual who caused this outage was not fired for it, even though the final cause was user error.

https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#494

Post by nobleach » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

noodle wrote: post #306

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.…

How long ago was this? Its been a while since I talked to either amzn or fb, but their processes were basically the same to me. Your description of amzn was almost exactly what I experienced with fb. It would be nice to hear hiring practices changing at a big tech co though.

Spring/Summer 2020

Amazon was rebranded LeetCode for their "entrance level". FB was writing code in what appeared to be more Microsoft Word-like. (There was no console to check my work). But the conversations with actual humans was where things diverged. The systems design stuff for Amazon was very "we're looking to zing you". Facebook was definitely "hmmm, that's an interesting approach, have you considered....?" or "That sounds like it would work but, what if we...." That type of interviewing really makes one feel like they're part of a team instead of being completely alone. Amazon seemed to thrive on the "you're scared, alone, and you need to build a bloom filter and figure out an efficient hashing algorithm NOW." I realize this is probably not everyone's experience. I am not saying "Amazon sucks, all their interviews are bad" I was simply sharing my experience as it's what led me to remove my candidacy.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#495

Post by lupire » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #314

muststopmyths wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP. stack ranking came up in another thread a few days ago and this practice of forced attrition seems like just another way to do the same thing. I thought it was understood that this kind of structure just incentivizes internecine fighting and politics ov…

> Mind-boggling that there still exists upper management that thinks otherwise. Far too many Harvard MBAs calling the shots, I guess?

I know one Harvard MBA (also an engineer) and she was a brilliant leader of tech and teams.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#496

Post by rantwasp » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

raincom wrote: post #318

rantwasp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a thing. The author was not unlucky. It’s actually a thing (I worked in AWS, I have heard this from several managers, some which actually had trouble struggling with how stupid the system is). You have a team of X engineers and you want to grow. You hire a couple more. The current engineers have 0 incentives to help the new ones. Most people don’t have the chops (technical or emotional) to go up against a whole…

>The current engineers have 0 incentives to help the new ones. Most people don’t have the chops (technical or emotional) to go up against a whole team. This is why companies want to hire rockstars who can be productive in a couple of months without being helped by colleagues. One can't get such rockstars just by leetcode. Maybe, these companies should pay $1M per annum for such rockstars.

you know. being a rockstar is not a solo thing. It’s a team thing. Usually rockstars teams are born out of high functioning teams where everyone is making everyone better.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#497

Post by wpietri » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

whakim wrote: post #478

wpietri wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. That's not "the free market". And that's not how most employers are. Wanting extra useless billions even if it immiserates others isn't commerce, it's sociopathy. Even sticking with industrial titans, look at Henry Ford, who insisted on paying his workers a living wage. That was revolutionary at the time, and put America on the road to having a significant middle class.

> Even sticking with industrial titans, look at Henry Ford, who insisted on paying his workers a living wage. That was revolutionary at the time, and put America on the road to having a significant middle class. Henry Ford didn't pay a "living wage" (I have no idea if the amount Ford paid was actually technically a living wage or not, but just using your terminology) out of the goodness of his heart - he did so in or…

Sure, and that's a lesson that Bezos failed to learn. There are a lot of people who consider it ideal to treat workers terribly. It's a common ethos; "The cruelty is the point." Which is why it was revolutionary for Ford to say, "Wait, what if we treated people well?"

That's lesson that the car industry sadly lost track of over the years too. A good example is the NUMMI plant, a joint venture where Toyota tried to teach GM its superior ways. They took GM's worst plant and made it a top performer by treating workers with respect. This American Life did a moving story about it a few years back: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#498

Post by andreilys » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #484

andreilys wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that amongst all the tech Co's, Amazon seems to have the highest proportion of horror stories? It's almost a meme at this point. I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture. Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit". No…

I find it easy to believe that Amazon is a shit place to work (as a SWE) and that Amazon is a massive company with different bits being different. But I also find it easy to believe that a meme could just be wrong. It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer. If everyone at Google is convinced at orientation that Googl…

It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer

To be fair there is a website dedicated to all the things killed by Google - https://killedbygoogle.com

No other tech co has a website like that, partly because it's incredibly difficult to get promoted at Google so you get a bunch of competing products that get spun up.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#499

Post by rantwasp » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

intricatedetail wrote: post #396

throwaway2757 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the 'poorly paid' employees can definitely afford a lawsuit. here's the thing though: if you know what the situation is and continue to work there who is to blame?

also, most stories I've heard is that the sub-optimal comp comes bundled with pretty good WLB. So maybe if you were to double the number of hours worked and double the comp M$ would blow other BigTech out of the water. Maybe this is the play (half the money for half the effort) and everyone knows it.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#500

Post by rantwasp » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #224

rantwasp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worked in AWS for a while, but it was 5 years ago. you’re right that your manager can make or break your experience. For the first couple of years there it kinda sucked, mostly due to oncall (our ticket queue was at 3000 tickets at some point) and constantly being yelled at when things broke. We would basically only work on sev2s. Having the pager was super-stressful. We “owned” so much cruft/dead projects/experiment…

I use reducing the rate of incoming tickets as the primary OKR for on-call engineers. Has never failed to reduce that burden over time. Just like you say - I'm convinced it's the only correct strategy to make the problem go away.

if you set a goal but don't empower people I think overall you end up killing morale. IMHO, reducing the rate of the incoming tickets can only be done with investments that are not fire-fighting. If you're doing that I think it's awesome.