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

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#501

Post by BobbyJo » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #377

cerved wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP made no mention of software and mentioned Sun and Motorola, so I don't think they made any point specifically about software. It may also be relevant to point out that Amazon is first and foremost a retailer, unlike the other companies mentioned.

> Amazon is first and foremost a retailer I feel these days that it's more correct to say Amazon was first and foremost a retailer, but these days they are just UberMegaCorp across so many businesses (Amazon site proper, AWS, WholeFoods, Kindle, Echo/Alexa, movie studios, etc. etc.) that it's hard to say they are foremost a retailer. I have a similar question, though, in that I've heard lots of nightmare anecdotes ab…

There a plenty of things that decouple incompetency in their software org from business success:

1) Amazon has been incredibly successful frontrunning two MASSIVE verticals: online retail, and cloud computing. They were early winners and invested an INSANE amount of money to be #1. That gives them a lot of leeway to fuck up and still be on top. Even if they stopped doing anything at all but maintaining whatever shit show is going on behind the scenes, it'll be a while before they aren't #1 in at least one of those two huge markets.

2) Tech debt doesn't hurt you today, it hurts you tomorrow. You can cut corners and get products out the door fast, but eventually features and products that should take X amount of time, instead take 5X. Given their lead in their units heavily reliant on software, I doubt it would hurt them anytime soon.

3) You can shit on a lot of people for a long time before it hurts hiring when your stock has shot up the way Amazon's has. Money will make people do dumb things.

4) It takes a long time for poor hiring and management practices to incapacitate an organization the size of Amazon. Turn over at the bottom may be high, but I doubt it's the same at the top, at least up until the past few years. When leadership starts turning over more you'll see a lot more business mistakes.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#502

Post by singron » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

rejectedandsad wrote: post #391

jmartrican wrote: post #277

Maybe Amazon just needs better SRE. They should read Google's SRE books.

The point of the system is that engineers operate what they own, that's fundamentally different from SRE. It allows for significantly greater organizational decoupling. At Google, they had to go through an entire ceremony just to get Rust into the monorepo (I actually don't know if they ever ended up doing that outside of the Fuschia repos) while at Amazon someone just created a build script that wraps cargo and now…

This is really orthogonal to SRE. Google, in many ways, prefers centralized infrastructure. They invest in a few ways of doing things and integrate them all together. Devs have a few tools/libraries/services etc. to pick from and they mostly work together very well.

This makes SRE easier since devs can throw various applications over the wall and SRE only has to learn a few different pieces of infrastructure.

But in practice, any pariticular SRE/dev team pair would work together for a long time and use a small set of infrastructure anyway even if it wasn't the same as the rest of the company. SREs just become a little less interchangeable since other teams will use different sets of infra.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#503

Post by patelaj » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

AWS engineer of three years: there are a massive range of experiences at Amazon and AWS. The consistent themes derive from the company values and the rigor with which they're implemented. Customer obsession is followed to a fault where operational sustainability and technical debt will permanently be deprioritized except in exceptional circumstances. Frugality necessitates the least headcount required to keep the lights on. Factor in the MBA-driven climate and you've created the worst situation possible in which to be an engineer in general. There is significant variation based on the quality of management in an organization. That said, good management can only do so much, and fixing a broken culture requires more faith and persistence than any reasonable person could put in. My coworkers and I have a saying: anyone smart would leave our team.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#504

Post by Gibbon1 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:21 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…

I read that in an interview with Henry Ford, the interviewer tried to get Ford to justify why his labor costs were higher than other automakers and Ford stopped him and said his labor costs were actually the lowest, per unit.

Also same article said the pace of work in Ford factories was brutally unsustainable. Which might also be why he went to an 8 hour work day.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#505

Post by Clewza313 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:29 AM UTC

andreilys wrote: post #498

dan-robertson wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#506

Post by azemetre » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

shadowlight wrote: post #253

burlesona wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a LOT of small business owners who choose to pay their employees more than they “have” to because they genuinely want to. There are a LOT of entrepreneurs who see “making my company a great place to work” as one of the core values of their job. I don’t think this is so common when you were talking about mega companies, in part because the work of operating a mega company is a lot less fun than a smaller com…

>Remember that the vast majority of capitalism is little businesses like your local veterinarian or florist, not FAANG. That is the vast minority. Corporations dictate much of the business in the states and the world. It's really easy to see this without resorting to statistics. What is the ratio of your friends who work for corporations vs. the amount that own/work for small businesses? The anecdotal percentage here…

I believe it, I remember reading an article saying that there were 3 times as many small businesses in the 70s than there are today.

It makes sense. There are many requirements and licenses for to start hair salons, barbers, wanting to garden, etc the system is set up to support the established elite today. At least IMO.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#507

Post by decafninja » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

dralley wrote: post #289

rantwasp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm. Do Microsoft or Tesla pay well? Last time I interviewed at M$ I had to turn down their offer because of how bad the comp was.

I don't know about Microsoft, but Tesla is well known for having terrible compensation.

Does Tesla give out heavily subsidized (or even free) cars to employees?

Had a friend who worked at Mercedes Benz corporate and he could pretty much pick any non-AMG car in rotating 6-month leases. The monthly lease payment for him to lease a SL550 (a six figure convertible) was about the same as leasing a Honda Civic.

Seems other car companies do similar programs for their employees.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#508

Post by bradleyjg » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #332

jjtheblunt wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Amazon engineer: it's far and away the most incompetently run bureaucracy with self-defeating dysfunctions forced on the huge number of layers. The recent "leaks" to Business Insider, pointed out to me by coworkers, are exactly what we see. Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see. Laughably, our middle manager berates us as incapable noobs, entirely unaware that some of us at least actu…

well the good news (for amazon) is that I used to work at a place where I was trying to build a cloud. And management suffered from EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEMS (though for different structural reasons, there was no "build a feature" incentive). And then we hired someone who used to work on amazon cloud who came with rave reviews, even though he completely failed my interview, which basically tested "do you read the spe…

Not just 2015. A lot of people, including me, would love for azure to be on par. Unfortunately it isn’t. Not in reliability, features, or even documentation. Hopefully it’ll get there.

GCP is an odd duck. It really wants you to do things its way. But if you are doing a multi-cloud strategy the last thing you want is to go all in on the GCP way. Also they just don’t seem to treat customers as seriously as Amazon and Azure. It isn’t life or death for Google and it shows.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#509

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

JediPig wrote: post #247

salil999 wrote: post #18

Former AWS engineer here. I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc) But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pret…

Amazon begged to interview, so i did. My friend worked there, and thought I go call her and find out how things worked there. That is when I discovered this forced termination of 30%. I thought it was 15% , but who's counting. So I gave amazon a choice. 2 year contract forced pay contract, if they fired me for any reason, other than fraud, I would collect the full amount. I done this twice. It was a defunct mobile co…

> So I gave amazon a choice. 2 year contract forced pay contract, if they fired me for any reason, other than fraud, I would collect the full amount. I done this twice.

As someone who has hired contractors and full time employees many times, this is just insane. I don't care if you are Linus Torvalds himself, as an employer I would never sign a contract that is that lopsided, and to be honest I can't believe that any competent company would either. And given the description you have given of the company that was dumb enough to sign this, they definitely don't sound very competent.

So, I mean I guess congratulations that you got 2 companies to sign this, but I can't think of any decently run company that would ever sign something like that.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#510

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

tmarthal wrote: post #238

amazon_throw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

> seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones". Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of t…

But hasn't Amazon expanded massively in the last 3 years? I'm not sure how meaningful those numbers are unless the employee count is relatively static.