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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#511

Post by whakim »

wpietri wrote: post #497
whakim wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 te…

I understand Ford asked "what if we treated people well?", but he did it in the context of "useless extra billions" (to use your language) - he paid people a little bit better than his competitors in order to enable a competitive advantage which earned him more money. If treating them worse would have earned him more money, he would have done that instead. (n.b. that the increased wage also came with a bunch of moralistic lifestyle strings attached that were rigorously enforced.)

My point is that there exist businesses and business owners who aren't solely motivated by increasing their share of the profits (even though our system strongly encourages this) - I just don't think Henry Ford just is a good example of that.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#512

Post by mter »

EarlKing wrote: post #487
Torn wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect: https://blog.aboutamazon.eu/discover-whats-behind-the-amazon... .

I'm genuinely not sure what those are. They appear to have been proposed at some Seattle facility: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-sleek-n... I've worked at two different facilities in CA and never once seen those. We still used the white/yellow/blue badge scheme. Are there any ambassadors in this thread who know what those are?

If you saw any blue badge employees with a yellow/red/purple border around their badge, then that signifies how long they've been at the company.

Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actually supposed to be orange, but the color came out yellow.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#513

Post by salil999 »

amzn-throw wrote: post #481
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…

Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had. I'm one of those people. I've been at Amazon for almost 10 ye…

Totally agree. My experience is my own and definitely not reflective of everyone else who works at Amazon. They employ tens of thousands of engineers and many of them are happy. I just wanted to share my story - not trying to generalize this for all of Amazon.

But I wouldn't say it's a minute exception with so much of it being revealed. For every story that's revealed you can assume that there are others in a similar situation who do not publicly share their story.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#514

Post by mter »

taway_zonian257 wrote: post #443
ako wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really problematic is that from a management perspective they're doing really great: company is growing and extremely valueable, stock price is doing great, revenue and profits are doing great, and bezos is the richest person in the world. Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. Probably the opposite, they see this as a winning system, and w…

> Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. SDE1 here, I might be completely wrong but I'm inclined to believe that upper management is kept practically blind about the real struggles and issues experienced on lower-levels, and this scenario is abused by managers to scapegoat their way out of problems they have to deal with, specially the ones they cr…

You're completely wrong. Upper management is where the policies come from. They don't push back on URA targets because they either don't care or don't have the backbone to.

If your L7 is doing that, look to change teams. Incompetent people can't be fixed.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#515

Post by whakim »

akarma wrote: post #135
papito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos wants to pay the least for the most amount of work, and the workers want the most money for the least amount of work. It sounds like both parties should meet themselves half-way as opposed to living in what is effectively modern-day slavery. Suggesting such a thing, however, is "radical" and "communist", and essentially one step away from a dystopian fascism hellscape something something ANTIFA.

> Jeff Bezos wants to pay the least for the most amount of work, and the workers want the most money for the least amount of work. It sounds like both parties should meet themselves half-way as opposed to living in what is effectively modern-day slavery. The way it currently works is what you describe here. Amazon pays the least they can for the most amount of work, and workers work the least they can for the most am…

Where "the equilibrium" ends up changes over time though. Over the past 40-50 years in most developed countries, capital's (i.e. businesses') share of gross national income has been rising and labor's has been falling. This means that on average "the middle" has been trending towards companies paying less for the same amount of labor.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#516

Post by EarlKing »

mter wrote: post #512
EarlKing wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely not sure what those are. They appear to have been proposed at some Seattle facility: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-sleek-n... I've worked at two different facilities in CA and never once seen those. We still used the white/yellow/blue badge scheme. Are there any ambassadors in this thread who know what those are?

If you saw any blue badge employees with a yellow/red/purple border around their badge, then that signifies how long they've been at the company. Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often. If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actua…

Honestly, I never ran into many blue badges down in logistics. Mostly all white and yellow badges, with a few exceptions... and most of the time I was in and out so fast I wouldn't have noticed any colored border on their badge. The only time I would've interacted with a blue badge is if there was a problem on-route.

TL;DR DSP drivers don't encounter many blue badges.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#517

Post by coryrc »

mLuby wrote: post #397
intricatedetail wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I now see those tests as nothing more than a way to reduce the number of applicants. More like a way to discriminate neurodiverse people. This is probably illegal, but I have not heard of anyone challenging it. If you create a test that certain people fail, that would otherwise do their job fine, then this is likely testing for protected characteristic and disguised as competence test.

Would you have to prove only that the test discriminates, or also that it was intended to discriminate? The latter sounds nearly impossible.

In the USA, intention is not necessary.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#518

Post by von_lohengramm »

Being a current engineer at Amazon, reading these stories and comments feels so foreign to me. I've literally never seen any of the toxic behavior & mechanisms that I've read about time and time again. I know that usually either AWS or just Amazon India are the culprits, but still, I'd imagine that I'd have witnessed _something_ down here in Consumer.

The literal worst I've seen so far was an "idea guy" L8 that pushed a number of L6's (including my manager who I followed) to a neighboring org. Other than that, I've really only seen underperforming/overplaced wallflowers "deciding to pursue a career outside of Amazon" outside of personal ambition. The skeptic/naive optimist in my tends to place a lot of these anecdotes into the points of view of these unfortunate bunch, but I realize that's probably just wishful thinking.

Regardless, for now I'm just keeping my head up and trying to grow professionally as much as I can while I'm still lucky enough to have such a positive experience. And of course, I'll follow my manager to the ends of the Earth to keep it that way :^). Hopefully by then I'll have built enough street cred to continue the ritualistic FAGMAN promotional job hop.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#519

Post by nzmsv »

matz1 wrote: post #183
nzmsv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this kind of reply gets posted every single time sleep deprivation is brought up. Needing this little sleep is usually a lie or a self-delusion. Perpetuating it has negative consequences for the rest of us. Do some of these unicorns exist? Sure. But they are nowhere near as common as this type of comment suggests. Most of the people in question would be better off with more sleep. Can they survive on 5 hours?…

How are you sure its a lie ? Not common? How do you know? Eating nothing but pizza is not healthy? I disagree, Pizza has carbohydrates, protein, vegetables, vitamin, etc. Not always but it can be healthy.

How can you be sure it's not a lie? What I meant by "lie" is this: let's say you ask someone how much they sleep. Currently society tells us that working as much as possible is a virtue. So they tell you they sleep 4 hours every night. You have no way of verifying this information. For all you know they could be sleeping 8 or 9 hours. But it is very easy and tempting for them to lie for a small boost in social standing.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#520

Post by tangjurine »

yoloyoloyoloa wrote: post #343

Funny to see people ask questions like LSE, lol you can probably figure out if someone on an alt account is a real amazonian or ex amozonian by asking them a few abbreviations. My experience is that everything this guy mentioned in this post is true and more worse things are true that are not mentioned. Working at amazon broke me. I had to go on Xanax after working at amazon and after quiting Xanax lost three jobs co…

Hmmm I was just an intern but during my code reviews I was told to use a lot of stuff from Google Guava or something like that?
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