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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#561

Post by dang »

imwillofficial wrote: post #361
imwillofficial wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you’re having a rough time. Hang in there, and if you move on, good luck!

I’m genuinely curious how saying good luck gets down voted. Fuck the HN crowd for this shit.

Your GP comment was just fine, but where you went with this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573815 is not cool. Please don't lash out like that in HN comments. When unfairly downvoted, remember that corrective upvotes are a thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and misclicks are also a thing, and please just move on.

Complaints like this, besides being tedious and breaking the site guidelines, usually also end by being uncollected off-topic garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#562

Post by amzn-throw »

northern-lights wrote: post #558
amzn-throw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's called Survivorship bias. Before coming here, I too thought the same. That the stories were exaggerated, that those experiences were outliers and a minority. But then I saw my team's L6 SDE get put on Focus within a year of joining and leave. If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. But no such thing. This place puts you in the middle of the ocean when you don't know how to…

> If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified.

That's not the metric for success or failure. It's delivering results.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#563

Post by amzn-throw »

andreilys wrote: post #482
amzn-throw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Even in my charitable view of my company, Amazon is INTENSE.

We set extremely ambitious goals, and orgs are only expected to meet 70-80% of them.

It's an environment that indexes extremely high on autonomy and flexibility for each person and each team.

It is without a doubt a sink-or-swim environment. But, by and large, the ability to swim is based on individual merit.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#564

Post by sreque »

hibikir wrote: post #210
sreque wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very short-sighted view on testing, although I'm not surprised SREs would say it. The biggest problem with software deployment is that it is owned and managed by people who have no vested interest in developer productivity, including devops engineers. A major goal of any org should be developer productivity; otherwise you are just hemorrhaging money and talent. When I say developer productivity, I mean: How co…

If the release/rollback process is fast enough, and your detection of anomalies is fast enough, you can still have great productivity, and few relevant outages, when testing in production. Hell, there are situations where testing outside of production is never going to cut it, as generation of sufficient load of the right shape would take you a whole lot more of engineering time than the consequences of failure. That…

I unfortunately can't agree with that sentiment. If I have to rely on production traffic to test my feature, then, at minimum, my feedback cycle is:

1) Make change. Think really hard about it to make sure it's correct.

2) put out code review.

3) get approval. Merge change.

4) CI pipeline builds and deploys to prod.

5) absent of alerts must mean it works?

Even if you have no QA environment and nothing between you and prod, I've rarely seen deployment to prod take less than 30 minutes. That's an hour feedback cycle. Contrast with:

1) write code.

2) write unit tests.

3) run tests locally.

The feedback cycle, especially when you get iterative, can get as low as single digit seconds. I run my tests and see a bug. I fix the bug, then re-run the tests. Similarly, for a more complex feature, I can break the feature down into multiple cycles of build, test, verify.

And that's not even accounting for the overhead of managing feature flags, which is not free. In the best case, you need to at least release a second PR to remove the feature flag when the feature is successful. At my previous employer, this step was often forgotten and resulted in real, consequential technical debt as it became harder to figure out how the product behaved based on which feature flags were turned off or on.

If you have an experience leads you to believe that production testing can more productive than local automated testing, I at least have never seen it occur in and I find it difficult to even imagine it being true.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#565

Post by School-Cotton »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #134
School-Cotton wrote: post #81

Amazon is a loose federation of different teams. Some are fine and some are bad. My counter-anecdote: I worked at Amazon for two years and it was mostly fine. Normal boring job.

If the majority of stock options vest in years 3 and 4, may I ask why you left after 2 years?

I didn’t like working there for normal, pedestrian reasons: dead-end project, mediocre code, difficult-to-use tools. The next job I got was substantially better paid because I got an implicit promotion.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#566

Post by vr46 »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #395
vr46 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your awful job, is this only in engineering or does it affect professional services like solutions architects etc too?

ProServe and SAs have little-to-no on-call responsibilities, but the general workload issues and mindsets affect those teams as well. Just as an example, resource management (aka staffing) and project scoping are things that AWS Sales is absolutely fucking awful at, and are things in particular that other consulting companies have figured out decades ago, but AWS does nothing to improve the shitty staffing processes…

Of course, I guess there's no perfect isolation. A friend at Amazon set me up a video call last year with an SA at AWS (Seattle/NW) so I could inquire about working there. It sounded pretty cool but I wasn't sure. I didn't think that AWS consulting was much of a thing, since my experience client-side has been that AWS will advise but not build. Anyway, irrelevant to this thread. Not sure consulting is much better away from AWS as in my world, it's 90% dependent on the client you're with and boy have I had some awful projects.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#567

Post by awsthro00945 »

vr46 wrote: post #566
awsthro00945 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProServe and SAs have little-to-no on-call responsibilities, but the general workload issues and mindsets affect those teams as well. Just as an example, resource management (aka staffing) and project scoping are things that AWS Sales is absolutely fucking awful at, and are things in particular that other consulting companies have figured out decades ago, but AWS does nothing to improve the shitty staffing processes…

Of course, I guess there's no perfect isolation. A friend at Amazon set me up a video call last year with an SA at AWS (Seattle/NW) so I could inquire about working there. It sounded pretty cool but I wasn't sure. I didn't think that AWS consulting was much of a thing, since my experience client-side has been that AWS will advise but not build. Anyway, irrelevant to this thread. Not sure consulting is much better awa…

Based on my experience working on different teams and interfacing with the SA teams (but not actually working as an SA, mind you), being an SA at AWS seems to be one of the better positions in terms of workload, limited on-call responsibilities, etc, but you do need to be very comfortable with constant customer-facing responsibilities (which can sometimes be better than on-call, and sometimes can be worse than on-call) and the team is still dragged down by the general Amazon/AWS culture.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#568

Post by larkfofty »

I'm an ex-Amazon software engineer who worked in AWS for a couple years and pretty much everything in this article and comments rings true to me and lines up with my personal experience. I won't say much about the PIPs and the brutal oncall rotations because that has been written about enough already, but I do want to express that working at Amazon was devastating for my mental health.

I was more stressed than I have ever been in my life. I had to start seeing a therapist specifically to help me with the constant anxiety I had about my job. I had to see a doctor to get anti-anxiety medication. I tried all the things people suggest: diet, exercise, therapy, medication, meditation, nothing was helping with the escalating stress and anxiety I had about the job. After a lot of internal debate I quit with nothing else lined up. I just needed to get out.

I took a 30% pay cut to join a new company and I couldn't be happier. Sure every job has its occasional stresses and pain points, and this one is no different, but I'm learning that constant stress and anxiety about your job is not normal and at least for me not worth the money.

I still have a small heart attack every time I hear someone's ringtone go off which is the same ringtone I had set on pong paging.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#569

Post by wyclif »

chipper02 wrote: post #432
Retric wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have felt that way before, but it’s better just to quit ASAP. It’s the company that’s making your teammates suffer and their also better off just quitting.

I live by the motto "I work for money and appreciation, in that order. If you want loyalty, buy a dog!" It has served me well and removed a LOT of stress. I walked out of one crap-hole with a yelling management style on on week's notice. They told me it was unprofessional, and I laughed in the VP's face and told him he was lucky he got a week.

That is also my motto at work. You know what's unprofessional? Managers screaming at people. The fact that they thought dysfunction like that is OK but one week's notice is "unprofessional" tells you everything you need to know.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#570

Post by eric4smith »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #485
eric4smith wrote: post #231

Think before you join any large company. Nothing here is unique to AWS. We outside have the illusion that everything is perfect on the inside of these profitable and successful companies, but in most cases it’s generally a lot of broken code and a boiler room. Staff is usually burned out after a few years - why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? The amount of bugs and issues in Facebook advertisi…

> why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? Pretty sure it's mostly driven by raises not being able to catch up with job hopping offer.

It's driven by a lot of things. No only raises.

Just like anything else in the world, its not one-dimensional.

For example, someone might switch jobs because you think its the higher offer elsewhere. But its also the burnout at the old job. Or they did not like the manager, and they also want to work with another tech stack.

The higher salary is the push, but there are other lesser reasons that add into the decision as well.

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