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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#571

Post by berkeshire »

“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft” [1]

Amazon is the New York equivalent in the analogy. The NYT article in 2015 [2] changed a few things, but not all.

Worked 4+ years in Amazon, or as the OldFart tool would say, was among the 4% oldest employees.

Left to preserve my sanity and to not become toxic, I could feel the negative change permeating my personality. I avoid most ex-colleagues from there, they "are now become the KoolAid".

The toxicity and gaming of the system by old timers is bad. Promotions and upwards-management are well managed by a select few who start charming the next level of approvers from day one. The ones who put their heads down and work will get spat out by the system. There is pressure on managers to "top-grade" the system, i.e. to remove bottom performers, never mind the fact that in a hyper-competitive environment that screens for the brightest, the so called bottom performers are merely relative to the top ones.

It's a system designed to burn and churn - burnout and churn the folks before they complete the 2 year cliff (5% and 15% equity at years one and two).

The system gnaws at your self-worth. It's good if these points come out in the open.

[1]: Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life. http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/mary-schmich.html

[2]: Inside Amazon, wrestling big ideas in a bruising place ... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#572

Post by northern-lights »

amzn-throw wrote: post #562
northern-lights wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except there are 14 LPs and nobody says any one LP is superior to the rest. If you need to consider "Deliver Results" supreme irrespective of anything else, then it needs to be made clear. Just do away with the rest of the LPs.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#573

Post by rantwasp »

intricatedetail wrote: post #559
rantwasp wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my point was that the people know the deal they are getting. if they still work there they are okay with it. to play devil’s advocate (from a top lawyer firm): how can one force a private entity to pay a certain wage that is way over what the minimum wage is?

People have no choice if all companies are doing same thing. The minimum wage should be tied to company revenue to reflect the value workers generate. I mean revenue, not profit, because those companies are masters at hiding profits to avoid tax.

if the compensation is artificially kept low yes, this should be (and is?) illegal. the fact that there are other places nearby that pay really well tells me that, at a minimum, people have options.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#574

Post by salil999 »

amazon_throw wrote: post #166

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind. While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations…

I didn't reveal my team to maintain some form of anonymity. If you're an L8 or above then you may have some power to do what you said. Otherwise I don't think it'll make a difference.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#575

Post by noodle »

nobleach wrote: post #494
noodle wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sure. The last time I talked to both FB and AMZN, I came in as a higher level referral for a specific job into both. But like a year or two earlier than yours.

AMZN's was very pleasant, though I think because I was a referral, I was side channeled and would have gone through their normal unpleasant process eventually if it was a good fit (it wasn't).

My FB interview was very similar to your AMZN description. They gave me a CS interview guide, told me to spend a few weeks studying it, and did the algorithm lottery on me. The main reason I declined to move forward was because they couldn't guarantee I'd actually get the role I was referred into and basically none of the process was role-relavant. It felt indistinguishable from the AMZN tech interview.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#576

Post by exikyut »

ryanSrich wrote: post #342
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.…

I interviewed for a Sr. Technical Product Manager role at AWS. This was shortly before Covid happened. Every interview seemed to go well until the on-site. It literally felt like I was wasting their time. They gave me very bad holier than though vibes. It seemed like every answer I gave was just given a head nod then on to the next question. They asked very basic level PdM interview questions. Things I would expect a…

Wow, https://www.haekka.com/ looks awesome. Security awareness based on culture-building, delivered as a Slack app. This is such a tricky market to frame viable, accessible solutions for. Very cool approach.

The "free training" links at the bottom of the site also caught my eye, and I found they link to long-form one-pagers. So now I'm learning about https://docs.haekka.com/hipaa-training, with https://docs.haekka.com/Free-SOC-2-Training-ee02fd6d1b3044c7..., https://docs.haekka.com/Free-GDPR-Training-6c099e88af2642a59... and https://docs.haekka.com/Free-Security-Training-55722324e2424... queued. A nice touch.

(I really like the site design :) pixel-art FTW)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#577

Post by wpietri »

whakim wrote: post #511
wpietri wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moral…

Would you please cite your sources for Ford's motivations being solely pecuniary? I am not trying to set up him up as an example of an amazing do-gooder; he was in many ways awful. But I don't think his biography fits with the notion that he was only in it for the money.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#578

Post by wpietri »

imwillofficial wrote: post #553
wpietri wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said that there were a number of recent articles. When you decided you didn't like the one I gave you, did you look for any of the rest?

I had already read the No times article when you posted your comment. My issue with not with your point, my issue is with business insider being cited as an authority for any news.

I don't think I cited it as an authority. If you believe they misrepresented the NYT article, feel free to say so. But otherwise, maybe there are better places to ride your hobbyhorse?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#579

Post by whakim »

wpietri wrote: post #577
whakim wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moral…

Would you please cite your sources for Ford's motivations being solely pecuniary? I am not trying to set up him up as an example of an amazing do-gooder; he was in many ways awful. But I don't think his biography fits with the notion that he was only in it for the money.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

I actually agree with you that as a person he wasn't "only in it for the money" - I am only arguing that his wage-setting policies were purely about the money.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#580

Post by wpietri »

sreque wrote: post #551
wpietri wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. I'm still trying to understand it too. Two things that have helped me: To contain time pressure, I like a kanban board with small units of work. If the team has a history of steady delivery of small lumps of useful stuff, managers are more willing to trust that we know what we're doing. To mitigate the natural human lack of humility, I start with the rule that every bug requires a test before fixing. People…

I find it's much easier for greenfield projects than existing projects because you can lead by example. Also, with these projects there are opportunities to define team rules and culture for the project from the beginning. Perhaps the greatest inertial force against improving test automation is the truth that any change to a in-production product incurs risk, coupled with the fact that adding tests often requires ref…

Makes total sense. I do most of my work on greenfield projects for that reason.

But I think you're right. There's really no low-risk path when you have a poorly tested code base. You can keep letting productivity decline, which guarantees eventual project failure. You can do a giant rewrite, which is hugely risky. Or you can gradually dig yourself out.

There's still risk there, of course. But it's in smaller, more manageable lumps. It seems like the clearly superior path to me.

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