I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months • Hacker News Board

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#571

Post by danielmarkbruce » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:50 AM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #559

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are clearly correct that some will find it offensive... I think I'd be happy to laugh and offend said people as a mechanism to keep them away. It can be pretty toxic when people assume the worst of others (even if they are nervous)

Trying to weaponize laughter is the most comically toxic thing I've ever heard of. If you did it I'd say good on you for showing your true colors and saving them the hassle of finding out later.

"weaponize laughter" is a clever sounding spin on what was said... however... a weapon is something designed to inflict damage. The comment above is about keeping people out who will inflict damage to an organization. Maybe you could call it.. using laughter as a shield

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#572

Post by vishnugupta » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #370

ubermonkey wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I thought the horror stories out of MSFT had put an end to stack-ranking forced-PIP evaluations. It seems incredibly counter productive, and leads to things like hire-to-fire that are just indefensible. Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?

What would be the rationale behind this? In their ideal world, why do they need it?

Blame it on Jack Welch[1]. I can't think of a more toxic system. It has become pervasive and people bring it up as if it's some received wisdom from Gods or like some fundamental physics law. That you can rank humans on some imaginary "performance" parameter is just, let's say, inhuman.

I get that some are more impactful than others. But that's just a matter of so many parameters. IME someone producing less output has always been due to some shitty process/documentation/systems. I'd rather fix the underlying problem. But no, like some law set in stone, they have to be ranked and the bottom 10% must be yanked.

/rant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#573

Post by gregkerzhner » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:54 AM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #470

kaashif wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think take-home projects might take the same amount of time as leetcode, when you count studying, but are much less stressful. As long as enough time is given. This really doesn't fix the problem of breaking into CS, and it's not even practical when there are too many candidates. Leetcode gives a gigantic number of false negatives, but that's a price companies are willing to pay.

I don't agree. I much prefer to spend one hour doing a live coding interview than spending 24h working on a test. It is much more time spent, and therefore more stressful.

If you can ace a 1 hour coding interview without any preparation then more power to you! But many of us have to spend months doing practice problems to perform well in that 1 hour interview. I’ve heard many stories of people doing hundreds of practice problems to pass these kinds of interviews.

I’d much rather dedicate a weekend to solve a take home challenge using technologies I already know than dedicate many months to learn a set of algorithms I would rarely use.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#574

Post by tamaharbor » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

I am a retired electrical engineer and have worked for various power utilities throughout the years. I have never experienced anything close to this, and have mostly good memories. After reading through the comments here, it sounds like most FAANG companies truly suck. I don’t know how you deal with them.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#575

Post by toast0 » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

aspaceman wrote: post #249

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Leetcode, but it keeps coming up here. I've been interviewer a lot lately and I keep trying to find ways to filter out the candidates that care more about interview prep than solving real problems. Is this a nonstandard perspective?

I think it's pretty common at small to mid sized companies + startups. Your more "trendy" companies and your F500 companies do the type of Leetcode interview you hear everyone on HN complain about. It typically looks like a 15 minute phone interview with HR, followed by a lengthy Leetcode/ take home exam (that's auto graded, no humans), a computer form where you input your school, GPA, and courses taken (seriously).…

> Take with a grain of salt, but I have heard of some folks explicitly getting permission to do hiring outside of HR at said large companies. The kids they get out of undergrad and through HR's Leetcode process are apparently complete garbage. Don't understand C, pointers, memory, or Linux at all. Don't even know what files are.

I've done a lot of interviews, and I just accept that I need to explain what a byte is to the candidates. You'd think people with a programming background would know what they are, but it's not a hard concept, so whatever. I don't really care if they know how to open a file or what a byte is, I want to know if they can describe their output, and then write code that does what they said. And if they can write a loop with a loop in it without going off the rails. Bonus points if they can communicate reasonably throughout. You can teach someone how to use files, and unless you're a C shop, most people don't need to use that much C that they can't learn it when it comes up, if they need to. But it's hard to teach 'make a spec, follow the spec you made' and if you have to teach a programmer how to do nested loops, they aren't a programmer yet. (which is maybe fine, if you're interviewing someone who's only programming adjacent or something)

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#576

Post by aghilmort » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

benadam11 wrote: post #288

kentonv wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected. The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not…

Thanks for following up! Looks like that setting was on from an old version of the site. Probably not a super common thing for people who are onboarding to CF Pages (previously my origin was on AWS) and I migrated to Pages.

seconded -- great read / info also as user of Cloudflare Pages for multiple domains

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#577

Post by fellellor » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

I’m impressed by your really clean website. Could you please share what stack and backend platforms you’re using for this?

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#578

Post by ordiel » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:07 AM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

This is slightly similar to that moment when checking code and ask who is the dumb ass who wrote a certain piece just for git blame to show your name...

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#579

Post by amitport » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:11 AM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #539

kmonsen wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I worked at Android in google at that time and he probably thought “I wish we could use kotlin”. It was still pretty rude to laugh though, had to be aware many candidates would already be nervous and would find it offensive.

I guess you are clearly correct that some will find it offensive... I think I'd be happy to laugh and offend said people as a mechanism to keep them away. It can be pretty toxic when people assume the worst of others (even if they are nervous)

Ironicly, you describe a very judgmental, insensitive, and quite toxic behaviour.

Edit since I can't reply to your comment: if you lack the emphaty to understand why people may be very reasonably insulted in such cases, you really shouldn't be conducting interviews, IMHO. The irony part is that you actually describe a behaviour that "assumes the worst of others", as you said.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#580

Post by lotophage » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:20 AM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #25

Hey congrats on making it 10 months! "Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work" Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on som…

> within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work

I've heard that, because of the stack ranking, if managers want to keep their current team unchanged, they sometimes hire someone new just so that they can turn around and fire them.