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

benadam.me

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

#581

Post by danielmarkbruce »

amitport wrote: post #579
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)

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.

The point of interviewing is to make judgements. There is no irony. This judgement is: people who assume the worst of others are toxic to work with.

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

#582

Post by BoorishBears »

unnouinceput wrote: post #530
Edman274 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as it is for any developer at Amazon, I have to say that I'm going to feel more sympathy for the people in the warehouse who are told to get back to work when a line worker dies of a heart attack in the middle of their shift due to stress than any developer who can always leave and get a fine job somewhere else. The precariat in those warehouses need collective bargaining more than any developer, anywhere (exc…

A dev's work is mental, a warehouse work is physical. I agree that the worker on warehouse have it tough, no denying there. However mental recovery takes longer that physical one. I have a joke for you, goes something like this: "Big rich guy goes to Mexico for vacation. There he meets Julio, a simple worker who after work is drinking in the bar with his friends and enjoys a simple life. Rich guy asks why Julio doesn…

You've never seen Amazon warehouse work if you think it's not mental and physical.

A story I don't really tell people is about my 3 days working at an Amazon warehouse.

The short version is, I'm a self-taught dev who didn't realize he was good enough to be a full time dev (spoiler as an L6 making >500k TC, I was!)

So I applied to a few labor jobs: Amazon Warehouse, pushing carts at WalMart, etc.

And a few dev jobs: Nothing fancy, a few local dev shops looking for a mobile dev.

-

I get a job with a local dev shop, but I'm still not sure I can actually make it there. So I still take my Amazon Warehouse job thinking I can work both somehow... I fell asleep at my computer on my first day at the office, which is why I only worked at that warehouse for 3 days.

But those 3 days are permanently etched in my mind. BDL5, I still recognize it looking at random Amazon deliveries when I visit my parents.

I'm not sure what it is about that place that makes me slightly sick to even recall, I think it's a mixture of:

- The awful lighting. That place was lit in this sickly blue light that made you feel sleepy and wide awake at the same time, and stuck with you after you went outside

- The noise: BDL5 is a sort center. It's tiny compared to a normal fulfillment center. And it was still constantly noisy. Something like 3 acres of open warehouse, miles of conveyer belts, constant truck loading and unloading.

- The nature of the work: I think part of what makes me sick thinking about it is how depressingly menial the work was. Again, I was only there 3 days, but it's a nightmare to imagine standing on your feet for hours wrestling with comically large shrink wrap rolls for a living. Or packing useless crap into a truck for hours on end. I don't believe humans were meant for that kind of repetition. This was when BDL5 first opened and you could see how uneasy people seemed to get as the weight of the work landed on them.

-

Amazon is such a depressing company. I mean I know all of this and of course, and I still use Amazon, it's just that ubiquitous and all-encompassing (although not as much lately)

It's just reached this point where something needs to give. I'm ok with not being able to place orders at 4 AM and getting them before 8PM. We'll live if 2 day shipping becomes 3 and that allows some shorter shifts for the same pay.

But yeah, devs have it easy compared to all that.

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

#583

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>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 some insane amounts of work.

Its crazy how these FANGs promise the moon, the serious RSU vesting starts only after 1 - 2 years and the average tenure is like 1.5 years.

>>he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out

I've heard this quite a bit at many places, when you go on a longish leave of any kind basically people kind of replace you. When you come back you discover your job is gone, for this reason alone I don't know many people who take these long leaves/vacations.

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

#584

Post by rixed »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #411
ljm wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN Law of Analogical Accuracy: for each attempt at an analogy, an attempt at a more accurate yet more abstract analogy exists in a reply.

If it continues long enough, so we eventually reach a point where the original situation is used as the analogy?

It actually happened already, right down below:

> It'd be a bit like 'someone else has set up a software development environment for you, now write some code' I suppose.

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

#585

Post by danielmarkbruce »

amitport wrote: post #579
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)

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.

What is a good reason to be insulted in the kotlin example, if you are the type of person who assumes good intent of others?

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

#586

Post by kamaal »

colinmhayes wrote: post #156
robby_w_g wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then…

> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.

These candidates aren't exactly spending their lives to get hired at your place because they think you are special.

They just don't take their day jobs seriously enough and spend most of their time on LC, when you hire them, they leave in a few months because that is what they are good at.

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

#587

Post by amitport »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #585
amitport wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is a good reason to be insulted in the kotlin example, if you are the type of person who assumes good intent of others?

They are in an interview which is not a normal situation. The way they read the situation, the interviewer was laughing at them. It is normal and very very common to be oversensitive and misread things like that during an interview.

The interviewee is not your friend, he/she do not know your brand of humor or internal jokes. Additionally, he/she may have cultural differences.

You talked with someone an hour in an unbalanced stressful job related situation and you really think you know something about their personality? Behavioural researchers think that you can't know much. I wouldn't be so judgmental of people you've just met. You should be more aware of the limitations of the interview platform and stick to what you can deduce. (Which is not, that a person is toxic, because he/she felt laughed at)

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

#588

Post by paganel »

sbierwagen wrote: post #448
paganel wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tells a lot about company politics. Often times I'm left wondering how come capitalism still survives. Actually, writing this down made me think that big companies (like the FAANG mostly are) are quite anti-capitalistic. I'm not sure how to call them, because sure as hell they're not socialist or anything of the sorts, but it's reasonably clear that many of the theoretical capitalistic principles that many of us know…

You might like Ronald Coase's "The Nature of the Firm". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm A business is a socialist command economy embedded in a market economy, which has odd boundary effects at the interfaces.

Thanks, I'll give it a try. I had read about it and about Coase relatively recently but I had skipped the subject, mostly. I think it's a very interesting subject, especially for our field, to be honest I didn't expect for the consolidation at the top to happen so fast (~10-12 years) and at so grand a scale, 9 of the biggest 10 companies by market cap are tech companies (I'm including Tesla here).

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

#589

Post by danielmarkbruce »

amitport wrote: post #587
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a good reason to be insulted in the kotlin example, if you are the type of person who assumes good intent of others?

They are in an interview which is not a normal situation. The way they read the situation, the interviewer was laughing at them. It is normal and very very common to be oversensitive and misread things like that during an interview. The interviewee is not your friend, he/she do not know your brand of humor or internal jokes. Additionally, he/she may have cultural differences. You talked with someone an hour in an unb…

> The way they read the situation, the interviewer was laughing at them

This is the problem. There are many situations in a career which aren't "normal" and will make people nervous. Giving presentations. Talking to the CEO. Or the boss's boss. Or the leading expert at X. Being in a meeting with all the execs. Or in a performance review. Meeting with clients/customers/potential customers. If every time a person is nervous they assume ill intent of others at the slightest hint, they are going to be problematic. They don't intend to be problematic, but they are.

The point of a mechanism like that given is that you don't have to make a judgement. It's self selecting. In this specific scenario, the kotlin example interviewer a) laughed b) offended a person and c) probably wasn't even aware they had caused offense and d) kept the person out of the company.

If b) had gone down the other path, the person isn't offended and (all else equal) is still enthused to work at the company.

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

#590

Post by pjmlp »

Retric wrote: post #485
bumby wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard it described as: “You can work on interesting problems, have a great work-life balance, or get paid really well, but you can only select two.”

The consultant side can do all three, but it’s a tough balancing act. You need the right niche, the right connections, great technical skills, and great social skills.

Or work for an agency. :)
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