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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

#591

Post by jjav »

bumby wrote: post #481
darth_avocado wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are companies where you can have a life, but they are boring. And there are companies that pay you more, but there’s always a catch. In my long resume consisting of Startups to SV Giants, not one company paid you a lot to do less work.

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.”

I would like "interesting problems" + "great work-life balance". Any recommendations on places these days? Don't seem to exist anymore, sadly.

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

#592

Post by pjmlp »

georgemcbay wrote: post #299
majormajor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time? EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people…

The craziest part of tech interviews for me is the way its just accepted that you do it this way regardless of how long someone has been in the industry. If companies were grilling people new to the career trying to figure out if they could FizzBuzz their way out of wet paper bag (I realize some can't) it would be one thing. Without a track record you don't have much to go on, but the fact that you can work in the in…

Only for those that are stuck getting a job as soon as possible and cannot afford to say no.

Otherwise there are plenty of companies that haven't fall into leetcode cargo cult.

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

#593

Post by guitarsteve »

mercy_dude wrote: post #569
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…

At least you had an interviewer who could speak English and explained the problem. Mine had an interviewer who just typed the problem and his English was so bad that I couldn’t get answers to any follow up questions. He kept saying “ok…ok” as I was explaining the approach and once I finished coding up my approach he said that’s not what he is looking for. I kept asking clarifying questions till the end but never got…

I had the same issue in an Amazon interview in 2020. Couldn’t understand the interviewer’s extremely strong accent so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I never really understood the question he was asking. Not the best experience.

But, I did work for Amazon several years before and that was mostly a good experience. So, luck of the draw, depending on which manager/team you get assigned to.

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

#594

Post by sbierwagen »

bogomipz wrote: post #542
sbierwagen wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company over a certain size will have stack ranking or something like it. Division leaders and VPs need an available knife to stick in the backs of their rivals. If stack ranking or URA doesn't exist, then they'll use a down quarter to create it, ("With the economy the way it is, we have to do some belt-tightening") then wield it to destroy their enemies. If all the VPs are cheerful, happy, nice guys, then some…

What is "URA" here?

"Unregretted attrition", Amazon internal jargon that mandates firing 6% of all employees every year: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at...

This program is obviously not applied uniformly. It's purpose is to be bent to eliminate divisions that lose internal political battles.

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

#595

Post by SergeAx »

kentonv wrote: post #208
kentonv wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally…

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…

Isn't that a default behavior for modern JavaScript SPAs: bundle all the frontend code into several files with unique hash names and refer them from generic html home page? Changing hash every time code changes?

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

#596

Post by Decker87 »

tdeck wrote: post #570
mcguire wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a few months ago? Wasn't that the case several years ago, or was than MS or one of the other FAANGs?

A few years ago there was a lot of noise about stack ranking at Microsoft, and there was also a lot about people crying at their desks at Amazon several years ago - perhaps you're remembering one of those. I believe the specific "hire to fire" press is pretty recent.

I think it was perhaps circulating in the professional networks and rumor mills before. I remember hearing about it a few years ago.

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

#597

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

I interviewed with Amazon about 2015, pretty long process but compared where I was coming from (huckster data startup) AMZN seemed ideal.

Onboarding was interesting at the general company level, but basically non existent at a team level. I gave it about three months trying to get to grips with the manual tasks underlying their Virtual IP assignment process (was on their networking team). Couldn't make head nor tail of it, had constant problems with the VM running on my laptop and basically started looking around for another job.

However, this little FAANG checkbox I now have ticked has opened lots of doors for me since then. I've seen most of my old team at a few tech events in the interim, and taking to them it seems like I got out in time. The team was "traded" to another senior director, and things got very bad, with loads of folks quitting.

My last day included an exit interview, which kind of stuck with me ever since. Talking to the HR rep, I said that the role probably wasn't a good fit for me, but maybe sometime in the future I'd wind up back at Amazon. You know, one of those throwaway comments you might say to be polite. The HR rep responded with "Well, you never know, maybe" while unconsciously shaking his head at the same time :)

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

#598

Post by nerdponx »

bumby wrote: post #481
darth_avocado wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are companies where you can have a life, but they are boring. And there are companies that pay you more, but there’s always a catch. In my long resume consisting of Startups to SV Giants, not one company paid you a lot to do less work.

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.”

I don't care about interesting problems. I want to get paid really well and have a great work-life balance.

But I don't think those jobs exist unless you're already an expert in something and can get by on the expertise that you already have. Please prove me wrong!

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

#599

Post by raxxorrax »

robby_w_g wrote: post #125
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…

> 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…

> "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual

Don't hold it against your colleagues. A lot of this knowledge isn't obvious to anyone and people chiding people for not knowing would be the last to come up with solutions themselves. This is just insecurity and bickering.

Google has been a publicly traded company with a massive scale. If the technical problems aren't interesting to you, I doubt it is worth it to work there. The culture of such companies are always the same. Detached to minimize problems, don't make personal problem a problem of the company. Good colleagues can make you forget this for a while of course.

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

#600

Post by khazhoux »

sizzle wrote: post #547
khazhoux wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-point (and I'm a manager): Every single team I've managed, I've given the lowest performers a huge benefit of the doubt, and a long timeline for improvement. In some cases, it wound up being a PIP->firing. But more often than not, I wind up trying one thing after another with the lowest performers, because I so much want to believe in them . They're always nice people, but they don't deliver. They say "I'm wo…

How do these low performers pass the high bar for interviewing??

In my own situations, I didn't hire these engineers myself. But I don't consider myself immune to this happening in one of my own hires.
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