Working at Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Working at Amazon

#61

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Oct 30, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

faitswulff wrote: post #6

asdfasdfasd333 wrote: post #4

Thanks for writing this, and with all due respect: This exact article could have been copy/pasted from any of the other big-tech companies. What makes Amazon different?

The author says as much: > ...but at the end of the day it’s just another high-tech company, nothing surprising.

So, basically:

"If you like being shunt into small teams to work on small projects that take too long and go nowhere, being unable to effect larger changes that actually improve things upon the sprawling mass of wasted effort and reinvented wheels, no long term organization or planning or realistic goals, no semblance of cross-group communication or organization, total enslavement to a disjointed hierarchical mess of disparate initiatives that are ignorant of one another (to say nothing of even caring to help each other), and wasting half your time supporting legacy systems that nobody has the energy or balls to finally put in the dirt, welcome to working at a big tech company."

I might be a little cynical.

Re: Working at Amazon

#62

Post by twayamznacct » Mon, Oct 30, 2017, 9:43 PM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #11

babaganoosh89 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point of a pager system?

Many companies have overseas teams that take the night shift, eg: every on call dev has 12 on during the day, 12 off at night. Amazon does not based on cultural reasons (allegedly) because it promotes ownership and accountability for those teams. Idea being if you're woken up at 4am because of a flaky test or some issue you'll be more inclined to fix it. And if it's a recurring issue, you'll really want to get it sor…

Disclaimer: Ridiculous pager duty was one of the reasons I quit Amazon (combined with massive failures in management, which I'll describe shortly).

The team I was on (retail-related, not AWS), shifted away from the rolling schedule with your counterparts in India taking over for the other 12 hours in order to push the "promote ownership" BS.

The only problem? Management was constantly pushing for new things to get done on extremely tight deadlines (including "emergency features" that needed to be done and in prod in days when they likely required a week of design efforts to get right, never mind actual dev time) so you have two options:

(1) Develop something stable, with good test coverage and the like, and work to fix it if it breaks... and work 20 hours to get it done.

(2) Shit something out as fast as you can and hope it breaks when someone else is on call (who likely will be too busy triaging SEV3-5's during business hours to even think about spending time fixing the root cause of the SEV1/2, rather than mitigating it and moving on...or, even worse (!) (/s) try to get the actual feature owners to fix it) in order to maintain some semblance of work-life balance.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess at which route was generally taken.

Re: Working at Amazon

#63

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 1:52 AM UTC

hsod wrote: post #58

colmmacc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon on-call engineer here! I'm on-call for three rotations. Two are "Call leader" rotations where a call leader like me is engaged if there's any kind of large event (e.g. Amazon.com orders aren't working, or an AWS service is having issues). I volunteer for those because it's super rewarding to be able to help materially make a tangible difference now and then, wouldn't trade them away for anything. For those rot…

> The other rotation is for one of my dev-team's software, and I'm hardly ever paged - like once or twice a year max. I'm in an on-call rotation (not at AMZ) where I hardly ever get paged, and it's cold comfort. I still have to carry my laptop with me everywhere I go, make sure I have access to the Internet, make sure I don't have one too many at the bar on Saturday night, etc.

[deleted]

Re: Working at Amazon

#64

Post by amznthrow » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

Danihan wrote: post #20

amznthrow wrote: post #13

Amazon has one thing going for it that I think is a huge deal for a standard BigCo job: if you don't like your initial team, you can switch ANY TIME. And if you're an engineer, you can probably join any team you want. The reason this is such a big deal is that when applying to any company, you'll get placed on a team and it's really hard to get enough information on the culture, mission, management, etc. Once you're…

What was wrong with the first team? How large are teams, generally? Are we talking like, six people, or sixty?

I didn't like the project I was assigned, didn't like the underlying design of the org's charter, didn't like the hours. I also got transferred between managers. I didn't really like it from the director down. It sounded way cooler from the pitch the hiring manager gave me. Team size is not a well-defined concept, TBH -- hierarchies can be structured in very different ways, and a team can be comprised of people with different managers. Also, if you love your director and adjacent teams, it would be unlikely you'd hate your own team.

Once I was inside, I found a few teams that sounded cool. At that point, I could easily meet people on those teams, read survey results on the managers, ask around about the new teams, visit the offices at 6-7 PM and see who was still around. This is somewhere between 10-100x the information I could get as an internal employee than as an external applicant. This led me to joining a team where I'm very happy. And if things went really badly -- I could have switched again! (Might look bad if you switch a ton though)

Re: Working at Amazon

#65

Post by synicalx » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

top256 wrote: post #2

it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.

> AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.

That's a fairly normal part of Operations work and has been for decades. Most places (I assume Amazon is one of them) will have a pool of lower-tier admins on deck 24/7 who handle and investigate 99% of the issues that crop up. But for that 1% they can't deal with, then they need to be able to reach someone who CAN deal with it.

It's much cheaper to occasionally call an SME every once in a while when they're needed, than it is to hire another 3 or 4 of them to cover a 24 hour roster.

I've been called out in the middle of the night to fix someone else's mess more times than I can count, so I'm 100% behind Amazon's cultural reasons for sticking to this sort of on-call system as well.