631–640 of 706 posts
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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.
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why do you want to work for Amazon and Google when there are so many great companies that would appreciate you every day (and pay you more)
Who is paying more than Amazon and Google right now? Investment banks, maybe?
You'll be lucky to make half the compensation a FAANG engineer makes at a typical investment bank while always being treated as a second class cost center employee.
Amongst the FAANG companies, my understanding for compensation is:
Netflix, Facebook > Google > Apple, Amazon
...adding in the MULA companies, believe Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are towards the upper end of the spectrum while Microsoft is towards the lower. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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I'm curious was it consistently bad for those two years or more of a see-sawing of highs and lows? I ask because two years seems like a long time given the bleakness of your summary. I'm guessing this might also explain why they tend backload the RSUs grants towards the last 2 years of 4 year vesting period?
It was consistently bad. During the first year or so I was motivated and focused on trying to solve the problems of my department. The writings were on the wall everywhere, but it didn't discourage me and I turned a blind eye on many of the issues. I would lie, if I would say that at the time money wasn't a factor. Most importantly, Amazon's culture is toxic. Poor leadership (shouting and swearing during meetings) le…
> In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level. This is put succinctly. Seeing Amazon from within was an absolute shock. It is hard to be hyperbolic about the company's technical achievements: Prime, AWS, 2-hour Delivery, Alexa, Prime Video, Amazon Go ... absolutely incredible, world-changing stuff. But the experience of working there felt like the place was on fi…
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Not really. It's just a human responding to the incentives they're given. When management creates poor incentive structures, they get poor behavior, which drives poor outcomes. As they say - the problem with incentives is that they work.
Or to say a different way - don't hate the player, hate the game.
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| - Make it easier to switch teams It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.
Is not, is easy to switch team if you know people in that team, and the manager already wants you, otherwise you have to go through interview loops, etc... At Google for example is way easier, as it should be.
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My personal experience was almost the exact opposite (granted, this was in 2020, and things might have changed since then). Both companies asked leetcode-style questions and behavioral questions. The Amazon interviewers were engaged, excited when talking about their work, and seemed like they were rooting for me to succeed. Google interviewers were condescending and looked like they were unhappy to be part of the int…
I'm pretty confident it's just luck of the draw. At both companies, giving interviews is an expectation for promotion, so many interviewers don't particularly want to be there and some are bad at hiding that fact.
Or maybe they are putting on an act to seem hostile to push your buttons.
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> The company who ordered people back to the floor when a hurricane was coming causing their death when the building partially collapsed Question about this specifically. Was it ever revealed if that order was to get people indoors to a reinforced building that happened to collapse? I remember SMS screenshots of a delivery driver who was killed, and to have sent him on the road would have been a death sentence.
That’s an exceedingly charitable stance to take, because the actual proper thing to do would have been to send people home before the storm hit, and possibly give them the option of sheltering in the warehouse if they needed to (assuming it was actually reinforced).
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Just a note that many folks on platforms like dropbox / S3 etc turn on versioning of excel sheets if they are in paid status for this exact reason. It's not perfect, but it get's you a lot very very easily. Version - date changed - who edited. Add in the universal flexibility (both function and who can use it). You can hand an excel file off to admin temp staff all the way to the top 3 folks in the org in one file an…
What does "are in paid status" mean?
Same with google. Paid plans you can make sure a copy of all sent messages is kept, set retention rules etc. So if folks use email for all their approval / business flows that can be helpful (ie, some orgs CEO might send an email say I approve - go ahead and sign it on big deals rather than shuffling paper or doing a proper e-signature. If so, you might want to keep an archive org level of your email flows
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…