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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

#691

Post by haswell »

strgcmc wrote: post #681
haswell wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, it's definitely a distinction with a difference for the OP In terms of OP's public persona, absolutely. And as I said, he writes the kind of post I'd probably write in that situation. I was referring to how the HN community often discusses Amazon, which generally happens anonymously. In this setting, someone ranting and raving about issues at Amazon and someone politely spelling out those issues at Amazon don…

I disagree with your writing off the whole thing with the single diagnosis of "organizational dysfunction." I'll explain why, but I'm not really trying to convince you, because I sense we are starting from perspectives that are too far apart to come to an agreement. Some of the things the author observes, like having 56 different frameworks that roughly do the same thing, or so many business processes running in Exce…

My use of the word "dysfunction" isn't about company output, but the cost of that output. Cost that includes human capital. I acknowledge that it's a lot more complicated than just simply "dysfunction".

I'm not questioning whether or not Amazon is successful. That is clear. My own employer is also doing extremely well in the market. The internal "dysfunction" remains. To your point, if you define success by output, and ignore the human cost, many companies/industries are "successful".

Maybe a word other than "dysfunction" is needed here, but my goal is to try to distinguish between "this business is successful" and "working there is a nightmare for xyz reasons".

When cost is measured purely in terms of dollars, it's easier to evaluate the appropriateness of that cost.

When cost is measured in people, it's a bit harder to evaluate what's acceptable/what's not.

The Restaurant/Education job markets are fundamentally broken, but also very necessary, and by some measures, successful. But we can examine success/output separately from the underlying issues that are rampant.

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

#693

Post by masterof0 »

ozzythecat wrote: post #509
masterof0 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do, and if for any reason the next manager doesn't want you or change his/her/x mind, you are in a really awkward situation with your team.

This is not true, not in AWS nor in CDO. The hiring manager might connect you with an engineer on their team to see if you’re a fit, but it’s not an actual interview loop. You’re certainly not coding. Source: Been at Amazon for a many, many years across retail and AWS teams. This was never true, and if you saw this really happen, it’s a 1% minority.

That was not my experience, and certainly not the experience of my coworkers that have been at Amazon "many, many years". If you are cozy with the people of the team you hope to get into, then is easy, otherwise, you get your CRs reviewed, asked for design docs, and need to talk with several people on the team. If you worked on a small project for a year, or were hired to maintain something that was already there, you don't get to have design docs, nor impact opportunities (even if you asked your manager for it during 1on1s). Also the next manager can make you apply (your current manager gets notified) and then rejects you, just because, and you will be in a delicate situation.

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

#694

Post by rhizome »

tdeck wrote: post #426
rhizome wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. That may be where R&V comes into the picture, maybe some people are able to negotiate a less stressful First Act, and possibly most likely, maybe my understanding is out of date. Remember, with the kinds of education people have at the…

> My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. I think this is only true if you want to work on something interesting. If you're willing to work in some obscure corner of ad infrastructure or Google Surveys or something and you're not trying to get promoted, you can stick around…

>I think this is only true if you want to work on something interesting.

Ha ha, fair enough!

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

#695

Post by scubbo »

willheis wrote: post #689
scubbo wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are approaching all of these from the perspective of an engineer and not recognizing that ordinary people don't see products and systems the way you do (a mistake I also often make). > Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier For the average person who isn't super-bothered about privacy, the voice-activated functionality is genuinely novel and delightful. > Prime Video is a 2nd or ev…

The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people. Also, I can see how my friends who use alexa (and google for that matter) have adapted their vocal cadences and vocab to interact with the device. And at the end of the day it is a way for people to play music, get news/weather report…

> The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people.

Right, yep, I absolutely whole-heartedly 100% agree - hence why I am critical of this technology at every reasonable juncture. I was presenting this as a counter-argument to the argument I mistakenly thought you were making (that voice control is not a successful product because it involves privacy-invasion), not as a justification of the technology itself.

> And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said.

Ah, fair. I'll gladly agree to that! Alexa is not meaningfully distinguished from Google Home or Siri, so it can't really be said to be a game-changer; ditto for Prime Video and Netflix/D+, etc; and I do agree with you that Prime Go is, at best, a marginal progression on the current state of affairs (I do think that "not needing to employ checkout people" is probably massively impactful from a business-process perspective, but from a customers' perspective, not really much different from a self-checkout)

Thank you for a respectful and illuminating exchange - this is why HN remains the only social site that I feel good about using :D

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

#696

Post by ozzythecat »

masterof0 wrote: post #693
ozzythecat wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true, not in AWS nor in CDO. The hiring manager might connect you with an engineer on their team to see if you’re a fit, but it’s not an actual interview loop. You’re certainly not coding. Source: Been at Amazon for a many, many years across retail and AWS teams. This was never true, and if you saw this really happen, it’s a 1% minority.

That was not my experience, and certainly not the experience of my coworkers that have been at Amazon "many, many years". If you are cozy with the people of the team you hope to get into, then is easy, otherwise, you get your CRs reviewed, asked for design docs, and need to talk with several people on the team. If you worked on a small project for a year, or were hired to maintain something that was already there, yo…

I agree - you get code reviews reviewed by the other team, design documents, and other artifacts. What I was saying was that there’s no formal interview loop like the one when you join the company. You’re not going to grow through LP questions and white boarding code.

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

#697

Post by yourapostasy »

_moof wrote: post #148
dudus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your view and while that may be true on a lot of cases that's not what the company represents a pip to be. A PIP is a situation where you are told you are not performing at the desired level and needs to improve. In a respectable company being on a pip can be good for you. In my personal case I was not performing well due to personal issues. Getting on a pip saved my job. It gave me the resources and attent…

I've put people on PIPs. I genuinely wanted them to do better. They did. Like you said, they are a tool for laser-focusing attention on specific, well-defined issues. There is no actual ass-covering need to put someone on a PIP. If a company in the U.S. wants to fire you, they generally don't need a reason. Individual company cultures will, of course, vary. There are a lot of shitty managers out there.

> Individual company cultures will, of course, vary. There are a lot of shitty managers out there.

Which is why I advise anyone who asks me about PIPs who I deem is sufficiently introspective to immediately secure another job and leave if they receive one. The pure game theoretic approach for employees to use is: unless they have overwhelming historical evidence their manager is someone like you, it is safer for them to assume they are in the majority lumped in with sub-optimal management (much less leadership, both activities tough as hell to pull off well), and insta-bail as soon as they can.

The challenge with PIP's is there are no governance controls around their deployment, so they are weaponized for purposes other than their purported staff development role: as budget controls (deliberately hire some people with the intention to PIP them to maintain headcount), as knife fighting, as political machinations, as compensation-busting tool, etc.

There are legitimate employees who need a PIP for the ostensible purpose they were created for. They're more rare in my experience than how many times PIP's are actually used.

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

#698

Post by Jemaclus »

ghaff wrote: post #228
spaceisballer wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve only worked in the public sector and have only had to PIP people a few times. It’s almost always a sign that you need to get out. I’ve only done it when I’m at wits end with a person. They all ended up quitting before we got to the 90 days but yeah as said it’s basically a CYA move. Likely the people are low performing enough by some measure you can fire them but it’s sort of a last chance thing. And it document…

I have a good friend who manages a fairly large group at a (mostly) government subcontractor. Their description is similar. A PIP comes after someone has been completely unresponsive to requests of various kinds, isn't doing good (if any) work, etc. My sense is that a PIP, in this case, is a reluctant last resort after months of this--and hardly ever works.

> and hardly ever works.

Technically, there are two desirable outcomes to a PIP:

1) the employee improves and no longer needs to be on a PIP (rare)

2) the company successfully fires the employee and doesn't get sued because they covered their ass with a PIP

From HR's perspective (and the manager's), it is indeed the reluctant last resort, but it's essentially a win/win for the company. Either the employee improves, or they can fire them while minimizing legal risk.

In other words, it fulfills its intent quite nicely. It just doesn't always end positively for the employee. So I guess in that sense, it depends on which way you look at it.

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

#699

Post by jeffe »

ajkjk wrote: post #90

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used si…

I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.

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

#700

Post by CRConrad »

pyrale wrote: post #612
sbierwagen wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Command economies are not necessarily socialist. In particular, businesses really don't fit the definition of socialism.

> Command economies are not necessarily socialist.

One counter-example comes immediately to mind, but mentioning that would cue a whole tedious discussion of "But that is socialism, it's even in the name!" vs "Just because it's in the name doesn't mean it actually is socialism!", so I won't spell it out.

> In particular, businesses really don't fit the definition of socialism.

No, true. As others have mentioned, feudalism ses a better fit.

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