Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do.
Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly.
Seemed like they were always hiring, and if I needed to eat, it would allow me to keep my standard of living for a 12-18 months while I figure things out. Best case: I somehow end up liking working there and stay for 4 years, worst case: I can keep my standard of living while the recession eases and move on to something else.
I will say, I got alot of recruiters from the Alexa division and I'm glad I didn't take them up now. AWS looks unaffected by this though.
Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They still do leetcode screening don’t they?
IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that recently.
You don’t get to show off your leadership or any other skills this way. You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.
I worked at Amazon for 5 years and was in over 100 interview loops. Amazon won't hire you if you don't have the skills, but they are/were relatively lax in hiring compared to other big FAANG companies. It is also helpful that they historically have been such a huge and growing company that if you have the skills and the basic interview techniques down, they will try pretty hard to find a place for you. Amazon at least used to also offer a down-leveled role if it was obvious that you were a good programmer but couldn't prove to the capricious hiring loop that you were going to perform at the level you were applying for. This means if you are a mid-senior level programmer that interviewing for Amazon is kind of a slam-dunk in the sense that you'll definitely get hired even if for a lower level.
I have thought similar to the grand-parent commenter about having Amazon as a fallback in the Seattle area. Not my ideal but somewhere that is always recruiting me and would pay the bills if the smaller company I am working for went under.
Actually, among the MAGMA companies I've found the _least_ bias for leetcode-memorization at Amazon.
My interview with Meta was exactly as you described (a CS riddle taken from a textbook, to be solved without running the code or receiving hints). But in my interview with Amazon, each coding interview also included a couple leadership questions. If you want you can look up the exact questions that they'll give you to test what they call their "Leadership Principles"
Also the Amazon coding questions were not taken directly from Leetcode, and were easily reasoned out without prior knowledge of a special algorithm.
They clearly layout their interview process and even have a video series on YouTube explaining how to pass it. It is not difficult but time-consuming to learn their interview "language"
Leetcode screens are a matter of grinding for a couple of weeks
They're well known for having one of the lowest hiring bars of the major tech corporations, certainly out of the traditional "FAANG" they are by far the easiest to get hired at.
N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty, from my impression.
Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and they had massive turnover rates.
> You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.
I thought the point was to actually learn the theory behind the question so memorizing isn't necessary? Like for dp questions for example: it's easier to do them if you just visualize the dag
The whole "memorize every question" shtick is the wrong way imo. Just seems very time inefficient to me
i've never interviewed at amazon, or even heard much about their interview process, but the sheer amount of recruiter spam i get from them gives off a "desperate for engineers we aren't getting" vibe, so i can see why people think it would be easier to get in there than at the other tech megacorps.
Uh, they definitely ask you a bunch of questions and you basically need to speak to their leadership principles. Being good at leetcode alone can't get you in, or that's the impression I've gotten from friends who work there. But I suppose it depends.
I see it the same way, once you were in and left on good terms, you are always welcome back .
I treat it as my fallback too, the shifts are easy, all you have to do is not be late (or early, for that matter) and adhere to break times. If you do that and you are not the weakest performer, you will have a good life.
It is one of the very few companies where taking ownership is really rewarded, they lay the path for promotions, they even ask you which role you would like in the future and no hard feelings if you leave for another department.
I have never seen or witnessed micromanaging, the holiday system is the best I have seen.
Keep in mind I was a fully virtual employee, maybe things are different in office.
I know I can go back there if I like and enter at a level where I get stock compensation right away with a solid salary.
If you collect plenty of accolodates and maybe get a badge or two, they will never forget you.
I think they habe a very good screening process and a pretty good sense for hiring the right people at any level(the requirements are rather high for the salary).
The reason why they like to re hire people is often the immense onboarding cost, anything level 3 and up requires quite some learning and training time before you can even think of being productive.
If I was hiring, there is no way I would hire a level 5 from outside amazon if I could give that role to an experienced level 4 employee.
All teams are pretty huge, think of lets say 10 head team, within the first six months, they will habe 2-3 months of training and upskilling, and really, you have to habe that training to do things like vcs, vat etc, as you will at least have to have some fba skills for that role.
If Amazon is letting people go, it must be pretty bad, usually they are not cheap about redundancy, theu are wise enough to be ready for spikes in business. Not sure what has happened there and I strictly speak for office jobs in europe, everything else , I do not know.
The whole thing is quasi subsidised by aws and this comes bit as a surprise to me.
I prefer bit more risky endeavours and chose amazon whenever my risk apetite has decreased.
Amazon is a rather solid employee if you perform, just be on time and have good adherence time, as a company with a million employees, this is understandable. It is also much less chaotic than you would imagine from such a giant corporate entity.
If they need you for programming, aws sales, language skills and tax matters, you will be doing fine there.
On tax matters or newly established teams, the next level is always in sight and within reach.
I hope the severance packages will be fair.
I struggle to understand the bad rep for amazon seen online, working for musk or google is many times worse. Facebook used to be pretty good from what I hear.
Maybe its all individual perception and a bit of luck or misfortune.
As for the screenings, yes, they do, but they do not care about memorized things, they try to care and see how you start to deal with an issue.
As explained lower in the thread, I should have given more context to my offhand remark. Since I can't edit the post itself, here's the context:
I say fallback in the sense that I felt confident I could interview there and apply without much friction. I got alot of LinkedIn invites from recruiters - typically once a week - for over a year.
I also don't believe the interview is "easy", but it felt available and I'm someone who - even for companies that don't crazy rigorous hiring practices - goes really deep before any interview, reading many weeks in advance worth of stuff about the company and their hiring process, learning etc. I practice alot, so I felt like I could do well with the Amazon interview. In fact, I did one once before and it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it just didn't work out at the time for me to join and I had to pass on the opportunity.
I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting:
"Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block."
This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless).
The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load.
From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load. Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.
I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate functionality. The requirements are usually never actually identical and when you try to merge them it results in services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and not even a bad thing.
That being said, Google for comparison does have good code re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud, tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.
This sounds like all but two of my software jobs. The greatest challenge of being an individual contributor is being beholden to the constraints of the environment. If they tell you to dig a hole then that’s what you do. If they tell you to waste all day digging into some unnecessary framework to make a single CSS change that should take 30 seconds plus a few minutes for deployment then that's what you do.
In front end development people NEED the world's largest application frameworks (sometimes plural) because they cannot figure out state management. State management is stupid simple and a solved problem, but whatever. It will still, at the job, take you all day (maybe a week) to make that 30 second change.
I really wish more people understood this. I'm working for a company that's in the middle of a move to the cloud and it feels like no one is acknowledging the sheer level of complexity being added.
Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the investment anymore.
Alexa is crazy. Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. I understand that it's part of the Amazon flywheel but there's a limit of how much you can rely on AWS to fund you.
Alexa is full of horrible managers that only care about growing their teams so that they can get a promo.
I have an Echo and a Homepod and I rarely use the Echo anymore because of their "by the way, did you know..." responses. They know there are a lot of users who want to disable that but unfortunately their goals aren't aligned with their users' goals.
The fact that organizations have multiple teams working on overlapping or even similar things baffles me. I can't imagine how that wouldn't be immensely dissatisfying for the individual.
> Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform
It turns out that there are many interaction models where Voice is clearly inferior. Visual discovery (contrast with music) such as for videos, as well as navigation in a UI, are poorly done via voice.
Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.
> Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.
I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers, not IT workers.
This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement. Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion using an undefined metric.
It's also pretty standard for an engineer to say "Yeah, I could build that in a weekend" when talking about some super scaled website like twitter or facebook or whatnot.
"Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're terrible at judging efforts involved.
Both of these things can be true. There is a lag time behind hiring someone, PIPing them, and terminating them. Amazon was on a hiring spree. They are almost certainly still be bloated even after these layoffs.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side of retail.
I haven't worked at Amazon, but my experience with the world of "pip" culture is that it only really appears when value is difficult to define, which is strong evidence of bloat.
Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly, they don't know how to avoid it.
This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero problem identifying how they can create more value to the company: close more deals.
But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is evidence of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.
You cannot put a dollar value to every bit of work that happens in a company.
What is the value of managers? What is the value of research? What is the value of procurement/ hr? What is the value of IT and internal support tools?
None of these individually provide value, but remove one and the company will collapse.
It's because it does not talk about employee bloat, but rather product bloat.
There are a lot of teams working on either useless or _duplicate_ products.
Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you, despite both teams existing for years.
My previous team found out that multiple of our products had equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent products made by other teams...
And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.
I've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it. Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my time at Amazon.
Oh my friend, there is a tool called Lift used in OLR/Talent Review by every single 50+ group at Amazon that quite literally will show your face up on a screen for everyone at the OLR meeting to discuss and rank vs your peers. If they don't have the Least Effective quota hit they will go through each face near the bottom to figure out who needs to be added. The most liberal definition possible of not stack ranking.
The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to another company but who were in focus or pivot when they left.
To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know:
- Amazon requires 6% of employees who leave the company every year to be unregretted attrition aka URA
- To be marked as URA an employee must be in Focus aka Devlist aka Devplan when they leave
- Talent Review aka OLR must occur at least every 6 months for each leader with >=50 employees under him
- Every employee is ranked from Least Effective - High Value 1-3 - Top Tier with quotas being 5:35:25:15:20 % respectively
- The 5% rated LE must be entered into Focus
- This effectively results in 10% of employees in Focus per year
- Around half fail improvement plans in Focus and are presented with Pivot, which 90% results in firing. This is the oft discussed "Pip"
- Rest either get out of Focus or leave themselves while on Focus and are still marked URA
One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite working there.
If only 0.1% of Amazon employees are very unhappy and vent their horror stories online, you will hear hundreds of bad stories. If 99.9 are "just fine" with it, you won't hear a single story...
Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt immense pressure.
These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side, as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular types of products. I think I recall there basically being a 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling shoes on the site, etc.
I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were. IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of dynamodb for instance.
This is totally true, I worked at Amazon when it first launched Kindle. There were multiple software engineers 100% dedicated to ‘making the Kindle product page work’ at this time.
It's not necessarily individuals. From what I saw years ago there are tons of project kicked off to see if they pan out but are probably not going to succeed. The company has some core teams around retails, mobile and AWS that do the majority of the table stakes work. The rest is a lot of team doing things that may or may not have any value. My pessimistic view is that required teams are like 10% of the company leaving 90% of maybe useful. That isn't to say the 90% should be let go. If they did you'd see no growth but it's unclear how much of it is actually useful. In good times that's fine, in rougher time they have to reduce that extra a bit.
Another way to be "bloated" is to have a lot of teams working very hard on systems/projects that don't add value to the overall business. Those teams will still manage out their low-performers and run a ruthless environment, but the folks that remain continue to work hard without providing value. Add new systems/projects underneath because people want more scope and responsibility, repeat through a few cycles, and you arrive at the quoted line.
The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their domain.
I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that already has all the people.
> This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them?
So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there are "many low performers/bloat" are at odds.
Amazon is notorious for practicing _forced_ attrition e.g. forcing the relative low performers out of the org (who still might be performing at expectations, onboarding, etc.).
In eight years at Amazon (in the supply chain org as SDE and SDM) I have not encountered anything close to "ruthless". It is true that there is rough stack ranking, but only in large organizations where it is statistically meaningful.
Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and it’s up to them to report up stacking within their remit and defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are made, it’s not always “fair” and varies greatly across orgs. All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org level based on value to the business.
Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).
It takes a while to stack rank people out of the company. It's not an efficient pipeline. Moreover, smart engineers know how to game the system.
So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in a way that I am at all worried about.
> They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat.
I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they directly received 0 of it).
Their stock price increased due to both performance during the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than PPP targeting mid-size businesses.
Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of the company, at least).
This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly.
That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.
This is what happens when you optimize for a certain metric only. Yeah you might have someone's who's writing tons of high quality code, but if this code is just a duplication of another project or there is no business use for it, then it you probably would have been better off not writing it in the first place.
People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?
If the stack ranking works then yeah they would have no bloat, but teams are just trying to demonstrate their value to someone above them who is trying to assess their value while demonstrating their own. How valuable they actually are is pretty difficult to assess. There are probably many teams sucking up millions that have a net negative impact with their contributions but how do you measure that.
I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.
A reported doesn't need to even know who they're talking to in order to get leads on who should be pursued, but being wrong can lead to a lot of wasted hours.
Exactly ... In modern big software orgs it does not even matter if you are delivering value/ All that matters is Perception, Image and Exposure (PIE). Product quality, features, technical depth none of that matters, as long as you can manage your PIE.
This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up.
Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director.
This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has passed or not, etc.
The past 3 days have probably been the least productive for all of Amazon's existence, everyone is thinking only about those layoffs (and I'm in an org that is supposed to be safe...).
So far there are reports of about 30 teams being shut down, but new ones are coming every hour or so.
Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook, Twitter, etc. but no, we're going to be living in fear for the next weeks or months.
Nothing more demoralizing than living in fear and rumorville. I was at a big bank post 2008 and it was months of messages about did you hear so and so got the tap on the shoulder. You never knew when or why, you just didn't know everyday if it was going to be your last. Not exactly how you want to live your life.
No better point re: living in fear and rumorville. Same experience for me in 2008. I also saw the same effect post dot-com bubble.
Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart, hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.
Hah yeah I worked in payments at once of the card processors, this happened every year like clockwork. 1-2 months just down the drain because everyone running around gossiping or sitting at their desk in terror.
It was such a joke, but I used to be of the belief that the card processors were so incredibly profitable, that they had to actually waste money to not be targeted by regulators too much (which monitored their profit levels to determine if they wanted to impose lower card fee rates). So these kinds of things were actually healthy for the business, along with insane travel and entertainment budgets - I used to routinely spend >$10,000 on plane flights back to HQ from Asia.
> Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook
Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his whole life from India to the USA)
I suspect that there’s actually no great win/win way of doing mass layoffs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's not a dichotomy between "no layoffs, no layoffs, please leave the building and never come back" and "There maybe will be layoffs but we can't tell you if you're in them or not" - in both cases the problem is the lack of knowledge.
The company could also just give workers notice. Works fine here in Europe.
The thing is that it's the same here. I saw a LinkedIn post from a guy at Amazon that got layed off 2 days after joining as well.
The difference is that not only you get no notice, you actually don't know when the wave of layoffs is done and when you can take a break from worrying.
Unfortunately this is how it works at a lot of companies. Just a mess.
I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share... we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of notification/SEC?
Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they gathered everyone in a room, said "go back to your desks you'll see a 15 minute meeting on your calendar if you're impacted" and at the end of the day they gathered the remainder in a room and said "if you're here you're safe".
It's not, it's like that everywhere. Every layoff follows the same pattern that you describe.
I don't know the exact reason for it, but if every single company does the same thing, there has to be a reason I don't know, since I've never managed a mass layoff.
The market ATM is really odd. On one side, you see these news pouring and giving us devs a little ansiety and on the other side, there are companies still trying to hire like crazy. I've received 3 emails from recruiters just today. It seems small-medium tier companies are looking to capitalize over this "downturn" by offering full WFH positions and other perks since they can't compete on salaries.
This is purely anecdotal but I shared this to give other devs that may feel like "this is the end", some hope for the future. The reality is that software development is almost ubiquitous; almost every industry is being touched by it.
We have to keep improving and wait for the whiplash when the time comes (prob. 2023Q2 at best or 2024Q2 if things get worse).
Check small-medium tier companies with WFH and try to move to a low-cost city. You'll get the best of both worlds, hehe.
The "worlds best employer" is horribly mismanaging this layoff. It's all hush hush, and nobody is admitting anything until suddenly you have a meeting at the end of the day with a bigwig and HR.
The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week of severance per 6 months of employment (min 4 weeks, max 20).
Oh, and we're being told to use those 60 days to find a job internally at amazon....during a hiring freeze.
This is the first ever that I hear this label attached to Amazon. Do they claim it? I've never seen them in the #1 spot on any top employer / best place to work ranking. I just googled again just to make sure, but perhaps I missed something.
So if you don't find other work, max severance is like 28.5 weeks? Or is 20 the cap? If it's the former, almost 7 months of runway to find a new job is pretty great.
The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all aspects of their comp and perks.
If at the end of the 60 days, you get a lump sump payment of 4-20 weeks of base pay, no sign on bonus or RSUs included.
Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless they were hired in the last year.
If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon.
To get the 7 months of pay you'll have had to be at amazon 10+ years. That's like 3 people. Turnover for all roles is >100%, tech is something like 50+%
>"The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance."
Could you or someone say how this works or is enforced? Once you are no longer working for Amazon how do they know you have found external employment elsewhere? Is this a legal gray area?
Both are bets to create a new platform as they feel threatened by Apple & Google's dominance on mobile.
Meta should take note. Alexa is widely adopted (# of devices) but has little engagement and still hasn't broken outside of the most primitive use-cases (play music, remind me, etc)
For context, I work for Amazon, have multiple Alexa devices, an Oculus Quest 2 and I think the Metaverse is absolute bullshit and will never bring a cent.
But I totally disagree with the comparison between Alexa and the Metaverse. Alexa has adoption and struggles with monetization, while the Metaverse struggles with adoption but would have endless possibilities for monetization.
What is condemning a lot of Alexa teams today is the complete inability for Alexa to be anything more than a music speaker that also tells you the weather and sets timers. It's tedious to interact with and it's impossible to monetize, just because of how limited the "interface" is.
The Metaverse will never struggle with the same problems. It's not gonna work, but not because it can't be monetized.
Meta tried to create a new market with the Metaverse, but Amazon overhired in their Alexa department because they were surprised by the financial success of smart speakers and wanted to double down.
Anecdotally, I often see the trashcan speakers in peoples' kitchens, even if people usually say that they only use it as a fancy radio alarm clock.
I rarely meet people who have tried Oculus' recent hardware, and those who have are usually gadgetheads who keep it in a closet as a party novelty. There was a spike in interest when Valve released the Vive and Oculus was an independent entity, but that was more about gaming than social experiences, and it seems to have tapered off in my social circles.
Gross profit generally means profit on sales/services after COGS (costs directly related to producing/providing those revenues) but not including other costs like admin, etc.
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Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly.
Seemed like they were always hiring, and if I needed to eat, it would allow me to keep my standard of living for a 12-18 months while I figure things out. Best case: I somehow end up liking working there and stay for 4 years, worst case: I can keep my standard of living while the recession eases and move on to something else.
I will say, I got alot of recruiters from the Alexa division and I'm glad I didn't take them up now. AWS looks unaffected by this though.
IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that recently.
You don’t get to show off your leadership or any other skills this way. You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.
I have thought similar to the grand-parent commenter about having Amazon as a fallback in the Seattle area. Not my ideal but somewhere that is always recruiting me and would pay the bills if the smaller company I am working for went under.
My interview with Meta was exactly as you described (a CS riddle taken from a textbook, to be solved without running the code or receiving hints). But in my interview with Amazon, each coding interview also included a couple leadership questions. If you want you can look up the exact questions that they'll give you to test what they call their "Leadership Principles"
Also the Amazon coding questions were not taken directly from Leetcode, and were easily reasoned out without prior knowledge of a special algorithm.
Leetcode screens are a matter of grinding for a couple of weeks
Source: received an offer from them in March
No? You can actually use code to solve problems. Don’t buy into the defeatism surrounding leetcode interviews.
N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty, from my impression.
Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and they had massive turnover rates.
I thought the point was to actually learn the theory behind the question so memorizing isn't necessary? Like for dp questions for example: it's easier to do them if you just visualize the dag
The whole "memorize every question" shtick is the wrong way imo. Just seems very time inefficient to me
I mean that's a big part of what makes it so easy. Near zero "culture fit" or anything random you just need to solve easy problems.
They look completely insane, recruit anyone with a keyboard and might even pay well.
I have never seen or witnessed micromanaging, the holiday system is the best I have seen. Keep in mind I was a fully virtual employee, maybe things are different in office.
I know I can go back there if I like and enter at a level where I get stock compensation right away with a solid salary.
If you collect plenty of accolodates and maybe get a badge or two, they will never forget you.
I think they habe a very good screening process and a pretty good sense for hiring the right people at any level(the requirements are rather high for the salary).
The reason why they like to re hire people is often the immense onboarding cost, anything level 3 and up requires quite some learning and training time before you can even think of being productive. If I was hiring, there is no way I would hire a level 5 from outside amazon if I could give that role to an experienced level 4 employee. All teams are pretty huge, think of lets say 10 head team, within the first six months, they will habe 2-3 months of training and upskilling, and really, you have to habe that training to do things like vcs, vat etc, as you will at least have to have some fba skills for that role.
If Amazon is letting people go, it must be pretty bad, usually they are not cheap about redundancy, theu are wise enough to be ready for spikes in business. Not sure what has happened there and I strictly speak for office jobs in europe, everything else , I do not know. The whole thing is quasi subsidised by aws and this comes bit as a surprise to me.
I prefer bit more risky endeavours and chose amazon whenever my risk apetite has decreased.
Amazon is a rather solid employee if you perform, just be on time and have good adherence time, as a company with a million employees, this is understandable. It is also much less chaotic than you would imagine from such a giant corporate entity.
If they need you for programming, aws sales, language skills and tax matters, you will be doing fine there. On tax matters or newly established teams, the next level is always in sight and within reach. I hope the severance packages will be fair. I struggle to understand the bad rep for amazon seen online, working for musk or google is many times worse. Facebook used to be pretty good from what I hear.
Maybe its all individual perception and a bit of luck or misfortune.
As for the screenings, yes, they do, but they do not care about memorized things, they try to care and see how you start to deal with an issue.
I say fallback in the sense that I felt confident I could interview there and apply without much friction. I got alot of LinkedIn invites from recruiters - typically once a week - for over a year.
I also don't believe the interview is "easy", but it felt available and I'm someone who - even for companies that don't crazy rigorous hiring practices - goes really deep before any interview, reading many weeks in advance worth of stuff about the company and their hiring process, learning etc. I practice alot, so I felt like I could do well with the Amazon interview. In fact, I did one once before and it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it just didn't work out at the time for me to join and I had to pass on the opportunity.
Dead Comment
"Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block."
This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load.
From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load. Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.
This is, by far, the hardest scaling problem in SaaS: How do we divide responsibilities amongst our (code|services|teams) efficiently?
You can only grow each so much before they become unwieldy to manage.
Divide scope too much and communication becomes complex.
Divide along the wrong abstraction and you get duplication, overlap, and confusion about what's responsible for what.
And as time passes, decisions of the past constrain and complicate your options to redesign/rearchitect/reorg today.
That being said, Google for comparison does have good code re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud, tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.
In front end development people NEED the world's largest application frameworks (sometimes plural) because they cannot figure out state management. State management is stupid simple and a solved problem, but whatever. It will still, at the job, take you all day (maybe a week) to make that 30 second change.
Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the investment anymore.
Alexa is full of horrible managers that only care about growing their teams so that they can get a promo.
It turns out that there are many interaction models where Voice is clearly inferior. Visual discovery (contrast with music) such as for videos, as well as navigation in a UI, are poorly done via voice.
I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers, not IT workers.
"Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're terrible at judging efforts involved.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side of retail.
Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly, they don't know how to avoid it.
This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero problem identifying how they can create more value to the company: close more deals.
But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is evidence of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.
What is the value of managers? What is the value of research? What is the value of procurement/ hr? What is the value of IT and internal support tools?
None of these individually provide value, but remove one and the company will collapse.
There are a lot of teams working on either useless or _duplicate_ products.
Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you, despite both teams existing for years.
My previous team found out that multiple of our products had equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent products made by other teams...
And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.
The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to another company but who were in focus or pivot when they left.
To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know:
One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite working there.These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side, as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular types of products. I think I recall there basically being a 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling shoes on the site, etc.
I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were. IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of dynamodb for instance.
Including systems engineers ups it to 348.
I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that already has all the people.
If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them?
So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there are "many low performers/bloat" are at odds.
No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.
Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).
So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in a way that I am at all worried about.
I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they directly received 0 of it).
Their stock price increased due to both performance during the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than PPP targeting mid-size businesses.
This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly.
That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.
People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?
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Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director.
This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has passed or not, etc.
The past 3 days have probably been the least productive for all of Amazon's existence, everyone is thinking only about those layoffs (and I'm in an org that is supposed to be safe...).
So far there are reports of about 30 teams being shut down, but new ones are coming every hour or so.
Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook, Twitter, etc. but no, we're going to be living in fear for the next weeks or months.
Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart, hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.
It was such a joke, but I used to be of the belief that the card processors were so incredibly profitable, that they had to actually waste money to not be targeted by regulators too much (which monitored their profit levels to determine if they wanted to impose lower card fee rates). So these kinds of things were actually healthy for the business, along with insane travel and entertainment budgets - I used to routinely spend >$10,000 on plane flights back to HQ from Asia.
Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his whole life from India to the USA)
I suspect that there’s actually no great win/win way of doing mass layoffs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The people I know that worked at Meta all started interview prepping after those announcements. It should not have come as a surprise.
The company could also just give workers notice. Works fine here in Europe.
The difference is that not only you get no notice, you actually don't know when the wave of layoffs is done and when you can take a break from worrying.
I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share... we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of notification/SEC?
Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they gathered everyone in a room, said "go back to your desks you'll see a 15 minute meeting on your calendar if you're impacted" and at the end of the day they gathered the remainder in a room and said "if you're here you're safe".
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It's not, it's like that everywhere. Every layoff follows the same pattern that you describe.
I don't know the exact reason for it, but if every single company does the same thing, there has to be a reason I don't know, since I've never managed a mass layoff.
This is purely anecdotal but I shared this to give other devs that may feel like "this is the end", some hope for the future. The reality is that software development is almost ubiquitous; almost every industry is being touched by it.
We have to keep improving and wait for the whiplash when the time comes (prob. 2023Q2 at best or 2024Q2 if things get worse).
Check small-medium tier companies with WFH and try to move to a low-cost city. You'll get the best of both worlds, hehe.
The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week of severance per 6 months of employment (min 4 weeks, max 20).
Oh, and we're being told to use those 60 days to find a job internally at amazon....during a hiring freeze.
World's best employer my ass.
This is the first ever that I hear this label attached to Amazon. Do they claim it? I've never seen them in the #1 spot on any top employer / best place to work ranking. I just googled again just to make sure, but perhaps I missed something.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
It's 100% bullshit.
So far the actions they've taken to be the worlds best employer has been....changing the password reset cycle to be one year instead of 90 days.
You can't be world's best employer while frugality reigns supreme.
The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all aspects of their comp and perks.
Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless they were hired in the last year.
If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon.
To get the 7 months of pay you'll have had to be at amazon 10+ years. That's like 3 people. Turnover for all roles is >100%, tech is something like 50+%
Could you or someone say how this works or is enforced? Once you are no longer working for Amazon how do they know you have found external employment elsewhere? Is this a legal gray area?
Both are bets to create a new platform as they feel threatened by Apple & Google's dominance on mobile.
Meta should take note. Alexa is widely adopted (# of devices) but has little engagement and still hasn't broken outside of the most primitive use-cases (play music, remind me, etc)
But I totally disagree with the comparison between Alexa and the Metaverse. Alexa has adoption and struggles with monetization, while the Metaverse struggles with adoption but would have endless possibilities for monetization.
What is condemning a lot of Alexa teams today is the complete inability for Alexa to be anything more than a music speaker that also tells you the weather and sets timers. It's tedious to interact with and it's impossible to monetize, just because of how limited the "interface" is.
The Metaverse will never struggle with the same problems. It's not gonna work, but not because it can't be monetized.
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/ge...
Meta tried to create a new market with the Metaverse, but Amazon overhired in their Alexa department because they were surprised by the financial success of smart speakers and wanted to double down.
Anecdotally, I often see the trashcan speakers in peoples' kitchens, even if people usually say that they only use it as a fancy radio alarm clock.
I rarely meet people who have tried Oculus' recent hardware, and those who have are usually gadgetheads who keep it in a closet as a party novelty. There was a spike in interest when Valve released the Vive and Oculus was an independent entity, but that was more about gaming than social experiences, and it seems to have tapered off in my social circles.
So the proposed cuts represent less than 1% of their profit (not net) from last year.
[0]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/...