amazon_throw (u/amazon_throw)

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

tmarthal · 4 years ago

> seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself

Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones".

Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of the company has been at Amazon for 3 years or less. Do you think that if the normal/average organization/team was a great place to be, that there would be so much attrition?

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

I have considered it. I don't see the pattern widely, and I'm watching for it. I've seen teams implode because of it, and other toxic patterns, so it's not that they're not there... they just seem to be in the minority. There are teams I won't send friends to work for, for sure.

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

ixaxaar · 4 years ago

> It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience.

"I have soft power". Suspicious indeed.

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

No, far from it; I'm not HR, nowhere close, but I am senior enough that people sometimes listen to me. I'd like to make things better for people if I can, and part of that is "knowing where the problems are". Believe me or don't, it's no skin off my ass, but that's the opposite of my goal.

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

atopuzov · 4 years ago

I'll tell you mine, L7. Seen and experienced personally things the author describes.

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

HenryKissinger · 4 years ago

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly?

Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete, perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors.

Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each month? It certainly isn't reflected in my browsing experience.

The British cracked the German naval codes with no more mathematicians than can sit at a table. But Amazon needs thousands of engineers to run an e-commerce website (and its concurrent AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers)?

(Not a software engineer or someone who's ever worked for $AMZN)

Edit: Woosh, way too many people failed to understand that this post was mostly sarcasm. Cunningham's Law in action.

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

HAHAHAHHHHa hah... hah. ha hah cough

Oh, wow, what an amazing take. You owe me a new keyboard.

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

throwaway2037 · 4 years ago

"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so.

I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

PragmaticPulp · 4 years ago

I worked at a company that hired several people out of Amazon. Amazon is a big company, so there is significant variation from team to team.

However, several of the ex-Amazon employees were clearly scarred from their time working at Amazon. Whenever something went wrong (delays, outages, missed deadlines) one of them went so far as to spend hours or days preparing documents showing how it was actually someone else's fault, not his, because he thought it was necessary to avoid being fired. He said his experience at Amazon was basically one large game of "not it" whenever it came time to assign blame for the latest issue, and everyone had to become very good at blaming someone else. The worst was when he was actual at fault for something, because he would panic and scramble to distract from the issue he caused by raising concerns about everyone else around him. Easily the most toxic person I've worked with in the past few years.

On the other hand, I've known other ex-Amazon people who said their work was nothing like this, so YMMV

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

That "CYA" response really doesn't feel like "us" to me, at least not the AWS side. I can't speak to the experiences on the store side, nor on the devices side. Over in AWS, we practice the "blameless postmortem" model you'll read about from time to time, and it is very rare to see any professional or personal consequences beyond some light joking come about from "breaking prod"

To that point, I know personally the engineers who triggered several of the AWS outages you will have read about in the news over the last decade and more. Some of them are still with us, some have been promoted since then.

amazon_throw commented on Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? leetcode.com/discuss/comp... · Posted by u/bobjones334

amazon_throw · 4 years ago

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind.

While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations within the company, that I am pretty confident that this experience isn't universal.

It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience.

amazon_throw commented on Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos support.apple.com/en-us/H... · Posted by u/brunoluiz

elliottkember · 5 years ago

I don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.

amazon_throw · 5 years ago

Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/...

(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)

amazon_throw commented on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees aboutamazon.com/news/comp... · Posted by u/marc__1

joolsbot · 5 years ago

Its still alive :)

amazon_throw · 5 years ago

Indeed it is, as are many of the older, more grognard corners of IRC.

Also, IRC is still alive.

amazon_throw commented on AWS Web Console Down? · Posted by u/typicalrunt

an_account_name · 6 years ago

!fq cockroaches

amazon_throw · 6 years ago

In the post-nuclear-holocaust wasteland where only cockroaches survive, the cockroaches will use IRC to rebuild.