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The counterargument here is empirical: there are companies that manage to do fine at Amazon's scale without forced attrition. Google is one of the most notable
by nilkn 8y ago
The counterargument here is empirical: there are companies that manage to do fine at Amazon's scale without forced attrition. Google is one of the most notable examples.
- alkibiades 8y agobut google has an insane hiring bar meaning that they rarely have false positives. amazons philosophy is hire fast fire fast. it’s too late for them to raise their bar considering a lot of their employees wouldn’t reach it
- mabbo 8y ago> amazons philosophy is hire fast fire fast Oh god, I can't disagree more. I've been an interviewer at Amazon. I've probably done 50+ interviews in house and hired maybe 5 of those. I'd really prefer if we'd lower the hiring bar and focused more on building (and RETAINING) engineers. It would be far less effort, imho.
- mhdhn 8y agoSounds right. A friend who worked there said he did 100 interviews for devs, with 0 ending up hired.
- alkibiades 8y agothat’s because 90 pct of people applying to any job are unqualified. all three times i’ve interviewed at amazon getting an offer was trivial.
- ex_amazon_sde 8y agoNot at all. I've been in many interview loops in Amazon. The hiring bar obviously depends on the team but it's usually higher than other FAANG without Google
- scottlegrand2 8y agoAh yes Google, the place where as possibly the world's first or second (full-time) CUDA programmer, with 14 filed patents, and the world's fastest implementations of molecular Dynamics (CUDA ports of Folding@Home and AMBER), I was thrown into blind allocation by Amit Singhal and I was told point-blank by Jeff Dean that GPUs would never serve a role at Google because the Intel processor roadmap was just about to steamroll them out of existence. Yep that's exactly how it played out, right? Anyway, they have PIPs too. My slapstick comedy of 4 months there was nothing compared to the horror shows others endured there. That's how I ended up at Amazon in the first place and my first four years there were actually pretty good. It wasn't until the New York times article that things started going downhill there in my opinion.
- nilkn 8y agoI don't understand what your point is. Yes, they have PIPs. No, that's not at all the same thing as forced attrition. I don't know about this personal drama with two particular programmers. I'm not sure it's relevant.
- mabbo 8y ago> It wasn't until the New York times article that things started going downhill there in my opinion +1 to this. The reaction to that article was, in my personal view, the wrong one.