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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 o
by PragmaticPulp 5y 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 5y agoThat "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.
- delecti 5y agoYour experience also matches mine from my time in the advertising org. There's no benefit to placing blame, just figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to prevent something like it from happening again. In fact it was one of the few parts of the culture that I tried to take with me after leaving.
- teawrecks 5y agoReminds me of that classic parable about the CEO and the worker who just made a $100,000 error. The worker says, "I assume you'll be firing me now" and the CEO says, "Fire you?! I just spent $100,000 training you!"
- itg 5y agoDepends on the team. In my team in AWS, if something was your fault, the manager would call you out in front of the entire team. Then they wondered why attrition was so high.
- imwillofficial 5y agoI’m agreeing with the “it’s not us” vibe. I work on a team that has some planet wide scale software pipelines. I broke it, hard. I’m not a software engineer so I had no idea how to undo what I had done. People from 3 different teams, two of them experts from other teams who heard my call for help hopped on a call and spent all day helping me fix the issue I made and then some. This was a hard stop on a cortical package pipeline for 24 hours and at no point did I feel like my job was at stake despite it clearly being my fault, and due to me running a command I know I shouldn’t have and cutting corners.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dontTellBezos 5y agoAs an example; the individual who caused this outage was not fired for it, even though the final cause was user error. https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
- atopuzov 5y agoSometimes COEs are used to punish engineers. Eg. take a look at so called "moustache" COE (which I was part of).
- ex_amazon_sde 5y agoEx-Amazon here: indeed the level of skills, management, code quality and so on changes a lot across teams. Unfortunately people outside of Amazon make sweeping generalizations about the company.