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I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market

I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.

rhexs 5y ago
Because they can continually fill the trenches with H1Bs willing to run the gauntlet.
decafninja 5y ago
Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors. True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though. If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects. If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects. I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is). A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies. So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      > Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.
      - dcolkitt 5y ago
        In microeconomics, it’s a pretty foundational tenet that wages normalize to marginal worker productivity.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro), but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and has nothing to do with particularly efficient single firms.
        brutus1213 5y ago
        Simple thought experiment. Firms will continue to hire until wage = marginal productivity .. otherwise, you leave money on the table. Usual BS assumptions on perfect information/competition, cetrus paribus, and all that stuff.
- nkssy 5y ago
  Personally, I'd work for Amazon and already be looking elsewhere the moment I signed up, given how random it seems in terms of being fired. They're going to fire you anyway.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    I actually did that, kept interviewing about every 8-12 months until last September or so. The problem is none of my offers were as high as Google new grad offers (all less than $200k, though one had a $175k base) so I didn’t take any. This was from 4 startups and Citadel. Seems like being inferior has its own severe monetary costs….
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period. Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs? I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong. The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.
      - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        Damn dude, I've seen you talk like this a few times over the last few months. You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.
      - kiadimoondi 5y ago
        I'll second what ZephyrBlue said: - you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that. Stay safe my friend.
- titanomachy 5y ago
  "the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies" I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    I mean, as someone who has yet to crack one FAANG (or similar level company) offer, a FAANG engineer is someone that I look up to. But my friends and ex-colleagues who did crack FAANG did so with difficulty, and they got rejected from all but the one company that did extend an offer. They all say if they were to re-interview at their companies (or another FAANG), odds are they'd be rejected. So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
    - htrp 5y ago
      I'd argue FAANG offers are like college admissions, probably a good 40% of the applicant pool likely qualifies for the role and can succeed in it, but only 3-4% of the pool gets the offer
      - ghaff 5y ago
        You can argue the numbers and there's probably a top tier of people who are no brainers. But, yeah, in general at least for elite university admissions, they could probably toss most or all of the admitted pile in the trash, figure out who to admit from the rest of the pile, and the world would keep on turning just fine.
    - titanomachy 5y ago
      If you work at a top-tier company, you'll meet lots of people who can get multiple offers from top-tier companies. They are bright, but usually not geniuses. And they are often a bit obsessed with puzzles :)
    - 5y ago
tinyhouse 5y ago
All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair = letting employees know months in advance that they are underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent severance package based on tenure, etc)
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6% of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various under-handed ways. The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan. No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?
sokoloff 5y ago
I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. It's not at all obvious to me that the success rate at Amazon should be expected to be significantly over 85% of hire-to-performing employee. Given that, what should they do with the 15% who don't turn out to be performing employees (for whatever reason that isn't itself protected class membership)?
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews, which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly noisy signal even for the best interviewers and management chain.
tmp60beb0ed 5y ago
I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups. In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy. I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained. Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.
- jameshart 5y ago
  There’s a lot of jobs in the vast excluded middle between ‘Amazon’ and ‘startups’.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  Comparing an 800,000 employee company with 1,000 employee companies doesn't really match up. This comment feels a little like gaslighting.
Scramblejams 5y ago
A couple of things come to mind. (I work for Amazon, but I don't speak for the company.) 1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing. 2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.

rhexs 5y ago

Because they can continually fill the trenches with H1Bs willing to run the gauntlet.

decafninja 5y ago

Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors. True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though. If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects. If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.

Frost1x 5y ago
>If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects. I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is). A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies. So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      In microeconomics, it’s a pretty foundational tenet that wages normalize to marginal worker productivity.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro), but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and has nothing to do with particularly efficient single firms.
        brutus1213 5y ago
        Simple thought experiment. Firms will continue to hire until wage = marginal productivity .. otherwise, you leave money on the table. Usual BS assumptions on perfect information/competition, cetrus paribus, and all that stuff.
nkssy 5y ago
Personally, I'd work for Amazon and already be looking elsewhere the moment I signed up, given how random it seems in terms of being fired. They're going to fire you anyway.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  I actually did that, kept interviewing about every 8-12 months until last September or so. The problem is none of my offers were as high as Google new grad offers (all less than $200k, though one had a $175k base) so I didn’t take any. This was from 4 startups and Citadel. Seems like being inferior has its own severe monetary costs….
jokethrowaway 5y ago
If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period. Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
- decafninja 5y ago
  How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs? I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong. The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      Damn dude, I've seen you talk like this a few times over the last few months. You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.
    - kiadimoondi 5y ago
      I'll second what ZephyrBlue said: - you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that. Stay safe my friend.
titanomachy 5y ago
"the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies" I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.
- decafninja 5y ago
  I mean, as someone who has yet to crack one FAANG (or similar level company) offer, a FAANG engineer is someone that I look up to. But my friends and ex-colleagues who did crack FAANG did so with difficulty, and they got rejected from all but the one company that did extend an offer. They all say if they were to re-interview at their companies (or another FAANG), odds are they'd be rejected. So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
  - htrp 5y ago
    I'd argue FAANG offers are like college admissions, probably a good 40% of the applicant pool likely qualifies for the role and can succeed in it, but only 3-4% of the pool gets the offer
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You can argue the numbers and there's probably a top tier of people who are no brainers. But, yeah, in general at least for elite university admissions, they could probably toss most or all of the admitted pile in the trash, figure out who to admit from the rest of the pile, and the world would keep on turning just fine.
  - titanomachy 5y ago
    If you work at a top-tier company, you'll meet lots of people who can get multiple offers from top-tier companies. They are bright, but usually not geniuses. And they are often a bit obsessed with puzzles :)
  - 5y ago

tinyhouse 5y ago

All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair = letting employees know months in advance that they are underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent severance package based on tenure, etc)

crispyambulance 5y ago
It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6% of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various under-handed ways. The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan. No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?

sokoloff 5y ago

I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. It's not at all obvious to me that the success rate at Amazon should be expected to be significantly over 85% of hire-to-performing employee. Given that, what should they do with the 15% who don't turn out to be performing employees (for whatever reason that isn't itself protected class membership)?

rightbyte 5y ago
> I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews, which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly noisy signal even for the best interviewers and management chain.

tmp60beb0ed 5y ago

I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups. In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy. I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained. Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.

jameshart 5y ago
There’s a lot of jobs in the vast excluded middle between ‘Amazon’ and ‘startups’.
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
Comparing an 800,000 employee company with 1,000 employee companies doesn't really match up. This comment feels a little like gaslighting.

Scramblejams 5y ago

A couple of things come to mind. (I work for Amazon, but I don't speak for the company.) 1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing. 2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.