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Amazon CEO unveils 55k tech jobs in his first hiring push
- aomobile 5y agoAmazing. I bet Tesla would do the same if they had enough cash
- Jyaif 5y agoThis is incredible.
- mciancia 5y agoI wonder how many will get PIPed in a year ;]
- XIVMagnus 5y agowhat's PIPed?
- AmericanChopper 5y agoPerformance Improvement Plan. Fired, but with extra steps.
- abc_lisper 5y agoYeah, with prolonged humiliation
- AmericanChopper 5y agoIf your employer wants to fire you, then they’re going to fire you. The PIP is a miserable process, but there’s not typically a nice way to be fired. The PIP gives you a decent opportunity to make other plans at least.
- me_me_me 5y agoExactly, if I were given PIP then first thing I start doing is using company time to upskill myself. I haven't seen many cases but PIP were 100% leading to firing. Also my corpo didn't respond to work reference bar HR letter stating you worked for them. So in my experience PIP is a sentence but you will face no consequence for not working. (In two cases the PIP were purely because manager didn't like the guy and just wanted them gone)
- mciancia 5y ago> Fired, but with extra steps Heh, I like this one
- unionpivo 5y agoPerformance Improvement Plan It's what they put you on, before you are fired. Some people think it's purpose is to get people to quit before they are fired.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoIts purpose is to reduce legal risks and financial costs. The legal risk is in case ex employee claims some type of harassment or discrimination. The financial costs is to keep unemployment insurance premiums lower. The more unemployment benefits your ex employees receive, the higher the unemployment insurance premiums. Ex employees are not eligible for unemployment benefits if they are terminated for cause. Ideally, a PIP in a white collar setting is also for the benefit of the employer about to be terminated to serve as advance notice that they should start looking for other employment. It benefits the employer because if they can start planning and looking for work elsewhere earlier. Ideally, they do and resign from their position, and the employer benefits here also since there is reduced risk of litigation from a resigned employee, and the ex employee is ineligible for unemployment benefits due to resigning, so the employer saves money on unemployment insurance premiums.
- koheripbal 5y agoEvery company large enough to have a dedicated HR team has PIPs. There is nothing special about Amazon in this regard - including the fact that the vast majority of PIPs result in termination.
- softveda 5y agoI wonder how they do this outside of US. In Australia we have a regulatory body named Fair Work Commission where you can take your case if you think you were unlawfully fired.
- mboekhoff 5y agoGot to cull the bottom 10% every year! I wonder how many people rejoin at a later point of their career, otherwise surely these sorts of practices would be unsustainable (without hiring lots of labour from abroad?).
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoI can't imagine many of those folks are eligible for hire. It's like a permanent stain on your HR record.
- ddalex 5y agoI'd not go for AMZN for double the salary I currently have at GOOG....
- belval 5y agoI'm probably biased because I work at Amazon, but really not for double your salary? That's an awful lot of money to say no to. Obviously Amazon doesn't actually pay more than Google so I guess we'll never know.
- tluyben2 5y agoHow much do they pay: I am not from the US and I see pretty large differences in salaries thrown around here for FAANGs.
- belval 5y agoNot from the US, I work from Canada (Montreal) and my salary is between 90-100k before bonuses and RSUs (those vary a lot more so it's a bit pointless to share). I'd say you can expect 110k total for L4 (SDE1) which is about as much as you can get for a new grad.
- ddalex 5y agoHealth and sanity (mental health) are invaluable. I've never heard stories about about how amazing the life/work balance is at Amazon, quite the contrary. I haven't heard them from Google either, but also I haven't heard horror stories from Google.
- eldelshell 5y agoI can hear all those binary trees being sorted.
- yawnxyz 5y agoLast time I reluctantly agreed to a phone screen interview at Amazon as a UX designer, and they wanted me to write a binary tree sorting algorithm over the phone, I knew that was probably not a place I'd find any gratifying work
- mloop 5y agohmm, considering to land a job on amazon, is there a good hackernews advice on how to prepare yourself? classic leetcode grind or things changed since then?
- tenryuu 5y agoFamiliarise yourself with the STAR recruitment method, alongside amazon's leadership principles. You won't only be judged based on your skills, but how well you seem to suit their work culture.
- belval 5y agoI have interviewed and done interviews for Amazon, I'd say leetcode easy with the occasional medium is to be expected, but Amazon is special in that it feels like a bunch of small team with different expectations and requirements so YMMV. I know Amazon gets a bad reputation these days but I really enjoy working there so if you are considering applying I'd say go for it.
- silicon2401 5y agoWhat's the work life balance like for you? The companies I've worked at expect 40 hours per week but in practice are more like 30/week. Amazon has a reputation of 60-100 hours per week depending on who's telling the story
- belval 5y agoAt AWS most team are pretty independent so it's hard to give a definitive answer. That being said I never met L4 SDEs working a lot more than 40 hours. Some team will experience crunch before reInvent but even then more than 60 hours (or even 60 hours honestly) would be unheard of for me. There is OnCall duty which can be a pain from time to time but it really depends on your product. TLDR: Your team's work-life balance usually defines your work-life balance. Never met anyone working 60 hours but that anecdotal.
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- snissn 5y agomeanwhile they illegally resist workers who want to unionize and have awful conditions for drivers and factory workers. The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon violated labor law after workers at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse tried to join a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union said Monday. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor... "I resort to peeing in bottles, and women urinate through funnels into bottles, just so I'm able to get done with my deliveries," Valerie G, a driver for one of Amazon's Delivery Service Partners (DSP), told Insider. "Those conditions are extremely unsanitary, and we are there with all those packages and our own urine and bodily fluids. That's unsanitary for the customers receiving the packages." https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-drivers-interview-giant-war-between-them-and-company-packages-2021-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-drivers-interview-gia...
- tantalor 5y agoOff topic
- snissn 5y agoto them hiring 50k people??
- tantalor 5y ago"55k tech jobs", not drivers/warehouse
- effingwewt 5y agoAh, yes let's treat it as if tech workers cannot unionize, and pretend Amazon won't shit on its engineers too just as soon as they think they have the leverage, look at Google now.
- aswegs8 5y agohow is that off topic?
- adingus 5y agoI wonder how Amazon's poor reputation as an employer is going to effect this hiring push. I would take one of those 55,000 jobs for a FAANG salary but only if I was sure Amazon wasn't going to chew me up and spit me out.
- BlameKaneda 5y agoIf you join as an engineer it seems that getting on a decent team is a gamble. You could end up with great people, or with people who'll make you miserable. Needless to say, I'd rather look at other FAANG options.
- yann2 5y agoDoes it matter? You'll have Amazon on your resume. Its a door opener for whatever job you apply for next.
- silicon2401 5y agoFor those of us who value life above work, it does matter. My focus for the next 1-2 years is enjoying them, not being miserable just to open career doors
- skohan 5y agoFor all the people like you who might have reservations, there's a line out the door with slightly worse, or even comparable qualifications who would be head-over-heals for an offer from Amazon.
- frankbreetz 5y agoThis may have been true a few years ago, but eventually they will burn through qualified candidates. Every article I read about Amazon is how terrible it is to work there and that includes white collar jobs. I would have thought about working for Amazon as an inexperienced engineer, but at this point after getting just 3 YOE, I have way too many options to go work for Amazon, they would have to more then double my salary because Amazon is known for backloading pay, so you won't make that much money until you have been there 2+ years. As we all know, there is not an infinite number of experienced devs and Amazon is burning through them quickly
- mrweasel 5y agoAre there actually 40.000 available people in tech to hire?
- tluyben2 5y agoIf you pay enough.
- miga 5y agoDepends on skills bar you have.
- nonameiguess 5y agoI don't see a time frame in this article. If the target is 40,000 over the next decade, then probably yes. If the target is shorter and they're willing to hire anywhere and not insist you live within commuting distance of an Amazon office, then also probably yes.
- koheripbal 5y agoFor the right price, I could be available.
- gootler 5y agoAll H1B's probably just doing the needful.
- adolph 5y agoArlington, Virginia, the “HQ2” contest winner that so far has a small fraction of the 25,000 roles Amazon has promised it over a decade, currently has about 2,800 openings.
- wombatpm 5y agoHad they won JEDI that might not have been the case
- skohan 5y agoWhen I see numbers like this, I wonder what on earth those 55k people will do. Like I recently interviewed a candidate who was working on a team of over 60 iOS developers working on a single mobile application. I've built fairly complex products with a team of 4-5 people - how would 55 more people manage to keep busy, let alone add value? I realize Amazon is a huge, multinational corporation with a lot of product offerings, but do they really have enough to work on that they need another small city of tech workers? Don't get me wrong, being in the industry I'm happy to have big players driving up the price of talent, but part of me wonders if they really understand how scaling works (or doesn't) with tech headcount.
- adam_arthur 5y agoI'd be curious to hear too! I knew somebody at Twitter years ago, and he said their mobile teams were bloated and individuals didn't do much. I mean, the Twitter app is quite simple overall, how can you have hundreds working on the UI? My guess is it becomes hard to contribute quickly at an individual level due to process, lots of overhead with planning, and perhaps codebase not being clean, or just overly large that you don't have good sense of the scope. Would love to hear from somebody that's worked on a team like this
- bob33212 5y agoAt large companies, Project Managers and Product Managers are really good at filling up time and creating tasks. They also create processes that slow things down. So instead of making a UI change that a customer requested in 1 day as you can do at a startup, It takes months to get through the design,approval,testing,deployment schedules,etc...
- weeblewobble 5y agoA lot of engineering time goes to building things that never ship. These companies do a ton of A-B testing of small changes in various combinations and only the best performing thing ships. When you have 100M DAUs a 1% bump in engagement (or whatever you're optimizing for) is huge
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- miga 5y agoTech people believe that highly skilled jobs are quality not quantity, Amazon CEO goes for quantity.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI initially thought it was a little flippant, but that is actually spot on. The idea seems to be to hire a lot and see what sticks. If that is the case, he seems to see those jobs as fairly easily interchangeable cogs. I find it mildly amusing. Naturally, it could just be PR.
- chii 5y agoyou shotgun 50k people, and if even 1% of them are 10x, you'd be ahead. Esp. if those low performers can be removed after a year or two.
- travoc 5y ago500 10x developers for the price of 50,000 developers doesn’t seem like a good deal.
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- rory_isAdonk 5y agowill this drive up salaries?
- daggersandscars 5y agoIs Amazon competitive, salary-wise, in the FAANG/Finance space anymore? My understanding is that max salary is capped at ~$175K, bonuses/options take years to vest, and managers play games with these. If you get hired and manage to stay for years, you'll do well in terms of total compensation, but the chances of that seem low.
- vibrato2 5y agoThey started doing a huge sign on that vests monthly over the first two years. So yes the rsu are still backloaded but they equalize the TC. Like sign on bonus 1-2x the annual base compensation.
- recursive_ 5y agoSpeaking strictly in software, they're still competitive but you'll likely have to negotiate with competing offers to get top dollar. Base salary caps around ~160k in non-Bay or NYC areas. You'll get a competitive sign-on bonus split between the first two years to compensate you for the fact that 80% of your stock options vest in year 3 and 4.
- gowthamgts12 5y agoI'm in India, and the recruiters are trying to make me apply. Even I was interested before, but after reading this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569594. no thank you.
- silicon2401 5y agoAs somebody who works with many Indian coworkers in tech, out of curiosity, could you explain if "even" is commonly used in India in that way? > Even I was interested before To me as an American, often hearing "even" used this way by Indian coworkers, it's confusing. To me the sentence reads like this: > Even I, who you would expected not to be interested, was interested Something like it's an unexpected claim. This is confusing to me because there's no reason for me to expect that you, specifically, aren't interested. But in contexts like your sentence and talking with coworkers, it seems like the intended meaning is something like the following: > I, too, was interested Please don't take this the wrong way; this is just a question from somebody who's a fan of linguistics. I've encountered so many constructions in English from Indian speakers at work that I've never seen from other speakers (like the way "itself" is used [1]) that it makes me wonder where it's coming from. Based on my research so far, some things come from trying to carry over words/grammar from Indian languages, and some come from British English as used during colonization. 1: I often hear sentences like "today itself" to mean something like "today [emphasizing today]" which is not said in standard American English, in my experience
- bluedino 5y agoAlso, you would never say 'a recruiter is trying to make me apply'. 'trying to get me to apply' would be the right thing to say. A recruiter can't make you do anything. Your parents or spouse on the other hand...
- one24 5y agoMost often these are cases of a word to word translation from India languages. Also, a lot of Indian English grammar rules are leftovers from Victorian England. For example, rarely would you see an Indian speaker use the word "too" after a verb for emphasis. But I see most of my American colleagues use that word way "too" much. Your example of "Today itself", probably has roots in Hindi where "Aaj hi" is a commonly used term.
- 100-xyz 5y agoAny one know how or where I can apply for an Engineering Manager position, please drop me a line leisenming AT protonmail DOT com
- nixpulvis 5y agoFuck Amazon.
- nfRfqX5n 5y ago55k jobs without offering remote/hybrid? my most recent recruiter email said they require in person in NYC. seems like it may be hard to fill
- reaktion 5y agoThis announcement is well timed given my recent experiences: I've just (this week) finished the SWE interview process with Amazon. I spent a few months preparing LC and made it to the onsite/full interview - which I thought went fairly well. However I was passed over, and the recruiter was unable to offer any feedback whatsoever, which was a bit insulting given the time commitment that's expected of interviewees. With such a large number of announced new roles, I wonder if Amazon's hiring process will need to become more interviewee-friendly.
- woleium 5y agofeedback of any kind is seen as a liability (you could sue) so it's not offered. I doubt this will change