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Why former Amazon engineers hate the company with a passion?
- th-miracle-257 4y agoIf there is one company that is neck to neck to win the title of a toxic workplace, it should be Intel. Very similar passionate hatred when you talk to ex Intel engineers especially of the past decade. I had made an observation about this in a past comment of mine. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597749
- wrp 4y agoI was hearing this about Intel in the 1990s. An HR person told me they called in police to have on hand during performance reviews in case someone got violent.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoGood thing there are thousands of other companies to work for that pay very well
- scarface74 4y agoThere are “thousands” of companies that pay returning intern software engineers $175K+ a year in total comp? I know there are some companies that pay more. But not “thousands”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MarkMarine 4y agoProbably 10s
- brianmcc 4y agoThere are certainly thousands that pay very well. "Very well" is way broader than just Amazon-level rates. I don't think OP suggested specifically "same or better"?
- scarface74 4y agoWhat is your definition of “very well”?
- brianmcc 4y agoDoes it need a definition? "A salary in the upper quartile per sector, location and experience level"?
- scarface74 4y agoCompensation for software developers in the US is mostly bimodal. You either end up in enterprise dev (banks, government, other non tech companies) where you start out at around $60K and then on average max out at the mid $100s - ie the “Dark Matter developers” - or you end up working for a tech company where you start out in the mid 100s and max out at 400K-$500K+. The “1000s of jobs” are the enterprise dev jobs. And I’m not judging those. That’s what I did all of my career until a couple of years ago. If we are talking in the context of software engineers being paid “very well”, I don’t consider those to be a substitution
- brianmcc 4y agoThat's an interesting perspective actually, thanks. Being UK based it's not really a thing here. Or maybe it is and I'm oblivious! In which case, point taken re the difference between simply 'well paid' and that very top tier.
- scarface74 4y agoThis is the concept. These numbers are not US centric in the article. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
- scollet 4y agoLiteral slave labour.
- htk 4y agoAfter taking a look at your comment history, it seems HN is not the place for you. Most of your messages are filled with anger and extremism.
- JoeyBananas 4y agoselection bias
- ajhurliman 4y agoThe comparison is not between current employees and alum, it’s between Amazon alum and alum from other companies.
- scollet 4y agoEvery employee of Amazon is exploited.
- nabla9 4y agoHow well this does this work for Amazon? I mean, if Amazon can use this process to retain people who can work with timeline and pressure (and then rewards them so much they stay) it could be a huge win.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago>> if Amazon can use this process to retain people who can work with timeline and pressure (and then rewards them so much they stay) it could be a huge win. PIPs and the related actions are just a pretext. They want to force the employees to quit or fire them and the PIP is just a tool to make it happen. If the leaked memo in https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh... is true (I suspect it is), then Amazon's reputation and practices for employee treatment are catching up to it and could cause problems.
- nabla9 4y ago>They want to force the employees to quit or fire them and the PIP is just a tool to make it happen. I know. That's why I asked the question. Getting rid of employees you don't want is a good thing. How well this method works for them relative to other ways to evaluate employees?
- aldebran 4y agoHeard about the day 1 thing? It also applies to people. I feel Amazon views Human Resources as tissues to use and discard. You know it needs to be discarded and you know a fresh one is better. Might as well use it up fast and toss it out. The next person coming in will be full of optimism and enthusiasm about their “day 1”.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago>> Getting rid of employees you don't want is a good thing. How well this method works for them relative to other ways to evaluate employees? It is not a question of whether the employees being PIP'ed / fired are good employees that perform well or not. It is all about meeting the unregretted attrition (URA) quota set by human resources regardless of the employee's current or past performance. The Twitter thread states: "The URA targets are set at org-level. Most SDMs will not be aware of this: usually director-level target. It’s almost always been fixed 6%". Employee quote: "I was Focus/PIP'd out after 10+ years of good to great reviews, by a manager I worked under for a total of ~2 months. This system is completely and utterly broken." "the company is demanding, sometimes brutally so, and it can lose sight of its employees’ humanity — which is neither good nor in its strategic interest. Amazon’s insistence on hitting “unregretted attrition” milestones, to the point that it would push out solid performers, is one example of the culture’s downsides." Source: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-plebs-amazon-leaders https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb... If you have poor performers, then obviously they should be let go. But if you have a solid team, who do you let go? If you have a solid team with a few open headcount and you have trouble hiring to fill the open headcount, who do you let go? PIP'ing and firing good employees just to meet a quota is stupid and yet that is the policy.
- jghn 4y agoSome of the Amazonians I know have been there for several years or more and love it. They have thrived there, and have great stories to tell. Other people I know that have gone to Amazon ran away screaming, often in <= 2 years. One common theme I've heard on both sides is that where you wind up matters a lot. The people and org structure around you can have a large impact. But I'm also convinced that personality is a key part of this as well. My bet is that some people are a good fit for Amazon, and many people just aren't.
- mirntyfirty 4y agoThe healthy places I’ve worked have had a variety of personalities and personality types. Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive, but were great communicators that had an endless supply of tasks to do that they were quite competent at. As such, they provided great support to their teams and improved the culture.
- rightbyte 4y ago> Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive, Type B? Is that an established concept?
- mirntyfirty 4y agoNot an expert on these types of things but I think that there’s this notion of a type A personality that gets overly glorified in the self-help and corporate productivity realms...at least from what I’ve noticed. I’ve found it to be silly though because I’ve also noticed top workers that are perfectly calm, easy to talk to, and not competitive in the slightest. And yes, these types of subjective things can be argued eternally but these have been my observations and experience.
- 0x20cowboy 4y ago> not competitive in the slightest. I prefer collaborating and building a team. I find people who “like to complete” to be short sighted, and often produce bad work over the long run - they already think they are “the best” and often don’t improve in a broader picture. The cup is already full so to speak. Almost all paths are for “type A”s in the tech world. Seems people didn’t learn anything from MoneyBall.
- jmartin2683 4y agoI once was interviewing for Amazon, and one night just after I had passed the initial coding test the recruiter called me drunk at like 2am imploring me not to work for Amazon (and for advice about his cheating wife? Weird).
- Tarsul 4y agoI think he liked you.
- CodeSgt 4y agoThat's incredible.
- HHC-Hunter 4y agoSounds standard for anyone working in technology.
- scollet 4y agono
- lightbendover 4y agoSo I guess Amazon has ONE decent and honest recruiter after all.
- fnbr 4y agoI had a similar, but less dramatic experience. An interviewer took me to lunch and told me that I shouldn’t work at Amazon, as she hated it and was planning to quit.
- steveBK123 4y agoMy understanding from people there is that there’s also a sort of compensation cliff risk on year 3 for new joiners. Due to the way the stock grants & vesting work, you get some fixed cash component in years 1-2-3 to offset, which goes away on the assumption you can start selling your shares now that they’ve vested. Further, as the stock was going up, there were downward adjustments to the number of shares granted after year 3 (since the dollar value was higher and put you “out of band”) if you hadn’t been promoted in time. Somehow I am doubtful there has been a equal adjustment to number of shares upwards as dollar value in 2022 has gone down. So it created a cycle of people coming in, working 3 years, then sitting out 6+ months so they could reset with a new offer all over again with the higher cash component plus negotiating their new stock grants...
- robotburrito 4y agoI don't even answer the massive number of recruitment emails I get from them. I can't imagine a world where working at Amazon improves the quality of my life, even if the pay is higher.
- wizwit999 4y agoI'm gonna say it: From my experience, most people who go on PIP deserve it. Amazon's been slipping the bar and they hire a lot of people who clearly are underperforming.
- _boffin_ 4y agoWhat’s the definition for underperforming?
- wizwit999 4y agoLike these people are really underperforming, e.g. couldn't even design a basic system and defend themselves in a design review. Would barely write code and are slipping by. It's quite common at Amazon.
- chaperoneextra 4y agoDoesn’t help that it’s extremely easy for new grads to cheat on their interview. The new grad hiring process has been such that you only need to solve an online assessment. If you do very well(all tests pass and it’s optimized) and then you do a 30 min. interview to explain the code you wrote. Copying solutions, changing variable names and just reading the code in the 30 min interview has anecdotally worked for several people.
- scollet 4y agoNo they are not.
- lightbendover 4y agoIt's not the simple. Sure Amazon has a bunch of no-talent garbage engineers (typically driven by SDMs who have been ordered to hire at any cost and BRs that either aren't strong enough to argue against the SDM or have likewise been told to pump conversions -- there are tons of loops that don't even have a BR interviewing), but some orgs are actually good at hiring and only hire talent. Applying URA at a director-level is injust and there is no cross-VP-org calibration that happens. While I agree that the URA target is likely lower than it should be for how bad some of the hires have been (e.g. L5s who refuse to use the command line for anything and have never written a test), there needs to be a better mechanism for identifying who is actually below bar.
- phendrenad2 4y agoThey hate it because then went into it with the wrong expectations. If you expect to be PIPped out after 1-4 years, you can just enjoy the ~50% higher than average salary and relax. Who knows, maybe they'll be thrown off guard by your nonchalant attitude (a la Office Space) and promote you to a VP role...
- pyuser583 4y agoWhy does Amazon have so little confidence in its hiring?