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I’m surprised that places with terrible reputations (e.g. Amazon) still manage to recruit at all. Then again, companies like that also have long-timers who lik

by gumby 3y ago

I’m surprised that places with terrible reputations (e.g. Amazon) still manage to recruit at all. Then again, companies like that also have long-timers who like it there so perhaps the reputations are overwrought?

SoftTalker 3y ago
You hear from the people who like to complain. You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Most people aren't ecstatic about their jobs. It's a means to pay the bills, and they suck it up because they have responsibilities.
- Mc91 3y ago
  This may be true, but there tends to be more complaining about Amazon in the FAANGs than the others.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Places like Amazon have a high regretted attrition rate. I think the average tenure is 3 years. Some teams see their team members rotated out in a span of a year. The number of people that stayed is eclipsed by the number of people who got up and left.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Across all jobs the average tenure is about 4 years. So on that basis they sound like not a great employer but probably not among the worst. But in tech, where some advise changing jobs every year or two to "advance," a three-year tenure might be more typical if not pretty good. I've left "good" jobs in less time than that, just because a better opportunity came along or outside factors changed. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
alistairSH 3y ago
1. Big company, bound to be some good teams and some bad. 2. Money will make people do all kinds of things.
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup). I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  How was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    It was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago. When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK. I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hibikir 3y ago
Teams that have very poor work-life balance lose more people than are actually high performance. This means they get more openings, and more people bounce out, continuing the pattern. Unless there is money and glory in landing in a badly performing team and turning it around, or the cost of managing a team with high attrition that doesn't get better is a pink slip, anyone that is career minded will not do anything to fix the problem areas that give a company a bad reputation. Even more so when said company uses stack ranking. Thus, almost every bad experience is worse than average, but if you are joining a company, it's much easier to land in those bad teams than in those where nobody ever wants to quit.
- chasd00 3y ago
  Yeah anytime you apply for a job make sure you find out why there’s an opening to begin with. Is a good team expanding or did the last 5 people quit in the first 90 days?
neilv 3y ago
It's been my guess that parts of Amazon can be good if you have a great manager who somehow shields you sufficiently from corporate. That aside, I speculate that job-hopping culture means many people don't have to care much about corporate culture. In 12 months, they've gotten a lot of Amazon TC, added Amazon to their resume, and are ready to hop to the next place, before they're likely to get stack-ranking culled, or metricsed in a way they actually have to care about, etc. (Well, there is being on-call, which is one unpleasantness you can't just disregard because you don't care.)

by gumby 3y ago

SoftTalker 3y ago

You hear from the people who like to complain. You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Most people aren't ecstatic about their jobs. It's a means to pay the bills, and they suck it up because they have responsibilities.

Mc91 3y ago
This may be true, but there tends to be more complaining about Amazon in the FAANGs than the others.
rewmie 3y ago
> You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Places like Amazon have a high regretted attrition rate. I think the average tenure is 3 years. Some teams see their team members rotated out in a span of a year. The number of people that stayed is eclipsed by the number of people who got up and left.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Across all jobs the average tenure is about 4 years. So on that basis they sound like not a great employer but probably not among the worst. But in tech, where some advise changing jobs every year or two to "advance," a three-year tenure might be more typical if not pretty good. I've left "good" jobs in less time than that, just because a better opportunity came along or outside factors changed. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf

alistairSH 3y ago

1. Big company, bound to be some good teams and some bad. 2. Money will make people do all kinds of things.

AlchemistCamp 3y ago

When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup). I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.

gardenhedge 3y ago
How was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  It was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago. When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK. I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hibikir 3y ago

Teams that have very poor work-life balance lose more people than are actually high performance. This means they get more openings, and more people bounce out, continuing the pattern. Unless there is money and glory in landing in a badly performing team and turning it around, or the cost of managing a team with high attrition that doesn't get better is a pink slip, anyone that is career minded will not do anything to fix the problem areas that give a company a bad reputation. Even more so when said company uses stack ranking. Thus, almost every bad experience is worse than average, but if you are joining a company, it's much easier to land in those bad teams than in those where nobody ever wants to quit.

chasd00 3y ago
Yeah anytime you apply for a job make sure you find out why there’s an opening to begin with. Is a good team expanding or did the last 5 people quit in the first 90 days?

neilv 3y ago

It's been my guess that parts of Amazon can be good if you have a great manager who somehow shields you sufficiently from corporate. That aside, I speculate that job-hopping culture means many people don't have to care much about corporate culture. In 12 months, they've gotten a lot of Amazon TC, added Amazon to their resume, and are ready to hop to the next place, before they're likely to get stack-ranking culled, or metricsed in a way they actually have to care about, etc. (Well, there is being on-call, which is one unpleasantness you can't just disregard because you don't care.)