21 ms·

Amazon's Silent Sacking

445 points by doitLP 3y ago

alephnerd 3y ago
They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Addendum: Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
- timeagain 3y ago
  Maybe it is just circumstance but I had been working with devs in Hyderabad since at least 2016 when I was at Amazon. I’m sure they are expanding the workforce there, though
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    They've been in HYD for some time, but HYD is fairly new in the Indian software scene. Traditionally, Delhi NCR and Bangalore were the big 2 tech hubs since the 80s-90s, but politicians who were also massive landlords in Hyderabad [0][1][2] began giving tech companies tax incentives to move to Hyderabad in the early 2000s It began as low tier Infosys type work, but began climbing up the value chain in the 2010s [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao [2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy
    - justin66 3y ago
      I mean, I don't know what they do there, but haven't Microsoft had an office in Hyderabad for over 20 years?
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Delhi NCR and Bangalore were tech hubs since the 1980s, hence why I'm calling Hyderabad (and Pune) new as they began sprouting in the early 2000s Indore is becoming the next Hyderabad now as well. It's in the same position that Hyderabad was in the early 2000s.
- debarshri 3y ago
  I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc. There are multiple factors. Ofcourse from orgs perspective it is cost saving measure. But from another phenomenon that has happened is that graduates from lower tier colleges have gotten good in cracking leetcode, faang style interviews. There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > graduates from lower tier colleges Lower tier colleges have gotten much better in quality too. I remember Indraprashta came to recruit Indian PhD students at my Ivy League tier college to become tenure track CS/ECE/EE professors. Plenty of lower tier IIITs and regional engineering colleges are getting Western or Top Tier IIT trained faculty, and students are higher quality now as well. As the child of a dad who attended one of these no name RECs who ended up becoming tech leadership here in the Bay, I'm glad that this democratization has occurred. The BITS Pilani and IITian uncles were very snobby and annoying.
    - raincom 3y ago
      What you cite is one factor. Another factor is access for students. Once upon a time, curious students had two choices: buy books to learn on their own; or go to whatever low quality teachers they had. Cheap internet, YouTube, LibGen, other resources help students as long as the latter desire to learn.
    - debarshri 3y ago
      Quality is a relative term. We have been hiring in India for past 2 years. I can tell you there is lot of noise and no substance. There is only handful of good candidates and they know they are good.
      - wyclif 3y ago
        In India it's crazy because culturally they focus so much on the credential. It wasn't that long ago that if you were an Indian engineer and you weren't a graduate of IIT, you had no chance of working for these companies. The entire Indian hiring funnel is based on that system and it will be hard to change.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  I have encountered this during my time recruiting as well, where the same position I applied for was also listed for 1 day (then taken down) in Hyderabad. Likely stealthily collect applications. Ultimately, they said I passed the rounds, but the role was cut. Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions. When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Humana is starting to hire nurses in the Philippines. One would think that’s a national security hole but what do I know. The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets my vote.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    You don’t have to outlaw it, just make it so economically painful as to be outlawed.
    - intended 3y ago
      Oh, yes please! As much as I would like labor laws to be improved Globally, I doubt governments will allow this. That said, I am dying to see some country try something similar again. There is something beautiful when voters hold politicians up to their values, and politicans fail to explain the competitive realities to their voters. Making outsourcing economically unviable is a magnicificent contender.
  - raincom 3y ago
    Candidates can promise many things, but they won't pass laws to ban outsourcing. Even if they do, they dilute it to an extent that these laws become impotent by creative loopholes.
    - pylua 3y ago
      They might if the tax base decreases substantially and unemployment shoots up to unsustainable levels. The government definitely cannot afford , with the national debt, to lose tax dollars or to subsidize high levels of unemployment.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Nursing was always dependent on Pinoy labor. Because PH used to an American territory until 1946, the education system is largely the same [0]. PH is to the US Medical system as India/Pakistan/Bangladesh are to the UK NHS [0] - https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-americans-nurses-in-the-united-states/ https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-ameri...
- citizenpaul 3y ago
  >living in their ancestral towns and villages I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here. Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life. I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India Yep! My parents and I are the same. The QoL in even a 3rd tier cow town in the US will be better than an economically vibrant city in India or China. Having clean tap water is (imo) the pinnacle of a developed country. > things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut True, but most Indian villages aren't like that anymore. They have all fairly developed now with electricity, WiFi, decent schools, etc. Go use Google street view - Indian villages may seem messy by Western standards, but they've gotten much better now. If you're someone who lived in small town or village India your whole life, and go to college to get a good job, if you have the option to earn a big city salary in your small town while being close to your family can be hard to beat. It's the same reason you see plenty of Techies take remote jobs and live near their families in the Midwest.
- kburman 3y ago
  > They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new. > expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it. > Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly 3 days from office like all the other office. > Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k Covid time is long gone.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > hyd low CoL Lower than Bangalore or Gurgaon. It's easier to operate a tech company from HYD financially than in Haryana or Karnataka. > Covid time is long gone Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.
    - kburman 3y ago
      > Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab. What I can say is that there is no special treatment for SDEs working from India, especially regarding the WFH policy.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Oh, you're talking solely about Amazon. Ok fair.
- pylua 3y ago
  The U.S. government should be concerned. The U.S. tax base could very well implode with outsourcing, ai, and offshoring in the next 10 years.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    This is why you encourage immigration. If you prevent talent from coming to the US, companies will follow the talent. This is why American cybersecurity and networking has almost entirely been outsourced to Israel and India and chip manufacturing to Taiwan and South Korea.
    - pylua 3y ago
      I do not understand how we got to this point. India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence and has not even voted to condemn Russia. It’s really a sign of how weak the U.S. government has become, which is heartbreaking. US has found it too expensive to invest in its own citizens. It’s almost a ticking time bomb.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        > India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence Financing the Abraham Accords [0], using American engines in tanks [1], American fighter jet engines in Indian fighter jets [2], and being a part of 2 bilateral treaty organizations [3][4] absolutely puts India in the US Sphere of Influence. > has not even voted to condemn Russia India will never piss off Russia, because India doesn't want Russia to join the Chinese camp [5]. By keeping trade and defense ties with Russia, India minimizes the chances of Russia becoming pro-China instead of neutral during an India-China war (which almost happened in 2020) [6]. Mistreatment of Indian students in Ukraine during the war made a vote in favor of Ukraine politically untenable during election season [7] [0] - https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-deal-g20-middle-east https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-... [1] - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/americas-cummins-engine-to-power-zorawar-tank-after-germany-fails-to-relax-trade-restrictions/article67544664.ece https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/ameri... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-plan-make-fighter-jet-engines-india-is-big-deal-2023-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-pl... [3] - https://www.state.gov/i2u2/ https://www.state.gov/i2u2/ [4] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/12/quad-leaders-joint-statement-the-spirit-of-the-quad/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [5] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-world-order-pub-90928 https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-w... [6] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-naravane-recalls-how-india-china-were-at-brink-of-war-in-aug-2020/1892648/ https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav... [7] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stranded-students-face-racial-abuse-373916 https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stra...
- pylua 3y ago
  The only issue I have with that is that they will not allow us citizens to live there and take on jobs. If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there and accept a lesser salary. Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Who says you can't do that? They would be thrilled to have silicon valley (or equivalent) talent working for India salaries.
    - pylua 3y ago
      I doubt India government would grant a business visa for that. They don’t want other countries citizens competing for jobs in their own country, which is effectively what is happening in the us now.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        They do, and plenty of Westerners (Indian origin and non-Indian origin) return to India to work for Indian companies, found their own companies, or manage American operations. Though, IME, it tends to be Japanese, Israeli, Singaporean, and Korean expats who can hack it in India. Western European and Americans are too soft.
        pylua 3y ago
        I have not seen it happen in a permanent way. I doubt a visa for generic remote based web dev work would get approved. In fact, I believe the visa even states you have to have a skill that is not readily available in India. The reality is your generic dev would probably not qualify especially if they are outside of a company.
- Hypocritelefty 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- drubio 3y ago
  Same hiring dynamic in Mexico. They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD. Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    I heard about that. A good buddy of mine who attended UT ended up moving to CDMX to work remotely for Reddit. He's earning around $70k which is honestly pretty great.
    - drubio 3y ago
      If he's single, $70k for CDMX (Mty or Gdl, the other two metro cities) it can work, if he wants to raise a middle-class family not so much. Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like. Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely. I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.
abeppu 3y ago
> Amazon won’t fire me Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
- malcolmgreaves 3y ago
  > we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook Isn't this the author's goal though?
  - abeppu 3y ago
    If the author is going for severance, isn't that less likely if they're being fired for cause, vs part of a layoff?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Nope, you get severance either way.
      - jldugger 3y ago
        In what planet does Amazon offer severence to a person they are firing for cause?
        JustExAWS 3y ago
        This planet? I happen to have first hand experience with Amazon’s PIP process… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 (I seem to have done something to anger the HN gods)
burlesona 3y ago
It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of ideas for how I could use the time…
- mooreds 3y ago
  Have been in this situation before. Sounds like fun, actually melts your brain.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    I know someone who has been in this situation for _years_. But his true passion is an outside of work outdoors hobby, which is where he spends about 38 of his work hours each week.
    - mooreds 3y ago
      Wow, I guess that is good for him. What would he do if he needed to find a new job?
      - irrational 3y ago
        Go get a new job. You don’t have to tell prospective employers how much time you spent a week doing stuff for your previous company. They will just see that you worked for company X for years Y and that will probably be good enough.
        mooreds 3y ago
        I guess? If I were in his position and worked in technology (he doesn't, see sibling comment), I'd be worried about skill degradation. I've never been hired because of my resume, though that definitely helps with an interview. There was always a skills test. I suppose you could grind leetcode or otherwise cram for a skills test, though. You definitely have enough time during the week.
      - 3y ago
stickfigure 3y ago
I'm confused. Author's team has been eliminated but he is still employed by Amazon? What's he doing now?
- burlesona 3y ago
  Resting and vesting.
- timeagain 3y ago
  Historically Amazon gives devs some number of weeks to find new work internally if they cut a department. Sales and admin aren’t normally so lucky…
- jzb 3y ago
  He explains in the post. "Our number one priority is to find another job." I believe it's implied "within the company." This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles." Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
  - smarmgoblin 3y ago
    In addition the roles are all RTO-enforced (implying his current one is not), so it may be impossible for him to take those roles.
- JustinGarrison 3y ago
  OP: I was told the final date of my employment would be Dec 31st (turns out that date was made up). I asked to be let go in Oct with severance but it wasn’t approved. I’ve been checking messages and reviewing requests but not taking on any new work.
padthai 3y ago
Interesting that they feel that they are “trailing in AI”. The second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.
- pm90 3y ago
  I couldn’t help but smile. To be clear, its not just Amazon who does this but they are guilty of not investing seriously in developing new tech, only monetizing it. Out of all the BigTech, they are the only one that doesn’t even pretend to invest in some sort of industrial lab focused on basic research (Even IBM has a Research division, even today).
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  AI is still pretty much a bubble. We don't really even have anything that remotely resembles AI right now, just way better search engines, that Amazon was never in the business of. All they need to do to stay relevant in AI is to offer cost effective EC2 instances with accelerator hardware.
paxys 3y ago
It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year after year after year that they work in a shit engineering culture. No, nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter. The company was always like thus. If you are feeling the heat now it just means that your org is the latest to find itself in the line of fire. And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue. There is a reason the company has among the lowest average tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.
- vinnymac 3y ago
  I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and getting to see the sun. Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
  - throwaway8877 3y ago
    Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not fair.
    - ambicapter 3y ago
      Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not fair.
    - laidoffamazon 3y ago
      In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.
      - khazhoux 3y ago
        Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.
earth2mars 3y ago
why silent sacking doesn't include severance package?! do you mean forcing people to quit which doesn't include severance. If there is no work, can't you start working elsewhere (or at least a side consulting job) until they fire and give severance?
- jzb 3y ago
  Pretty sure Amazon's employment agreement / policies forbid moonlighting without manager approval. Which you're very unlikely to get if they're trying to move you out.
  - insomniacity 3y ago
    What are they going to do - fire you?
- otikik 3y ago
  Probably yes, but also probably the person who would check for this kind of thing was probably let go already :P You can “help” your friend who is bootstrapping his startup. You can even book a room in the office and meet with your friend there. As long as you are available for work in the office, it can count as “training”. Just don’t be blatant about it. Like, reserve rooms on a different floor every day. Or I imagine that is how it would be done, I definitely didn’t do this when I was benched on this big company for months.
- shrimpx 3y ago
  I think they mean making people's lives miserable enough that they quit. Presumably they can live with whatever Amazon throws at them, and keep taking a paycheck until fired.
  - curiousgal 3y ago
    > making people's lives miserable enough that they quit. I am genuinely at awe at how out of touch people seem to be. We're talking about software engineers given nothing to do and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars... Yes this is not ideal but let's not act that they're torturing these people or forcing them to clean bathrooms or something.
chank 3y ago
> I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else. When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  How can Amazon be guilty of incentivizing short term profit when their profit margin history looks like this? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit... Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta’s 20%+ profit margins.
hornban 3y ago
I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts. I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  I've been on the other side of these decisions. It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just aren't enough positions to fill. Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other stakeholders to ensure financial viability. It sucks, but it is what it is.
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    Which tech CEOs were fired for making the wrong call and overhiring? I don’t mind eye popping executive pay for exceptional performance, I mind that those positions have zero accountability.
    - spdy 3y ago
      Because they don't decide this on their own. A smart CEO gets board approval before going on a hiring spree, so afterwards, if the CFO shows a negative forecast, everyone can go, 'Oh, who could have seen this?' CEOs get fired if the board loses trust in their abilities.
nameoda 3y ago
A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no impactful work and promises of impactful project work once headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-internal knowledge with them.
yborg 3y ago
At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having to scrape by on $250K/yr...
crtified 3y ago
Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain. Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction. I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  My experience https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
- blagie 3y ago
  I have never been laid off or fired*. However, for most of my adult life, a layoff would have been traumatic. I have a specialized skillset, and it takes a while to find jobs. In the meantime, I have living expenses. It's doubly hard to find a job unemployed. I don't want to be in that position. "Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it."). If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no one else has to. * I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like a layoff or firing, through.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    > "We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it." I’m an entrepreneur in France, and I had one employee I would have like to say that to, but it can so easily be turned against the employer… Unions and litigations have basically made honesty the worst choice in every situation. Only to discover afterwards that the person had been willing to go since 6 months already. The entire experience is stupid, stupid humans working (or not working) together.
dougweltman 3y ago
Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses (let’s exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than what’s needed to run those? There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth. Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do. This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it. When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term. These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around. Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
- w10-1 3y ago
  > Very few people are needed to run the technology elements Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year. When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it. The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error. And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train. Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
Podgajski 3y ago
Can’t wait for the AWS outages. Good times ahead!
- yolovoe 3y ago
  I work in the core of AWS. Sure, we've lost head count, but I wouldn't expect more outages, at least in the core EC2/VPC space. All the really tenured folks we absolutely need are here in my and adjacent orgs--they're getting promotions, in fact. Really, what the loss in head count changes is what our teams can work on. Less new exciting stuff we can resource--just focus on security, ops, bug fixes, etc. Also, maybe more leverage for the engineers that are still here? :)
  - ragall 3y ago
    It would be nice if AWS finally stated that we can only count on EC2, but that Fargate and Cloudwatch are not supported any more and could be subject to outages.
nixass 3y ago
> There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people. Last sentence is pure bullshit
- caesil 3y ago
  What do you think accounts for the increase?
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    Holiday traffic, obviously. Do people really believe that engineers have to sit there and constantly commit code to keep servers from crashing?
snotrockets 3y ago
Assuming that AWS (or any tech company) was/is better due to engineering doesn't align with reality. The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities of their SaaS offering.
wolverine876 3y ago
Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that? Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time. Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs). The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
  - belter 3y ago
    The managerial way to say it...The company is frugal
  - senderista 3y ago
    I couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay, good colleagues, and good management.
nine_zeros 3y ago
My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc. My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go. But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages. Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
- F_J_H 3y ago
  What did you learn?
lulznews 3y ago
Dude your VP rocks. Amazon sucks, RTO sucks, but none of that bad stuff will happen. The machine will keep chugging, and no one cares.
BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck. But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
- amzn-throw 3y ago
  If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you. L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s. If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture. If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process. If you don't like a process, kill it. This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago
    Nah, I hired specialists and caught no end of trouble for doing so. All of them that are still in tech make $1M+ annually these days because they stand out among the lovable but mostly ineffective fungibles that are the cannon fodder for rounds of layoffs there. But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy. Pro-tip: if it's an abusive culture, leave ASAP.
    - drubio 3y ago
      So an account named 'amzn-throw' is trying to lecture you after leaving, this is very Amazonian of them, it's like a PIP beyond the grave.
steveBK123 3y ago
This is actually funny in that it reminds me of a Big Dumb Bank that I worked for post-GFC that was so screwed they were in endless cut mode. One year they basically ran out of money to severance people out by Q3. How the accounting magic of this works is beyond me, but they continued to employ these people instead of laying them off. There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3. Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done. It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Amazon was never at "peak". They paid second lowest after Amazon, they never really did anything huge in terms of tech. The stuff they are getting rid of now are things that they had money to spend on previously, but now don't. AWS is still raking in massive profit margins and the leader, retail is the largest source of revenue, and none of that is going away any time soon.
  - swyx 3y ago
    > Amazon was never at "peak". They paid second lowest after Amazon, looks like a typo. did you mean something else?
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yes and AWS seems to be simultaneously the cash cow & the worst / highest churn part of AMZN to work at, on the engineering side...
rdl 3y ago
Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?
- JustinGarrison 3y ago
  Yes, I vested my final payment from my original RSUs in October.
htss2013 3y ago
People don't appreciate what a total mindfuck it is to go through this. - You aren't told you're being targeted to be managed out when it starts. Managers often do not tell you that you're beginning phase 1 of getting managed out, whatever it's called. - You've always known this could happen to you or anyone else, so you are always guessing if that email from your boss is just a normal email or was it the beginning of a paper trail? You sense something different, but is that just in your head? - You might think you'd realize you're being managed out, reading the room, but that assumes there's a rational foreseeable reason to PIP you. Often there is not. Management gets PIP targets and someone has to get PIPed. It can be you for political reasons above your head that you are oblivious to. - You are subtlely being setup to fail, and even if you don't explicitly fail, finding a reason to frame your performance as deficient is always possible. - There is always something you could have done better, and nothing ever goes 100% perfectly. Those things will be magnified 100x. Are they being over magnified? Or were you delusional to minimize them? - To be on the receiving end of this is totally disorienting. It's basically gas lighting. Suddenly everything you do is somehow deficient in some way, even when you thought you were doing well. How could you have not realized this? Is this proof you can't trust your own judgment? That you're incompetent? - Your paper trails are useless. You can always be criticized for subjective reasons, like your style of communication, some 20/20 hindsight way you arguably could have done things even better, you're "not showing enough leadership", yes you're doing your core job but at your level we also expect XYZ, etc. - This can go on for months, working 60-80 hour weeks, on little sleep, with constant stress. You start to question your ability to assess reality. What else are you missing if you didnt realize you were screwing up so badly? Are you doing this outside of work too? - You think, wait, this has never happened to me before, but maybe it was just luck until now. Was imposter syndrome not a syndrome this whole time? Was I actually an imposter and this is what it feels like to be found out? At the end of this gas lighting psychological manipulation marathon, you have a hard time knowing up from down and you're fired. Who do you talk to about this to get your bearings back? You are ashamed this happened, and yet you're also not because bullshit PIPing is famous. It's not your fault. Or is it? Anyway you probably should find a way to process this right? Or maybe it's best to shove it deep into your subconscious and move on. Isn't this what therapists are for? Sure, go explain that your mind is vaguely screwed up from getting fired from a $300k/year job for...reasons? Did you screw up? Well no, but technically yes, but in reality no? Maybe? How the hell do you even articulate this without sounding like an incoherent spoiled brat?
hintymad 3y ago
> Pipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized. All components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team. It turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart. I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
thrw542 3y ago
“The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience. The word comes from Latin decem, meaning "ten." Decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.”

445 points by doitLP 3y ago

They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Addendum: Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.

timeagain 3y ago
Maybe it is just circumstance but I had been working with devs in Hyderabad since at least 2016 when I was at Amazon. I’m sure they are expanding the workforce there, though
- alephnerd 3y ago
  They've been in HYD for some time, but HYD is fairly new in the Indian software scene. Traditionally, Delhi NCR and Bangalore were the big 2 tech hubs since the 80s-90s, but politicians who were also massive landlords in Hyderabad [0][1][2] began giving tech companies tax incentives to move to Hyderabad in the early 2000s It began as low tier Infosys type work, but began climbing up the value chain in the 2010s [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao [2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy
  - justin66 3y ago
    I mean, I don't know what they do there, but haven't Microsoft had an office in Hyderabad for over 20 years?
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Delhi NCR and Bangalore were tech hubs since the 1980s, hence why I'm calling Hyderabad (and Pune) new as they began sprouting in the early 2000s Indore is becoming the next Hyderabad now as well. It's in the same position that Hyderabad was in the early 2000s.
debarshri 3y ago
I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc. There are multiple factors. Ofcourse from orgs perspective it is cost saving measure. But from another phenomenon that has happened is that graduates from lower tier colleges have gotten good in cracking leetcode, faang style interviews. There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > graduates from lower tier colleges Lower tier colleges have gotten much better in quality too. I remember Indraprashta came to recruit Indian PhD students at my Ivy League tier college to become tenure track CS/ECE/EE professors. Plenty of lower tier IIITs and regional engineering colleges are getting Western or Top Tier IIT trained faculty, and students are higher quality now as well. As the child of a dad who attended one of these no name RECs who ended up becoming tech leadership here in the Bay, I'm glad that this democratization has occurred. The BITS Pilani and IITian uncles were very snobby and annoying.
  - raincom 3y ago
    What you cite is one factor. Another factor is access for students. Once upon a time, curious students had two choices: buy books to learn on their own; or go to whatever low quality teachers they had. Cheap internet, YouTube, LibGen, other resources help students as long as the latter desire to learn.
  - debarshri 3y ago
    Quality is a relative term. We have been hiring in India for past 2 years. I can tell you there is lot of noise and no substance. There is only handful of good candidates and they know they are good.
    - wyclif 3y ago
      In India it's crazy because culturally they focus so much on the credential. It wasn't that long ago that if you were an Indian engineer and you weren't a graduate of IIT, you had no chance of working for these companies. The entire Indian hiring funnel is based on that system and it will be hard to change.
hackernewds 3y ago
I have encountered this during my time recruiting as well, where the same position I applied for was also listed for 1 day (then taken down) in Hyderabad. Likely stealthily collect applications. Ultimately, they said I passed the rounds, but the role was cut. Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions. When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
jimbob45 3y ago
Humana is starting to hire nurses in the Philippines. One would think that’s a national security hole but what do I know. The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets my vote.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  You don’t have to outlaw it, just make it so economically painful as to be outlawed.
  - intended 3y ago
    Oh, yes please! As much as I would like labor laws to be improved Globally, I doubt governments will allow this. That said, I am dying to see some country try something similar again. There is something beautiful when voters hold politicians up to their values, and politicans fail to explain the competitive realities to their voters. Making outsourcing economically unviable is a magnicificent contender.
- raincom 3y ago
  Candidates can promise many things, but they won't pass laws to ban outsourcing. Even if they do, they dilute it to an extent that these laws become impotent by creative loopholes.
  - pylua 3y ago
    They might if the tax base decreases substantially and unemployment shoots up to unsustainable levels. The government definitely cannot afford , with the national debt, to lose tax dollars or to subsidize high levels of unemployment.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Nursing was always dependent on Pinoy labor. Because PH used to an American territory until 1946, the education system is largely the same [0]. PH is to the US Medical system as India/Pakistan/Bangladesh are to the UK NHS [0] - https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-americans-nurses-in-the-united-states/ https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-ameri...
citizenpaul 3y ago
>living in their ancestral towns and villages I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here. Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life. I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India Yep! My parents and I are the same. The QoL in even a 3rd tier cow town in the US will be better than an economically vibrant city in India or China. Having clean tap water is (imo) the pinnacle of a developed country. > things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut True, but most Indian villages aren't like that anymore. They have all fairly developed now with electricity, WiFi, decent schools, etc. Go use Google street view - Indian villages may seem messy by Western standards, but they've gotten much better now. If you're someone who lived in small town or village India your whole life, and go to college to get a good job, if you have the option to earn a big city salary in your small town while being close to your family can be hard to beat. It's the same reason you see plenty of Techies take remote jobs and live near their families in the Midwest.
kburman 3y ago
> They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new. > expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore. Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it. > Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly 3 days from office like all the other office. > Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k Covid time is long gone.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > hyd low CoL Lower than Bangalore or Gurgaon. It's easier to operate a tech company from HYD financially than in Haryana or Karnataka. > Covid time is long gone Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.
  - kburman 3y ago
    > Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab. What I can say is that there is no special treatment for SDEs working from India, especially regarding the WFH policy.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Oh, you're talking solely about Amazon. Ok fair.
pylua 3y ago
The U.S. government should be concerned. The U.S. tax base could very well implode with outsourcing, ai, and offshoring in the next 10 years.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  This is why you encourage immigration. If you prevent talent from coming to the US, companies will follow the talent. This is why American cybersecurity and networking has almost entirely been outsourced to Israel and India and chip manufacturing to Taiwan and South Korea.
  - pylua 3y ago
    I do not understand how we got to this point. India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence and has not even voted to condemn Russia. It’s really a sign of how weak the U.S. government has become, which is heartbreaking. US has found it too expensive to invest in its own citizens. It’s almost a ticking time bomb.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence Financing the Abraham Accords [0], using American engines in tanks [1], American fighter jet engines in Indian fighter jets [2], and being a part of 2 bilateral treaty organizations [3][4] absolutely puts India in the US Sphere of Influence. > has not even voted to condemn Russia India will never piss off Russia, because India doesn't want Russia to join the Chinese camp [5]. By keeping trade and defense ties with Russia, India minimizes the chances of Russia becoming pro-China instead of neutral during an India-China war (which almost happened in 2020) [6]. Mistreatment of Indian students in Ukraine during the war made a vote in favor of Ukraine politically untenable during election season [7] [0] - https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-deal-g20-middle-east https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-... [1] - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/americas-cummins-engine-to-power-zorawar-tank-after-germany-fails-to-relax-trade-restrictions/article67544664.ece https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/ameri... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-plan-make-fighter-jet-engines-india-is-big-deal-2023-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-pl... [3] - https://www.state.gov/i2u2/ https://www.state.gov/i2u2/ [4] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/12/quad-leaders-joint-statement-the-spirit-of-the-quad/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [5] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-world-order-pub-90928 https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-w... [6] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-naravane-recalls-how-india-china-were-at-brink-of-war-in-aug-2020/1892648/ https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav... [7] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stranded-students-face-racial-abuse-373916 https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stra...
pylua 3y ago
The only issue I have with that is that they will not allow us citizens to live there and take on jobs. If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there and accept a lesser salary. Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.
- paxys 3y ago
  Who says you can't do that? They would be thrilled to have silicon valley (or equivalent) talent working for India salaries.
  - pylua 3y ago
    I doubt India government would grant a business visa for that. They don’t want other countries citizens competing for jobs in their own country, which is effectively what is happening in the us now.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      They do, and plenty of Westerners (Indian origin and non-Indian origin) return to India to work for Indian companies, found their own companies, or manage American operations. Though, IME, it tends to be Japanese, Israeli, Singaporean, and Korean expats who can hack it in India. Western European and Americans are too soft.
      - pylua 3y ago
        I have not seen it happen in a permanent way. I doubt a visa for generic remote based web dev work would get approved. In fact, I believe the visa even states you have to have a skill that is not readily available in India. The reality is your generic dev would probably not qualify especially if they are outside of a company.
Hypocritelefty 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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drubio 3y ago
Same hiring dynamic in Mexico. They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD. Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  I heard about that. A good buddy of mine who attended UT ended up moving to CDMX to work remotely for Reddit. He's earning around $70k which is honestly pretty great.
  - drubio 3y ago
    If he's single, $70k for CDMX (Mty or Gdl, the other two metro cities) it can work, if he wants to raise a middle-class family not so much. Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like. Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely. I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.

abeppu 3y ago

> Amazon won’t fire me Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?

malcolmgreaves 3y ago
> we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook Isn't this the author's goal though?
- abeppu 3y ago
  If the author is going for severance, isn't that less likely if they're being fired for cause, vs part of a layoff?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Nope, you get severance either way.
    - jldugger 3y ago
      In what planet does Amazon offer severence to a person they are firing for cause?
      - JustExAWS 3y ago
        This planet? I happen to have first hand experience with Amazon’s PIP process… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 (I seem to have done something to anger the HN gods)

burlesona 3y ago

It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of ideas for how I could use the time…

mooreds 3y ago
Have been in this situation before. Sounds like fun, actually melts your brain.
- dharmab 3y ago
  I know someone who has been in this situation for _years_. But his true passion is an outside of work outdoors hobby, which is where he spends about 38 of his work hours each week.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    Wow, I guess that is good for him. What would he do if he needed to find a new job?
    - irrational 3y ago
      Go get a new job. You don’t have to tell prospective employers how much time you spent a week doing stuff for your previous company. They will just see that you worked for company X for years Y and that will probably be good enough.
      - mooreds 3y ago
        I guess? If I were in his position and worked in technology (he doesn't, see sibling comment), I'd be worried about skill degradation. I've never been hired because of my resume, though that definitely helps with an interview. There was always a skills test. I suppose you could grind leetcode or otherwise cram for a skills test, though. You definitely have enough time during the week.
    - 3y ago

stickfigure 3y ago

I'm confused. Author's team has been eliminated but he is still employed by Amazon? What's he doing now?

burlesona 3y ago
Resting and vesting.
timeagain 3y ago
Historically Amazon gives devs some number of weeks to find new work internally if they cut a department. Sales and admin aren’t normally so lucky…
jzb 3y ago
He explains in the post. "Our number one priority is to find another job." I believe it's implied "within the company." This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles." Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
- smarmgoblin 3y ago
  In addition the roles are all RTO-enforced (implying his current one is not), so it may be impossible for him to take those roles.
JustinGarrison 3y ago
OP: I was told the final date of my employment would be Dec 31st (turns out that date was made up). I asked to be let go in Oct with severance but it wasn’t approved. I’ve been checking messages and reviewing requests but not taking on any new work.

padthai 3y ago

Interesting that they feel that they are “trailing in AI”. The second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.

pm90 3y ago
I couldn’t help but smile. To be clear, its not just Amazon who does this but they are guilty of not investing seriously in developing new tech, only monetizing it. Out of all the BigTech, they are the only one that doesn’t even pretend to invest in some sort of industrial lab focused on basic research (Even IBM has a Research division, even today).
ActorNightly 3y ago
AI is still pretty much a bubble. We don't really even have anything that remotely resembles AI right now, just way better search engines, that Amazon was never in the business of. All they need to do to stay relevant in AI is to offer cost effective EC2 instances with accelerator hardware.

paxys 3y ago

It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year after year after year that they work in a shit engineering culture. No, nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter. The company was always like thus. If you are feeling the heat now it just means that your org is the latest to find itself in the line of fire. And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue. There is a reason the company has among the lowest average tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.

vinnymac 3y ago
I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and getting to see the sun. Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
- throwaway8877 3y ago
  Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not fair.
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not fair.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.

earth2mars 3y ago

why silent sacking doesn't include severance package?! do you mean forcing people to quit which doesn't include severance. If there is no work, can't you start working elsewhere (or at least a side consulting job) until they fire and give severance?

jzb 3y ago
Pretty sure Amazon's employment agreement / policies forbid moonlighting without manager approval. Which you're very unlikely to get if they're trying to move you out.
- insomniacity 3y ago
  What are they going to do - fire you?
otikik 3y ago
Probably yes, but also probably the person who would check for this kind of thing was probably let go already :P You can “help” your friend who is bootstrapping his startup. You can even book a room in the office and meet with your friend there. As long as you are available for work in the office, it can count as “training”. Just don’t be blatant about it. Like, reserve rooms on a different floor every day. Or I imagine that is how it would be done, I definitely didn’t do this when I was benched on this big company for months.
shrimpx 3y ago
I think they mean making people's lives miserable enough that they quit. Presumably they can live with whatever Amazon throws at them, and keep taking a paycheck until fired.
- curiousgal 3y ago
  > making people's lives miserable enough that they quit. I am genuinely at awe at how out of touch people seem to be. We're talking about software engineers given nothing to do and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars... Yes this is not ideal but let's not act that they're torturing these people or forcing them to clean bathrooms or something.

chank 3y ago

> I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else. When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
How can Amazon be guilty of incentivizing short term profit when their profit margin history looks like this? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit... Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta’s 20%+ profit margins.

hornban 3y ago

I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts. I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.

alephnerd 3y ago
I've been on the other side of these decisions. It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just aren't enough positions to fill. Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other stakeholders to ensure financial viability. It sucks, but it is what it is.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  Which tech CEOs were fired for making the wrong call and overhiring? I don’t mind eye popping executive pay for exceptional performance, I mind that those positions have zero accountability.
  - spdy 3y ago
    Because they don't decide this on their own. A smart CEO gets board approval before going on a hiring spree, so afterwards, if the CFO shows a negative forecast, everyone can go, 'Oh, who could have seen this?' CEOs get fired if the board loses trust in their abilities.

nameoda 3y ago

A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no impactful work and promises of impactful project work once headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-internal knowledge with them.

yborg 3y ago

At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having to scrape by on $250K/yr...

crtified 3y ago

Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain. Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction. I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.

scarface_74 3y ago
My experience https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
blagie 3y ago
I have never been laid off or fired*. However, for most of my adult life, a layoff would have been traumatic. I have a specialized skillset, and it takes a while to find jobs. In the meantime, I have living expenses. It's doubly hard to find a job unemployed. I don't want to be in that position. "Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it."). If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no one else has to. * I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like a layoff or firing, through.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > "We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it." I’m an entrepreneur in France, and I had one employee I would have like to say that to, but it can so easily be turned against the employer… Unions and litigations have basically made honesty the worst choice in every situation. Only to discover afterwards that the person had been willing to go since 6 months already. The entire experience is stupid, stupid humans working (or not working) together.

dougweltman 3y ago

Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses (let’s exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than what’s needed to run those? There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth. Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do. This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it. When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term. These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around. Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.

w10-1 3y ago
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year. When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it. The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error. And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train. Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.

Podgajski 3y ago

Can’t wait for the AWS outages. Good times ahead!

yolovoe 3y ago
I work in the core of AWS. Sure, we've lost head count, but I wouldn't expect more outages, at least in the core EC2/VPC space. All the really tenured folks we absolutely need are here in my and adjacent orgs--they're getting promotions, in fact. Really, what the loss in head count changes is what our teams can work on. Less new exciting stuff we can resource--just focus on security, ops, bug fixes, etc. Also, maybe more leverage for the engineers that are still here? :)
- ragall 3y ago
  It would be nice if AWS finally stated that we can only count on EC2, but that Fargate and Cloudwatch are not supported any more and could be subject to outages.

nixass 3y ago

> There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people. Last sentence is pure bullshit

caesil 3y ago
What do you think accounts for the increase?
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Holiday traffic, obviously. Do people really believe that engineers have to sit there and constantly commit code to keep servers from crashing?

snotrockets 3y ago

Assuming that AWS (or any tech company) was/is better due to engineering doesn't align with reality. The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities of their SaaS offering.

wolverine876 3y ago

Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that? Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time. Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs). The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.

asylteltine 3y ago
Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
- belter 3y ago
  The managerial way to say it...The company is frugal
- senderista 3y ago
  I couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay, good colleagues, and good management.

nine_zeros 3y ago

My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc. My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go. But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages. Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.

F_J_H 3y ago
What did you learn?

lulznews 3y ago

Dude your VP rocks. Amazon sucks, RTO sucks, but none of that bad stuff will happen. The machine will keep chugging, and no one cares.

BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago

Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck. But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.

amzn-throw 3y ago
If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you. L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s. If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture. If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process. If you don't like a process, kill it. This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago
  Nah, I hired specialists and caught no end of trouble for doing so. All of them that are still in tech make $1M+ annually these days because they stand out among the lovable but mostly ineffective fungibles that are the cannon fodder for rounds of layoffs there. But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy. Pro-tip: if it's an abusive culture, leave ASAP.
  - drubio 3y ago
    So an account named 'amzn-throw' is trying to lecture you after leaving, this is very Amazonian of them, it's like a PIP beyond the grave.

steveBK123 3y ago

This is actually funny in that it reminds me of a Big Dumb Bank that I worked for post-GFC that was so screwed they were in endless cut mode. One year they basically ran out of money to severance people out by Q3. How the accounting magic of this works is beyond me, but they continued to employ these people instead of laying them off. There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3. Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done. It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.

ActorNightly 3y ago
Amazon was never at "peak". They paid second lowest after Amazon, they never really did anything huge in terms of tech. The stuff they are getting rid of now are things that they had money to spend on previously, but now don't. AWS is still raking in massive profit margins and the leader, retail is the largest source of revenue, and none of that is going away any time soon.
- swyx 3y ago
  > Amazon was never at "peak". They paid second lowest after Amazon, looks like a typo. did you mean something else?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes and AWS seems to be simultaneously the cash cow & the worst / highest churn part of AMZN to work at, on the engineering side...

rdl 3y ago

Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?

JustinGarrison 3y ago
Yes, I vested my final payment from my original RSUs in October.

htss2013 3y ago

People don't appreciate what a total mindfuck it is to go through this. - You aren't told you're being targeted to be managed out when it starts. Managers often do not tell you that you're beginning phase 1 of getting managed out, whatever it's called. - You've always known this could happen to you or anyone else, so you are always guessing if that email from your boss is just a normal email or was it the beginning of a paper trail? You sense something different, but is that just in your head? - You might think you'd realize you're being managed out, reading the room, but that assumes there's a rational foreseeable reason to PIP you. Often there is not. Management gets PIP targets and someone has to get PIPed. It can be you for political reasons above your head that you are oblivious to. - You are subtlely being setup to fail, and even if you don't explicitly fail, finding a reason to frame your performance as deficient is always possible. - There is always something you could have done better, and nothing ever goes 100% perfectly. Those things will be magnified 100x. Are they being over magnified? Or were you delusional to minimize them? - To be on the receiving end of this is totally disorienting. It's basically gas lighting. Suddenly everything you do is somehow deficient in some way, even when you thought you were doing well. How could you have not realized this? Is this proof you can't trust your own judgment? That you're incompetent? - Your paper trails are useless. You can always be criticized for subjective reasons, like your style of communication, some 20/20 hindsight way you arguably could have done things even better, you're "not showing enough leadership", yes you're doing your core job but at your level we also expect XYZ, etc. - This can go on for months, working 60-80 hour weeks, on little sleep, with constant stress. You start to question your ability to assess reality. What else are you missing if you didnt realize you were screwing up so badly? Are you doing this outside of work too? - You think, wait, this has never happened to me before, but maybe it was just luck until now. Was imposter syndrome not a syndrome this whole time? Was I actually an imposter and this is what it feels like to be found out? At the end of this gas lighting psychological manipulation marathon, you have a hard time knowing up from down and you're fired. Who do you talk to about this to get your bearings back? You are ashamed this happened, and yet you're also not because bullshit PIPing is famous. It's not your fault. Or is it? Anyway you probably should find a way to process this right? Or maybe it's best to shove it deep into your subconscious and move on. Isn't this what therapists are for? Sure, go explain that your mind is vaguely screwed up from getting fired from a $300k/year job for...reasons? Did you screw up? Well no, but technically yes, but in reality no? Maybe? How the hell do you even articulate this without sounding like an incoherent spoiled brat?

hintymad 3y ago

> Pipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized. All components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team. It turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart. I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.

thrw542 3y ago

“The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience. The word comes from Latin decem, meaning "ten." Decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.”