amzn-throw

10 ms·

31.
by amzn-throw 4y ago
For the record, being on the other side, and working hard to CREATE these experiences that customers love is absolutely addictive and intoxicating. You have to actually give a shit about it though. Which most of us do. It requires effort an
32.
by amzn-throw 4y ago
I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been promoted twice. Ask me anything. Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers, because of discussion threads like this where a lot of misinformation is shared ab
33.
by amzn-throw 4y ago
> You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. You can, if OP's premise
34.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
To be clear, that wasn't the memo text. That was Steve Yegge's pithy summary of it in his infamous Google Plus post that was meant to be privately shared inside Google to call out how/why Google is worse than Amazon at web se
35.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Over 700 comments, and noone questions maybe there is a little more to this story. For example: * Yes, he "submitted" >50k lines of code. Most of it is auto-generated from infrastructure generation templates. * His teammates ar
36.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
I work at Amazon and love it and don't want to work at Google because I want to work on meaningful big projects that deliver real value to customers rather than re-writing a Chat app for the 6th time, or spending time on mandatory-top-
37.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Based on what I know, that's not the case. DDB is a steady ship. The explanation on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30009611 is likely the best explanation. L7 TPMs make the same money as L6 SDEs. Getting promoted
38.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
What do you think Solutions Architects and Developer Advocates (between the two groups who do most Re:invent sessions) are? Hell, what do you think re:Invent is? It's a sales conference. In any company you have two groups of people: Th
39.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
The key benefit with DDB is predictability: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/01/19/predictability.html Yes, you have to learn about all these things upfront. But once you figure it out, test it, and confi
40.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company? This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him? Again, no shot aga
41.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
That could also be based on a difference of expectations in skills for a job family at Google vs. Amazon. An Amazon Sr. SDE (L6) is expected to have strong leadership skills, which means interpersonal tech lead abilities - including mentors
42.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
AWS's mindset is software is useless without customers. Google doesn't seem to have the same care - it's a charity for academic software engineers to spend AdSense revenue on abstract high level computer science problems not
43.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> Having worked at AWS previously, I can tell you that when you force your software engineers to do everything and promote them based on _what_ they deliver without caring about the operational load, you end up with crazy oncalls and poo
44.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> a VP must sign off on changing status pages, which is... backwards to say the least. I think most people's experience with "VP's" makes them not realize what AWS VP's do. VP's here are not sitting in an ex
45.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
It's popular to upvote this during outages, because it fits a narrative. The truth (as always) is more complex: * No, this isn't the broad culture. It's not even a blip. These are EXCEPTIONAL circumstances by extremely bad te
46.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Amazon/AWS teams are so distributed and independent that it the quality of the output of one team very rarely reflects in any way on the quality of the output of another. This is almost always a good thing. There are of course centrali
47.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
In 2014 most of the AWS console was written in GWT, and I worked on one of the services. Honestly? I kind of loved it. As a backend Java dev, it made a lot of sense to me, and I almost never had to touch any Javascript. Every service team a
48.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> Of course they are if so many people are being fired. You don't seem to understand. Amazon grows by 15-30% every single year. We're constantly hiring, even if there is no attrition. We also have a high bar. The ~ ratio is 20
49.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Even in my charitable view of my company, Amazon is INTENSE . We set extremely ambitious goals, and orgs are only expected to meet 70-80% of them. It's an environment that indexes extremely high on autonomy and flexibility for each pe
50.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. That's not the metric for success or failure. It's delivering results.
51.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
No, you don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378836
52.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (
53.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> Most BRs aren’t you. Most BRs are wet noodles and will just go along with whatever the HM wants to do. Citation needed. > 2) hire someone mediocre that’s just good enough to pass the loop, don’t spend any time onboarding them, fire
54.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> "Holy shit I need to hire people" means that the bar is less consistent Not even. It's not the manager's job to determine the bar. It's the bar raiser's. And they are not under the same pressures. We can a
55.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Jesus Christ the amount of unprofessional projection in this thread is insane. No. That could not happen. Bar raisers are hiring to raise the bar for Amazon. Period.
56.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> It is very easy to “game the system” and get candidates past the hiring loop, BR or not. False. Source: Am bar raiser. 9 year Amazonian, >500 interviews. Am a manager. I do performance reviews. Yes, there are unregretted attrition r
57.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Not quite. Source: Am bar raiser. While bar raisers can't make hiring managers take a candidate they don't want, they can absolutely "veto to hire" for Amazon. It just means that Recruiting needs to find another team, wh
58.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
294 comment thread from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369910
59.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> It's the choice of who gets out that matters. You contradict your own point above > has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations. These higher ups tend to have extr
60.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
That's why bar raisers have to be from a different organization than the team hiring. As an Amazon Bar Raiser, our community takes our unbiased position and ability to veto hires EXTREMELY seriously. We hire for Amazon, not for the tea

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