[HN Gopher] Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit ...
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Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-11-16 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| malfist wrote:
| The "worlds best employer" is horribly mismanaging this layoff.
| It's all hush hush, and nobody is admitting anything until
| suddenly you have a meeting at the end of the day with a bigwig
| and HR.
|
| The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter
| where if you find employment external you give up remaining
| severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week
| of severance per 6 months of employment (min 4 weeks, max 20).
|
| Oh, and we're being told to use those 60 days to find a job
| internally at amazon....during a hiring freeze.
|
| World's best employer my ass.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > World's best employer
|
| This is the first ever that I hear this label attached to
| Amazon. Do they claim it? I've never seen them in the #1 spot
| on any top employer / best place to work ranking. I just
| googled again just to make sure, but perhaps I missed
| something.
| malfist wrote:
| "World's best employer" was added to our leadership
| principles April 2021.
|
| It's 100% bullshit.
|
| So far the actions they've taken to be the worlds best
| employer has been....changing the password reset cycle to be
| one year instead of 90 days.
|
| You can't be world's best employer while frugality reigns
| supreme.
| andsoitis wrote:
| I see. Looked it up
| (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles), says "Strive to be
| Earth's Best Employer".
|
| Did Amazon perhaps add it to the list _because_ of
| lackluster workplace quality, and so this is still early in
| the journey?
| smithrj wrote:
| They added it as one of the two new leadership principles
| last year I believe.
|
| https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
| typon wrote:
| When I interviewed there in 2018 the recruiter specifically
| asked me to memorize all the leadership principles because
| I will be tested on them during the on-site interview. I
| feel bad for the candidates who now have to memorize two
| more of them :(
| celestialcheese wrote:
| So if you don't find other work, max severance is like 28.5
| weeks? Or is 20 the cap? If it's the former, almost 7 months of
| runway to find a new job is pretty great.
|
| The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by
| Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all
| aspects of their comp and perks.
| malfist wrote:
| If at the end of the 60 days, you get a lump sump payment of
| 4-20 weeks of base pay, no sign on bonus or RSUs included.
|
| Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super
| senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless
| they were hired in the last year.
|
| If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all
| payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon.
|
| To get the 7 months of pay you'll have had to be at amazon
| 10+ years. That's like 3 people. Turnover for all roles is
| >100%, tech is something like 50+%
| dymk wrote:
| Amazon doubled their base cap last year, so is this still
| true?
| malfist wrote:
| That's why I had a disclaimer about being hired this
| year.
|
| If you weren't hired this year your base is likely still
| around the 160k
| makoz wrote:
| Data point of one and all that, but I got a decent bump
| in base and have been with the company for more than a
| few years. I assume that's true for almost everyone else
| based off the Blind posts.
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| Couldn't you, y'know just get a new job offer and not tell
| them about it until your 60 days have elapsed?
| mywittyname wrote:
| There are reporting agencies that can be used to
| determine who employs a person. That's not including some
| other shady shit I wouldn't put past the company getting
| up to (i.e., bribing recruiting firms to tattle on former
| employees). Plus, I bet there's clawback provision if you
| don't tell them and they find out about it.
|
| But yeah, I'd take that gamble and just keep a low
| profile online. Or one could slow walk the hiring
| process: land a job then push your start date back out
| 61-x days.
| josefresco wrote:
| Similarly could you tell your new employer "Hey don't
| officially hire me for another 3 more weeks - I'll still
| work for you now but Amazon will pay my salary - deal?"
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I'm not sure why anyone would play this weird game of
| defrauding Amazon and working for a company for free when
| they could instead just do: "Hey I need some time, can my
| start date be X days from now", where X will probably be
| 30 or so days (given it takes time to apply to new jobs,
| go through the various stages of interview, etc).
| [deleted]
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like
| twitter where if you find employment external you give up
| remaining severance."
|
| Could you or someone say how this works or is enforced? Once
| you are no longer working for Amazon how do they know you have
| found external employment elsewhere? Is this a legal gray area?
| Zaheer wrote:
| Alexa is to Amazon what Metaverse is to Meta.
|
| Both are bets to create a new platform as they feel threatened by
| Apple & Google's dominance on mobile.
|
| Meta should take note. Alexa is widely adopted (# of devices) but
| has little engagement and still hasn't broken outside of the most
| primitive use-cases (play music, remind me, etc)
| ronnier wrote:
| They'd probably get a lot more use if they opened up the API so
| we can send commands locally to say, play an mp3.
| qqtt wrote:
| They have a Alexa skill development kit where you can make
| your own commands but yeah, as far as I know it's all cloud
| based:
|
| https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-
| kit/ge...
| akira2501 wrote:
| The skill flow builder is a nice desktop GUI program that
| can help you develop interactive skills without having to
| engage with raw API.
|
| https://developer.amazon.com/es-ES/blogs/alexa/alexa-
| skills-...
| foostepsndpics wrote:
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| For context, I work for Amazon, have multiple Alexa devices, an
| Oculus Quest 2 and I think the Metaverse is absolute bullshit
| and will never bring a cent.
|
| But I totally disagree with the comparison between Alexa and
| the Metaverse. Alexa has adoption and struggles with
| monetization, while the Metaverse struggles with adoption but
| would have endless possibilities for monetization.
|
| What is condemning a lot of Alexa teams today is the complete
| inability for Alexa to be anything more than a music speaker
| that also tells you the weather and sets timers. It's tedious
| to interact with and it's impossible to monetize, just because
| of how limited the "interface" is.
|
| The Metaverse will never struggle with the same problems. It's
| not gonna work, but not because it can't be monetized.
| hintymad wrote:
| AWS is barely touched. AWS AI even less so. A repeated lesson for
| me: always join a growing business for professional development,
| for career satisfaction, for financial reward, and for job
| security.
| twelve40 wrote:
| Alexa was the absolute hotness when it was first introduced.
| There were so many claims how it's going to take over the
| entire world that I started to question my own sanity. Imagine
| if you joined that growing business at the time? Same here,
| what is AWS AI and how can you tell that apart from a hyped-up
| diversion? Clearly, anything "AI" is extremely overhyped
| currently, but how can you tell which one is real.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| The real trick to job safety is to join a core (but
| profitable) organization.
|
| I doubt many (if any) cuts are being made in EC2/EBS/S3/etc.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| This.
|
| Be willing to do the boring, unsexy stuff that is at the
| foundation of the business. You'll never be the hotshot,
| but it's extremely unlikely that you would get caught up in
| layoffs like this.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > You'll never be the hotshot
|
| It depends on your definition of hotshot. If you stay in
| the core part of the business and reliably contribute,
| your star will definitely rise and almost certainly be
| noticed in some capacity, even at the highest levels of
| the company.
|
| You're not going to be the poster boy, and trade
| magazines aren't going to beat a path to your door for an
| interview, but if job security and absolute authority
| over your own environment is what you expect.. that's
| definitely on the table, even in the "boring" parts of
| the company.
|
| This I've found to be especially true and take less time
| in any organization that relies on commissioned sales.
| There's an incentive for internal recognition in those
| environments that improve the calculus here quite a bit.
| hintymad wrote:
| There will be multiple personal risks with this approach.
| First my skills may increasingly become irrelevant, as
| there are only "boring" work to do. Second I don't get
| job satisfaction. Of course, it depends on what makes one
| happy. To me, it is the thrill of solving new problems
| and knowing that I kept becoming a better problem solver.
| Third, an org with no growth means incumbents fight for
| turfs. In contrast, a growing org has increasingly larger
| pie for us to eat, which means more focus on doing, less
| on in-fighting. Fourth, I still want to reap some
| financial reward. A profitable yet non-growing company
| naturally concentrates its resources to the top, and the
| future growth is predictable. A growing company has a
| much better chance to have better financial returns (with
| higher risks as well).
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I didn't say you had to be stuck working on boring
| maintenance work on a boring team with no problems to
| solve, just join a boring _organization_.
|
| There are many teams in organizations like EBS/S3/etc
| working on the growth and next frontier of those services
| - but those teams are still far less likely to be cut in
| a layoff than teams doing similar work in riskier
| organizations. Why? Because layoffs are allocated from
| the top first. The reliable and profitable S3 org as a
| whole will be required to lay off far fewer people than
| the Devices org that is losing $XXXXXXXX/year.
| rr888 wrote:
| They might just be doing division by division. AWS layoffs
| tomorrow.
| recursive_ wrote:
| Amazon has been cutting a handful of their growing businesses
| aswell. Take for example Amazon Care. That team tripled in size
| YoY and was disbanded right before these layoffs. A growing
| business also needs a clear path to profitability.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My guess is they meant growing in terms of revenue, not
| headcount.
| hintymad wrote:
| Yes. Growth in user demand, number of use cases, and
| revenue. Uber HR used to boast that Uber was the fastest
| growing company because it grew its headcount faster than
| google and facebook, which cringes me to no end.
| hawski wrote:
| Is it other part of the workforce that gets laid off recently
| from the recently widely reported labor shortage?
| [deleted]
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/g4zAW
| erehweb wrote:
| I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider
| interesting:
|
| "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there
| but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the
| chopping block."
|
| This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that
| it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack
| ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's because it does not talk about employee bloat, but rather
| product bloat.
|
| There are a lot of teams working on either useless or
| _duplicate_ products.
|
| Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another
| team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you,
| despite both teams existing for years.
|
| My previous team found out that multiple of our products had
| equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel
| sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a
| table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent
| products made by other teams...
|
| And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do
| not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| I've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it.
| Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've
| worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of
| which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the
| horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my
| time at Amazon.
| lightbendover wrote:
| There are absolutely quotas for every org over a certain
| size. If you're not a manager and not on the chopping block,
| it would be hard to notice.
| agentofoblivion wrote:
| +1. I've been here almost 6 years and across 3 different
| teams. Never seen any of the horrors.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| If only 0.1% of Amazon employees are very unhappy and vent
| their horror stories online, you will hear hundreds of bad
| stories. If 99.9 are "just fine" with it, you won't hear a
| single story...
| Chamix wrote:
| Oh my friend, there is a tool called Lift used in OLR/Talent
| Review by every single 50+ group at Amazon that quite
| literally will show your face up on a screen for everyone at
| the OLR meeting to discuss and rank vs your peers. If they
| don't have the Least Effective quota hit they will go through
| each face near the bottom to figure out who needs to be
| added. The most liberal definition possible of not stack
| ranking.
|
| The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really
| intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a
| good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the
| unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to
| another company but who were in focus or pivot when they
| left.
|
| To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know:
| - Amazon requires 6% of employees who leave the company every
| year to be unregretted attrition aka URA - To be
| marked as URA an employee must be in Focus aka Devlist aka
| Devplan when they leave - Talent Review aka OLR
| must occur at least every 6 months for each leader with >=50
| employees under him - Every employee is ranked
| from Least Effective - High Value 1-3 - Top Tier with quotas
| being 5:35:25:15:20 % respectively - The 5%
| rated LE must be entered into Focus - This
| effectively results in 10% of employees in Focus per year
| - Around half fail improvement plans in Focus and are
| presented with Pivot, which 90% results in firing. This is
| the oft discussed "Pip" - Rest either get out of
| Focus or leave themselves while on Focus and are still marked
| URA
|
| One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know
| exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains
| more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is
| not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under
| Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly
| consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I
| understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite
| working there.
| andonisus wrote:
| Both of these things can be true. There is a lag time behind
| hiring someone, PIPing them, and terminating them. Amazon was
| on a hiring spree. They are almost certainly still be bloated
| even after these layoffs.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side
| of retail.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Another way to be "bloated" is to have a lot of teams working
| very hard on systems/projects that don't add value to the
| overall business. Those teams will still manage out their low-
| performers and run a ruthless environment, but the folks that
| remain continue to work hard without providing value. Add new
| systems/projects underneath because people want more scope and
| responsibility, repeat through a few cycles, and you arrive at
| the quoted line.
| LanceH wrote:
| The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate
| teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple
| VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their
| domain.
|
| I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle
| the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The
| other team just acquires as many people as possible and
| writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag
| pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that
| already has all the people.
| fdye wrote:
| I used to see this occasionally and always see it as
| wasteful. However, there is another angle here. Imagine
| your a C-Suite or senior level manager and you have lots of
| resources at your disposal. Now you have identified a
| strategic widget you need to get to within some timeframe,
| say 2 years to lay into your grand strategic vision.
|
| Scenario A: Task a single team, staff them and let them do
| their thing. Cross your finger and hope they get it done.
|
| Scenario B: Look across offices, org groups, whatever, and
| task 2-3 (sometimes more) teams with your task. Let them
| start work on it and get regular demos and updates.
| Eventually, pick a winner.
|
| B looks very wasteful from the outside, until you realize
| that many software projects fail (like 50%). So more
| attempts give you a higher chance of success. Downside:
| Internal politics, waste, attrition from engineers throwing
| away code/busy work.
|
| A is great if you can do it, but you're putting all your
| eggs in one basket.
|
| A lot of times this is just bad org/bureaucracy though, but
| it can be done to great effect.
|
| Disclaimer: Worked for a CEO with a large outsourced
| engineering base and several offices. Would see multiple
| attempts at different offices all the time. Eventually,
| grudgingly acknowledged there was a method to that madness.
| Trump also is famous for this (although his seemed more
| madness).
| vkou wrote:
| Scenario B very rarely happens.
|
| What actually happens is Scenario C - it doesn't arise
| from a top-down planner mandating it, it arises from
| middle managers (or their subordinates) further down the
| food chain each trying to grow their own kingdom, who all
| get the same idea at roughly the same time, and each
| build their own solution to the same problem.
|
| During times of plenty, or if the top-level planner is
| only absent-mindedly managing that part of their org, the
| firm will be willing to tolerate these competing
| implementations, but during lean times, they cut, cut and
| cut and consolidate down to one winning solution.
|
| A lot of corporate politics and strategy makes a lot more
| sense when you start looking at the personal motivations
| of the participants in it.
| fdye wrote:
| Agreed, C is also a very real possibility.
| zwkrt wrote:
| Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were
| vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire
| fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the
| organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt
| immense pressure.
|
| These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of
| Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft,
| more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side,
| as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll
| have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular
| types of products. I think I recall there basically being a
| 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling
| shoes on the site, etc.
|
| I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that
| I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were.
| IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of
| dynamodb for instance.
| Chamix wrote:
| For fun, there are currently precisely 312 employees under
| DynamoDB directors/VPs that are categorized at "Software
| Development".
|
| Including systems engineers ups it to 348.
| aserafini wrote:
| This is totally true, I worked at Amazon when it first
| launched Kindle. There were multiple software engineers 100%
| dedicated to 'making the Kindle product page work' at this
| time.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I haven't worked at Amazon, but my experience with the world of
| "pip" culture is that it only really appears when value is
| difficult to define, which is strong evidence of bloat.
|
| Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it
| always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly,
| they don't know how to avoid it.
|
| This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well
| defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused
| about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for
| having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero
| problem identifying how they can create more value to the
| company: close more deals.
|
| But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of
| Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to
| keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is _evidence_
| of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact
| that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are
| stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.
| blue039 wrote:
| It takes a while to stack rank people out of the company. It's
| not an efficient pipeline. Moreover, smart engineers know how
| to game the system.
|
| So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to
| experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large.
| They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP
| money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat.
| It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in
| a way that I am at all worried about.
| _rs wrote:
| How is it possible to game a system like that? I thought by
| design it pushes more people out than even necessarily
| deserve it
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| There's no surefire way to game the system, and I would
| even say there is no way to game the system at all, but you
| just need to understand two things:
|
| 1. Your manager is the one putting you in PIP (firing
| plan). If you're friends with your manager, he won't put
| your name, even if your performance is below the bar.
|
| 2. This is applicable in every single avenue of life, but
| your reputation is everything. Work hard for the first few
| months after joining a team and impress your leadership and
| your colleagues on your first few tickets, then you can
| dial it down and still be 100% safe and be regarded as a
| top tier engineer. You will be "the guy that ramped us fast
| and executed well" for the rest of your time in that team.
| If you have setbacks, you won't even need to justify
| yourself, they will just know that "hey if this top guy is
| struggling it just means it's very hard".
|
| On the contrary, I have witnessed people being fired or
| looked down upon just for having a bad reputation, even
| when they were doing just fine or had legitimate roadblocks
| on some tasks. One of my good friends got fired because he
| was the party guy of our team, so nobody was ever taking
| him really seriously.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I've done the stack ranking many years in multiple
| companies.
|
| I rarely have seen (1) come into play. I'm sure it
| happens, but there is a lot of scrutiny of the stack
| rank, enough where I think it would be hard to pull off.
| I think most friend managers would tell their friend
| months ahead of time -- you really need to do XYZ or
| things are going to be tight at review time.
|
| (2) is very true though. Reputation and perception is
| super important. Although I think companies now do take a
| harder look at delivered impact either via KPIs or OKRs.
|
| In my experience, most engineers are pretty good. And
| I've struggled to find people to put in the bottom of the
| stack rank, because I didn't feel that their compensation
| would reflect the impact they had. IMO, after having to
| do layoffs, it is the hardest part of the job. And it
| sucks because there is very little way out of it for the
| manager. Helping person X do better, just means that now
| person Y is at the bottom of the stack.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I rarely have seen (1) come into play.
|
| Worked in a company that does stack ranking. Here's how
| you do 1 (in the opposite sense): Give the person tough
| tasks, with very tight deadlines. Amplify their failings
| and belittle their achievements. Repeat till the employee
| screws up, and start building evidence for a PIP. Get
| others involved (customers the employee is interacting
| with, your own manager, etc). In most cases I've seen, if
| a manager is unhappy with you, the others (customers,
| your manager) will follow the manager's lead to get rid
| of the person.
|
| If/when the employee contests this, most HRs will pick
| someone from the same department to be the investigator.
| Since it's the same department, it means it's the same
| culture your manager is exhibiting. They will much more
| likely believe them than they will you.
|
| Source: I got semi-fired this way. To give you an
| example: The investigator wanted proof for everything I
| was claiming in my defense. Not only that, they held it
| against me if I had _not_ sent emails to my manager
| saying I disagreed with his behavior. Eventually, I asked
| the investigator: "So, did my manager show you proof for
| all his claims?" The investigator responded with "Good
| point, and once this process is over I will send him and
| his manager feedback on the mistakes they made." Umm -
| sure, but why should I be punished and not them? No
| answer.
|
| I somehow stayed at the company (they made an exception
| for me and let me change teams) - and over years saw this
| process repeat over and over. When an employee is in
| trouble, I immediately start advising them on the steps
| their manager will take - it usually plays out as
| described above.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > I rarely have seen (1) come into play. I'm sure it
| happens, but there is a lot of scrutiny of the stack
| rank, enough where I think it would be hard to pull off.
|
| In Amazon you will be PIPed (or rather put in focus,
| which is a first step that may lead to PIP) if you are
| marked as "Least effective" which is the bottom 15%.
|
| Your manager has to demonstrate why you are "Least
| Effective", and they have to demonstrate why you are "Top
| tier". However, they don't really have to justify
| themselves to put you in the middle of the pack, where
| you will be safe from PIP.
|
| So, for sure, you may not be ranked in the top of the
| team if you're buddy with your boss, which means you
| won't get a salary increase for example, but at least you
| won't be PIPed, which in the end is what I assume most
| people care the most about.
| ctvo wrote:
| > They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP
| money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat.
|
| I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired
| during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP
| worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and
| Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they
| directly received 0 of it).
|
| Their stock price increased due to both performance during
| the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by
| the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than
| PPP targeting mid-size businesses.
| blue039 wrote:
| I also think I'm being interpreted as supporting stack
| ranking for some reason by some inept commenters passing
| by. I'm not sure how they're getting that.
| vaidhy wrote:
| You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a
| completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing
| quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig
| might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless).
|
| The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not
| realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy
| penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A
| large part of core services have been built over several years
| (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for
| some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think
| of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off
| between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think
| about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would
| spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to
| prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot
| of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their
| own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational
| load.
|
| From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is
| bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field
| development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy
| platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of
| semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load.
| Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every
| annual plan I created when I was there.
| jsharf wrote:
| I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate
| functionality. The requirements are usually never actually
| identical and when you try to merge them it results in
| services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge
| cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I
| suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and
| not even a bad thing.
|
| That being said, Google for comparison does have good code
| re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud,
| tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock
| infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.
| vaidhy wrote:
| I did not say it is bad. I just wanted to point out that
| N^2 communications are a big hit (of course we know them
| for long time) and people under-estimate the co-ordination
| effort and the fact that already running systems impose
| constraints that are not true for green-field efforts.
|
| I think I am regurgitating mythical man-month here and will
| shut up.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| > the fact that already running systems impose
| constraints that are not true for green-field efforts
|
| Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I often find that doing a
| new greenfield project sounds easier but by the time you
| deal with all of the non-functional stuff (connectivity,
| resilience, logging, build tools, documentation etc) you
| might have been quicker holding your nose and bodging it
| in somewhere vaguely appropriate in an existing system.
| vaidhy wrote:
| There is shit-ton of work to be done :)
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I really wish more people understood this. I'm working for a
| company that's in the middle of a move to the cloud and it
| feels like no one is acknowledging the sheer level of
| complexity being added.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| > micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team
| co-ordination
|
| This is, by far, the hardest scaling problem in SaaS: How do
| we divide responsibilities amongst our (code|services|teams)
| efficiently?
|
| You can only grow each so much before they become unwieldy to
| manage.
|
| Divide scope too much and communication becomes complex.
|
| Divide along the wrong abstraction and you get duplication,
| overlap, and confusion about what's responsible for what.
|
| And as time passes, decisions of the past constrain and
| complicate your options to redesign/rearchitect/reorg today.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| So it's "bad micro-service architecture imposes a heavy
| penalty on team co-ordination", then.
|
| ...which is a fairly obvious observation. "Bad <x> imposes
| a heavy penalty on team co-ordination" is generalizable.
| vaidhy wrote:
| There is no bad vs good micro-service architecture. It is
| just that micro-service architecture imposes a different
| kind of penalty on co-ordination and debugging. Instead
| of intra-component dependency, it moves it to inter-
| service dependency. Each service might look simple, but
| the complexity is moved to service communications. It is
| not that obvious, imho.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| There absolutely are bad microservice architectures,
| that's a weird claim to make. Good microservice
| architectures minimize or entirely eliminate the friction
| around the coordination and debugging. I'm working on
| splitting out a monorepo as we speak and I'm determining
| tradeoffs we'll need to make. If I do this wrong, there
| will be a lot of pain around navigating between the
| services, but there are choices I can make now that
| minimize (or eliminate in some cases) that pain.
|
| I recommend you find a way to spend time with someone who
| knows how to design a quality microservices architecture.
| It will completely change your opinion about how
| microservices interact and the supposed "pain" therein.
| vaidhy wrote:
| If it were so obvious, I am wondering why you need to
| worry about doing it wrong. You talk about trade-offs as
| if they are fixed in time. That is not the case at all in
| anything but toy systems. Maybe you need to find someone
| who can design a quality micro-service?
|
| You have no idea what I do and what my competencies are,
| yet, you are assuming you know a lot more about system
| design than I do and I am missing something simple.
|
| Here is another take from Bryan Cantrill
| [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE&t=1413s].
| Very likely, he does not know anything about services
| either, I guess.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Can you show me where I said "building microservices is
| obvious"? Or if you don't believe I said that, can you
| describe what you think it is I'm suggesting here?
| Because my intent was to say, "It is obvious that
| microservices can be designed well and designed poorly."
| In fact, if you'll observe, I removed the word
| "microservices" from my final statement, to demonstrate
| that such a statement is trivially true for any given
| thing.
|
| Nowhere did I say, "It is obvious how to design a good
| microservice." but it seems like you're arguing against
| that statement, not the one I made.
|
| And for what it's worth, I don't give a hoot who you are,
| who Bryan Cantrill is, or what your supposed competencies
| are; make your argument, don't rely on your pedigree to
| speak for you. _That_ should be obvious.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, what is good and bad can change over time with the
| business. Few judgement calls in software will last
| forever.
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I think the answer is kind of obvious, but disappointing:
| the way to scale is to both divide responsibility while
| simultaneously sharing it. The way to do this _well_ is to
| work on the basics: communication, training, quality,
| study, operations, continuous improvement.
|
| There is no magical model for this, no buzzword, no single
| practice, because different businesses and use cases need
| to be adapted to it. But there's 70+ years of study into
| methods to do this, and I believe they're taught by all the
| business schools. It's just nobody wants to do the work.
|
| ....On the other hand, nobody teaches MBAs how drastically
| different tech is than other industries, and thus how you
| run your "factory floor" has to be different. But the basic
| principles above should still be applied; they just have to
| be adapted to the industry and work. What one should _not_
| do is just accept things however that industry does it,
| because they probably aren 't doing the above principles
| either.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| This sounds like all but two of my software jobs. The
| greatest challenge of being an individual contributor is
| being beholden to the constraints of the environment. If they
| tell you to dig a hole then that's what you do. If they tell
| you to waste all day digging into some unnecessary framework
| to make a single CSS change that should take 30 seconds plus
| a few minutes for deployment then that's what you do.
|
| In front end development people NEED the world's largest
| application frameworks (sometimes plural) because they cannot
| figure out state management. State management is stupid
| simple and a solved problem, but whatever. It will still, at
| the job, take you all day (maybe a week) to make that 30
| second change.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations for resources/tools on
| state management? My background is in robotics engineering
| and I'm working on picking up front end so I can build end
| to end web apps for myself. Currently learning react with a
| lot of head scratching.
| jrockway wrote:
| If you're building web apps for yourself, do you even
| need to do state management? Just print the results
| wrapped in HTML from your backend.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| I'm hoping to grow side projects that I enjoy working on
| but not in the short term, hence current focus is to only
| build things for myself. It's also fun and educational
| for me to develop my own toolbox to get a sense for what
| works at different scales, how to iterate quickly on
| features of arbitrary complexity in the same spirit as
| PG's beating the averages essay.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| I wrote a thorough examination of state management with a
| code example. That essay is small enough to fit on two
| printed pages. I cannot share things I have written
| without breaking the anonymity of this account.
|
| Here is the summary:
|
| * You need a storage location
|
| * You need a defined data structure to store your state
| data. I recommend storing everything in a single logical
| storage object, because 1 is simple and simple is good.
|
| * You will need to update and save your storage object at
| the needs of your application. I do it on each user
| interaction, because this is cheap.
|
| * On page load you will need to access your storage
| object and apply it to the user facing event handlers
| that create your state artifacts that otherwise normally
| execute in response to user interactions.
|
| That's it. Consider the problem from the goal and work
| backwards to the solution.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| That's helpful. Thank you for taking the time to
| summarize your essay and sharing it here.
| throwaway23597 wrote:
| This is why I hate frontend so much. Frontend sits right at
| the uncomfortable intersection between overly complicated
| tech that's tough to understand, and demanding PMs and UXs
| who _need_ the feature to look or behave a certain way. I
| initially enjoyed frontend because of the hands-on nature
| of it, being able to make something and then play around
| with it in my browser. But after the 100th time wrestling
| around with CSS and JS to make some minuscule style change,
| I just am done with it.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| I super enjoy pushing innovative new front end
| technologies in personal projects where a 30 second fix
| might take as much as 5 minutes after test automation and
| all necessary due diligence, but at past jobs I just dig
| that hole they tell me to dig.
|
| If you try to bring up that the days work could be solved
| in less than hour if only we didn't make all the wrong
| decisions and fear the platform they will look at you
| like you're retarded. I have heard this mentality
| expressed perfectly in the movie Edge of Tomorrow: _Don't
| tell anybody. Are we clear? Best case scenario you're
| gonna end up in a psych ward. Worse case you'll get
| dissected for study_
| Andys wrote:
| Best argument around for doing your own startup.
| axg11 wrote:
| Context: I recently left Amazon
|
| Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely
| bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very
| over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working
| on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy
| there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year.
| Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for
| their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a
| platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big
| platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the
| investment anymore.
| ctvo wrote:
| Unlike Facebook Alexa was somewhat successful. See Alexa
| microwaves, cars, TVs, etc.. It looks like Amazon also knows
| when to move on vs. Meta.
| axg11 wrote:
| Success is relative. Voice didn't turn out to be "the next
| big computing platform". It's still mostly a command
| interface. Perhaps it still could become something bigger.
| Alexa isn't widely used on the iPhone/iOS/CarPlay or
| Android/Android Auto, the two most important places for
| voice. Alexa works well but doesn't have a clear technology
| advantage vs Google Assistant (admittedly, Siri is trash).
|
| Contrast that to VR, which is in a much earlier stage of
| its technology and adoption cycle: Meta has a strong
| technology advantage, currently has the best overall
| platform and _if_ VR becomes the next big computing
| platform, Meta is in a strong position to capture a
| significant proportion of market share. It's a big if! but
| at least there's still a chance.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Voice as an interface sucks for almost everything where
| choices exist. As a purely serial communications method
| you are forced to wait for enumerated choices.
|
| As a primary interface voice was very widely used in the
| 80s and 90s in the form of IVRs and the industry was
| immediately destroyed by web browsers as fast as was
| possible. Nothing makes people angrier than having to go
| through a phone menu system and that's just an organized
| version of your more general voice interface.
|
| "Alexa set a timer" defines the kinds of interactions
| that are sensible to do with voice and it is very, very
| narrow.
|
| It was never, ever going to be big.
| pm90 wrote:
| Voice still has a _lot_ of potential, especially with the
| advances in AI that we 've been seeing recently. A robust
| voice-controlled interface would be immensely useful to
| consumers. I think the investment in Alexa voice is well
| worth it compared to whatever meta is doing atm.
| draw_down wrote:
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Alexa is crazy. Close to 10K employees for a product that
| they don't even know how to monetize. I understand that it's
| part of the Amazon flywheel but there's a limit of how much
| you can rely on AWS to fund you.
|
| Alexa is full of horrible managers that only care about
| growing their teams so that they can get a promo.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Alexa does seem like it has fantastic potential. To throw
| so many resources at it with so little result seems like an
| incredibly massive failure of management.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Alexa was Jeff's pet project. Management failure, indeed.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Failure for whom? The shareholders, sure. But Alexa is
| pretty cool. It is the first voice interaction that I
| have used that actually works. So good for Jeff.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their
| roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general
| AI so powerful, it would change the whole world.
|
| I wonder if, within my lifetime, it will be possible to
| tell a digital assistant to "order all the ingredients I
| need to bake the cinnamon buns as detailed in the
| cinnamon bun baking video I watched last month with the
| Chinese lady that doesn't have an accent"?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Based on the capability of state of the art language
| models, we may get that soon. The technology largely
| exists, but the compute is still too expensive. Rumor has
| it that GTP-4 will be able to pass for human-like.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right, the missing step to make these assistants
| actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play
| [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"--which are
| basically just a voice-driven command line--has almost
| nothing to do with voice recognition _per se_ and is
| more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI".
|
| It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu
| and shopping list for your week, interact
| conversationally to tweak it including understanding that
| something like "I'm allergic to that ingredient" means
| _never ever try to include it again_ while other
| statements of preference may be much softer, learn your
| preferences so those conversations get shorter every
| week, and order the ingredients for you, too. It barely
| matters if that happens over keyboard input or voice,
| because the hard parts of that problem have nothing to do
| with how the input is done.
| leetcrew wrote:
| even a "voice-driven command line" would still be pretty
| useful if it actually worked reliably. Google's
| implementation misinterprets my parents' address about
| 50% of the time, choosing some town I've never visited in
| another state as the most likely alternative. I navigate
| to that address at least once a month, and I even have it
| as a saved place in maps.
| ghaff wrote:
| The voice recognition (given decent hardware and a fairly
| vanilla accent) is quite good. The problem is being able
| to integrate, present options, learn preferences, etc.
| even to the degree of that subpar assistant who you only
| keep paying because they're the daughter of your mother's
| best friend.
|
| You want to be able to give a few parameters for a trip
| you're taking and get some choices back. But, as you say,
| that's far more about "intelligence" than the type of
| input.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| If there was also a screen, so many more things could be
| done. For example it could show that list of ingredients
| and their prices, for your approval. Then let's say you
| could interact with that screen by voice (your fingers
| are sticky because you're cooking now) or touch.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is one in Amazon Echo Show. I've never used one
| though so I don't know how useful it is in practice. The
| thing is though that I'm never far from a computer in my
| house so I'm going to one of those for anything remotely
| complex.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Alexa is funded by retail's profits.
| rapsey wrote:
| Retail has no profits. AWS is the profit center.
| dbliss wrote:
| and advertising
| bushbaba wrote:
| Retail has no profit after all expenses. One of those
| expenses is Alexa
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What needs to be distinguished here is retail as in
| Amazon procuring and selling goods, or retail as in
| Amazon being a platform and another version of
| Aliexpress.
|
| The former is a low single digit profit margin business,
| the latter probably has a decent profit margin.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > don't even know how to monetize
|
| Amazon music subscriptions are $15.99/month. Doesn't that
| count? Sure, you can buy that without an Alexa, but that is
| the whole reason people do.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even
| know how to monetize.
|
| Or work consistently.
|
| "Alexa play music".. Nothing... Do it a few times and it
| finally does play music? I could have gotten up and done it
| myself easier/faster at times.
|
| the links and offering is solid. I have spotify connected
| to my amazon account and this is NICE..but as i said, the
| inconsistency is frustrating.
| criddell wrote:
| I have an Echo and a Homepod and I rarely use the Echo
| anymore because of their "by the way, did you know..."
| responses. They know there are a lot of users who want to
| disable that but unfortunately their goals aren't aligned
| with their users' goals.
| odysseus wrote:
| I got rid of my Echo mostly because of those types of
| responses. And also for how easy they make it for you to
| buy something accidentally off Amazon, or accidentally
| upgrade to Music Unlimited.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Everything I use Alexa for:
|
| "Alexa, set a timer for x mins / wake me up at x time."
|
| "Alexa, what's the weather today?"
|
| "Alexa, can dogs eat <type of food>?"
|
| "Alexa, play <the song I just referenced so my wife knows
| the reference even though she doesn't care>"
|
| Mostly just the first two. I don't care about anything else
| they try to push on me.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform
|
| It turns out that there are many interaction models where
| Voice is clearly inferior. Visual discovery (contrast with
| music) such as for videos, as well as navigation in a UI, are
| poorly done via voice.
| barbazoo wrote:
| The fact that organizations have multiple teams working on
| overlapping or even similar things baffles me. I can't
| imagine how that wouldn't be immensely dissatisfying for the
| individual.
| shmatt wrote:
| This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He
| would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would
| survive, while the other teams products were thrown away
|
| This goes all the way back to his early days (I think I
| remember a scene about this in The Pirates of Silicon
| Valley), but also reportedly multiple teams were building
| very different original iPhones
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think this approach makes sense for hardware but not
| pure software.
|
| I think its easier to adjust pure software iteratively
| than hardware. So with hardware, it makes sense to have
| different teams working on similar but different things
| because variations of ideas need to be fleshed (and
| thoughts that spawn off those ideas) and it can be hard
| for one team to do this iteratively.
|
| If you're right and this is where it came from, I think
| largely pure software teams doing this are wasting
| resources, but if its hardware I don't agree its wasteful
| bitL wrote:
| It was way before Jobs, IBM was using it ages ago.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Isn't this part of the premise of the book Hackers?
| Haven't read it in like 25 years, but that's what I
| vaguely remember.
| warner25 wrote:
| I don't recall this coming up in _Hackers: Heroes of the
| Computer Revolution_ , but it was definitely in _The Soul
| of A New Machine_ , the story about Data General trying
| to build their first 32-bit computer.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Thank you... it was Soul of a New Machine. I don't think
| I even ever read Hackers!
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Jobs gets credit for everything in computing the way
| Churchill gets credit for all the good quotes.
| giaour wrote:
| I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Hey, Churchill
| didn't say that; that was me."
| lightbendover wrote:
| Not all teams are created equal. Having multiple teams with
| an extremely similar charter promotes competition, harder
| work, and deeper search for synergies elsewhere. A single
| team with a guarded remit is not going to try as hard and
| they may outright fail on their mission even if they do
| have internal competition.
|
| It makes a lot of sense if you can afford it.
| onion2k wrote:
| Amazon has about 75,000 engineers. That's the equivalent of
| a large town. It's completely reasonable that many people
| would end up duplicating the work of other teams simply
| because they never communicate with them.
| axg11 wrote:
| Internally it was sold as: working together with other
| teams is too inefficient due to dependencies and differing
| priorities. It's faster to build it again independently
| than integrate with the existing service.
| kevan wrote:
| The philosophy is "1 > 2 > 0". This means ideally you'd
| prefer a single thing but single things often bottleneck
| delivery from different orgs as they have differing
| requirements. In that case you'll accept
| overlap/duplication if it keeps those orgs decoupled and
| both delivering faster.
|
| I ran into this a couple years ago with partially
| duplicating a service that existed under another SVP org.
| It didn't feel good at the time but in hindsight it was
| probably less effort and higher chance of success than
| trying to align priorities across SVP orgs and making their
| thing work for our slightly different use cases.
| bitL wrote:
| You spawn multiple teams working on very similar projects
| without them knowing about each other, let them grow for a
| while, then choose the most promising one (or with the
| highest traction) as your default solution and kill off the
| rest. Pretty normal exploration strategy.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| In environments where missing deadlines can have huge
| cascading effects it isn't unheard of to do redundant work
| so that you have a better shot of meeting your deadline and
| in a good case you have multiple successful options to pick
| from. When your deadlines are potentially expensive enough
| (think capital investment that need to be bought in time to
| be built out before old ones become uneconomical to
| operate) this approach can be well worth it.
| lightbendover wrote:
| Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn't mean
| they are working on impactful projects. Directors and
| especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue
| and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further
| provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and
| it's up to them to report up stacking within their remit and
| defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are
| made, it's not always "fair" and varies greatly across orgs.
| All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always
| make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another
| layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the
| best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org
| level based on value to the business.
|
| Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high
| performer in the context of a team or org may be a low
| performer if taking value to the overall business into account.
| Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that
| value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).
| masterof0 wrote:
| I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind,
| from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking
| for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away.
| I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to
| them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on
| news stories.
| dsr_ wrote:
| A reported doesn't need to even know who they're talking to
| in order to get leads on who should be pursued, but being
| wrong can lead to a lot of wasted hours.
| brewdad wrote:
| What makes you think that isn't step two? Step one is finding
| the people and their stories then following up with the most
| promising/compelling ones.
| masterof0 wrote:
| Sure, there is plenty of ways to get someone from that
| company's attention, Looking for trolls in Blind is not the
| best way really, anyone can say anything their one, and the
| reporter would have no way of verifying it, then will
| publish something that is false, which we all know have
| happened many times. But if you think BBC is a extremely
| reliable source, then, yeah, you are right.
| RobertDeNiro wrote:
| This is what happens when you optimize for a certain metric
| only. Yeah you might have someone's who's writing tons of high
| quality code, but if this code is just a duplication of another
| project or there is no business use for it, then it you
| probably would have been better off not writing it in the first
| place.
|
| People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?
| nkassis wrote:
| It's not necessarily individuals. From what I saw years ago
| there are tons of project kicked off to see if they pan out but
| are probably not going to succeed. The company has some core
| teams around retails, mobile and AWS that do the majority of
| the table stakes work. The rest is a lot of team doing things
| that may or may not have any value. My pessimistic view is that
| required teams are like 10% of the company leaving 90% of maybe
| useful. That isn't to say the 90% should be let go. If they did
| you'd see no growth but it's unclear how much of it is actually
| useful. In good times that's fine, in rougher time they have to
| reduce that extra a bit.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to
| say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement.
| Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion
| using an undefined metric.
| malfist wrote:
| It's also pretty standard for an engineer to say "Yeah, I
| could build that in a weekend" when talking about some super
| scaled website like twitter or facebook or whatnot.
|
| "Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're
| terrible at judging efforts involved.
| black_13 wrote:
| ericmcer wrote:
| If the stack ranking works then yeah they would have no bloat,
| but teams are just trying to demonstrate their value to someone
| above them who is trying to assess their value while
| demonstrating their own. How valuable they actually are is
| pretty difficult to assess. There are probably many teams
| sucking up millions that have a net negative impact with their
| contributions but how do you measure that.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is
| that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are
| stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
|
| If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due
| to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant
| low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them?
|
| So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there are "many low
| performers/bloat" are at odds.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or
| manage them out every review cycle.
|
| No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.
| ctvo wrote:
| > Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP
| or manage them out every review cycle.
|
| A slight correction: An organizational unit larger than a 2
| pizza team -- think 50 engineers, is expected to cut 5-10%.
| A team within that unit may lose 0 engineers, which is how
| high performing teams that meet all their goals stay
| intact.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Fair. But every manager must be prepared to put one of
| their people forward, even if they ultimately don't have
| to in the session. The pressure is still there.
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| Which, unfortunately, is only so much related performance.
| Feedback circles and cabals are a thing. Pkus some people
| are better at operating those cycles than others.
| discopicante wrote:
| Amazon is notorious for practicing _forced_ attrition e.g.
| forcing the relative low performers out of the org (who still
| might be performing at expectations, onboarding, etc.).
| jrd259 wrote:
| In eight years at Amazon (in the supply chain org as SDE and
| SDM) I have not encountered anything close to "ruthless". It is
| true that there is rough stack ranking, but only in large
| organizations where it is statistically meaningful.
| serioussecurity wrote:
| Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out
| of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working
| environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard
| to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but
| Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd
| go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they
| are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper,
| designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting
| two years of boilerplate from them.
| jrd259 wrote:
| This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it
| would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of
| work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first
| six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We
| hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
| rurp wrote:
| > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
|
| :eyeroll:
|
| This reads like PR fluff and flies against the experiences
| shared by a _lot_ of employees, current and former. Amazon
| is a huge company with a lot of variation between teams so
| I 'm sure it's not a meat grinder for everyone, but they
| don't have this reputation for no reason.
| serioussecurity wrote:
| Done much crying at your desk recently?
|
| My boss at Amazon told me he was happy that his baby was
| born prematurely, because it meant he could be back at work
| in time for a launch.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
|
| I keep hearing this, but as a customer, I don't see it.
|
| Amazon retail experience is poor.
|
| The layout of the site sucks (so many clicks just to see
| all the reviews).
|
| They used to allow comments to reviews, which often were
| _very_ useful (e.g. top review complaining about something
| not working, and the comments explain how to fix it). But
| reviewers weren 't notified of the comments so they
| couldn't engage. And to top it all of, they recently
| removed all the comments.
|
| The reviews have been gamed, not very useful.
|
| They still let people make product pages with very
| different products as "formats", and that skews the reviews
| the wrong way.
|
| Lots of counterfeit product issues. Perhaps more common:
| Problems with comingling items. I know it doesn't happen
| often, but being burned once is bad enough. I recently
| bought a toy for my daughter's birthday. The box had
| creases. Upon opening it was clear this was a used item.
| Some of the items were out of their (sealed) packaging.
| Perhaps my mistake for not examining it before, but
| whenever I buy from Walmart or Target, I don't even have to
| _think_ this will be a problem. Fixing it up with a great
| return policy is not a solution. Oh, and I couldn 't return
| it. They recently made it hard to contact a human, and the
| automated return system on their web site wouldn't let me
| return if I had used it. I had to open it as we couldn't
| change her birth date.
|
| The search sucks. Way too many results that have nothing to
| do with what I searched. eBay, of all sites, is _way_
| better in this regard.
|
| I've also been an Amazon seller (FBA). The seller portal
| was _crap_.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out
| of people to interview. It 's a wood chipper, designed to
| burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years
| of boilerplate from them._
|
| I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers,
| not IT workers.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's also true of their engineering - they have a
| _terrible_ reputation which caused them to raise salaries
| _a ton_ in the last 2 years just to try to get comparable
| engineers.
|
| They easily pay 30% more for the same engineer just because
| of their culture/reputation.
| keithnz wrote:
| out of interest, with all these big layoffs, does the tech job
| market in the US pretty much consume these people pretty quick?
| or does it take quite a while for these people to find new jobs?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been
| living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles
| have popped up.
|
| Basically there has been no official communication about teams
| affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be
| shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their
| director.
|
| This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the
| layoff wave has passed or not, etc.
|
| The past 3 days have probably been the least productive for all
| of Amazon's existence, everyone is thinking only about those
| layoffs (and I'm in an org that is supposed to be safe...).
|
| So far there are reports of about 30 teams being shut down, but
| new ones are coming every hour or so.
|
| Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out"
| email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook, Twitter,
| etc. but no, we're going to be living in fear for the next weeks
| or months.
| ars wrote:
| > This layoff is horribly mismanaged
|
| It's not, it's like that everywhere. Every layoff follows the
| same pattern that you describe.
|
| I don't know the exact reason for it, but if every single
| company does the same thing, there has to be a reason I don't
| know, since I've never managed a mass layoff.
| supergeek133 wrote:
| Unfortunately this is how it works at a lot of companies. Just
| a mess.
|
| I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share...
| we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months
| you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were
| laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of
| notification/SEC?
|
| Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they
| gathered everyone in a room, said "go back to your desks you'll
| see a 15 minute meeting on your calendar if you're impacted"
| and at the end of the day they gathered the remainder in a room
| and said "if you're here you're safe".
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| Usually to avoid the WARN act reporting. there's a few things
| that can trigger it.
| [deleted]
| quaffapint wrote:
| Nothing more demoralizing than living in fear and rumorville. I
| was at a big bank post 2008 and it was months of messages about
| did you hear so and so got the tap on the shoulder. You never
| knew when or why, you just didn't know everyday if it was going
| to be your last. Not exactly how you want to live your life.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| No better point re: living in fear and rumorville. Same
| experience for me in 2008. I also saw the same effect post
| dot-com bubble.
|
| Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term
| game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the
| last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were
| opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart,
| hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and
| spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.
| zhivota wrote:
| Hah yeah I worked in payments at once of the card processors,
| this happened every year like clockwork. 1-2 months just down
| the drain because everyone running around gossiping or
| sitting at their desk in terror.
|
| It was such a joke, but I used to be of the belief that the
| card processors were so incredibly profitable, that they had
| to actually waste money to not be targeted by regulators too
| much (which monitored their profit levels to determine if
| they wanted to impose lower card fee rates). So these kinds
| of things were actually healthy for the business, along with
| insane travel and entertainment budgets - I used to routinely
| spend >$10,000 on plane flights back to HQ from Asia.
| Shish2k wrote:
| > Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're
| out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook
|
| Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only
| learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying
| they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they
| could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments
| (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his whole
| life from India to the USA)
|
| I suspect that there's actually no great win/win way of doing
| mass layoffs -\\_(tsu)_/-
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The thing is that it's the same here. I saw a LinkedIn post
| from a guy at Amazon that got layed off 2 days after joining
| as well.
|
| The difference is that not only you get no notice, you
| actually don't know when the wave of layoffs is done and when
| you can take a break from worrying.
| Macha wrote:
| It's not a dichotomy between "no layoffs, no layoffs, please
| leave the building and never come back" and "There maybe will
| be layoffs but we can't tell you if you're in them or not" -
| in both cases the problem is the lack of knowledge.
|
| The company could also just give workers notice. Works fine
| here in Europe.
| pm90 wrote:
| CEO of Meta had been warning for months that there would be a
| freeze and possibly layoffs, unlike other firms that were
| promising "no layoffs".
|
| The people I know that worked at Meta all started interview
| prepping after those announcements. It should not have come
| as a surprise.
| fortylove wrote:
| Seems like the layoffs were not announced well, with many people
| still not knowing whether they are or are not impacted, and no
| clear message from the top. Shameful, especially contrasting to
| how recent layoffs were handled by Meta and Stripe.
| uberman wrote:
| Note: Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a 29.28%
| increase from 2020.
|
| So the proposed cuts represent less than 1% of their profit (not
| net) from last year.
| mrep wrote:
| Where are you getting your numbers? They had 469 billion
| dollars in revenue and 38 billion dollars of income before
| taxes in 2021 [0].
|
| [0]:
| https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Gross profit generally means profit on sales/services after
| COGS (costs directly related to producing/providing those
| revenues) but not including other costs like admin, etc.
| elforce002 wrote:
| The market ATM is really odd. On one side, you see these news
| pouring and giving us devs a little ansiety and on the other
| side, there are companies still trying to hire like crazy. I've
| received 3 emails from recruiters just today. It seems small-
| medium tier companies are looking to capitalize over this
| "downturn" by offering full WFH positions and other perks since
| they can't compete on salaries.
|
| This is purely anecdotal but I shared this to give other devs
| that may feel like "this is the end", some hope for the future.
| The reality is that software development is almost ubiquitous;
| almost every industry is being touched by it.
|
| We have to keep improving and wait for the whiplash when the time
| comes (prob. 2023Q2 at best or 2024Q2 if things get worse).
|
| Check small-medium tier companies with WFH and try to move to a
| low-cost city. You'll get the best of both worlds, hehe.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Strange times, but expected. At some point there was a recession
| to be expected at these code factories. The higher the scale the
| higher the impact. Old age car manufacturers used to employ
| entire cities and once they went bust these cities went bust with
| them. We need to be careful in allowing software factories to
| grow as large, else we risk the same fate. Personally I'd stay
| away from such employers (not that I have been an employee in a
| long time, but still if needed i'd avoid them).
| no_wizard wrote:
| Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly
| hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does
| right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do.
|
| Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is
| that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback"
| job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find
| anything else relatively quickly.
|
| Seemed like they were _always_ hiring, and if I needed to eat, it
| would allow me to keep my standard of living for a 12-18 months
| while I figure things out. Best case: I somehow end up liking
| working there and stay for 4 years, worst case: I can keep my
| standard of living while the recession eases and move on to
| something else.
|
| I will say, I got alot of recruiters from the Alexa division and
| I'm glad I didn't take them up now. AWS looks unaffected by this
| though.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Saying Amazon is your "backup" shows you think really little of
| Amazon engineers. I think it's honestly offensive.
| bjoernw wrote:
| I would take it more as a comment on the sheer volume of
| hiring, meaning there was a place for any level of engineer
| there.
| karmasimida wrote:
| For entry-level ... yes?
|
| Amazon isn't selective in hiring L4s, it hires some people
| who simply can't code and PIP them in next 6 months.
|
| It is just how Amazon chooses to operate.
|
| Good ones are still there though, just varies very big from
| team to team, org to org.
|
| Essentially, Amazon engineer means nothing significant, the
| bar isn't consistent across its body
| no_wizard wrote:
| so, I say fallback in the sense that I felt confident I could
| interview there and apply without much friction. I got _alot_
| of LinkedIn invites from recruiters - typically once a week -
| for over a _year_.
|
| I think Amazon engineers are - by and large - pretty great
| actually, worked with more than a few ex-Amazon engineers to
| know.
|
| This was, and I admit, an offhand comment of which I should
| have explained this context better.
|
| I also don't believe the interview is "easy", but it felt
| _available_ and I 'm someone who - even for companies that
| don't crazy rigorous hiring practices - goes really deep
| before any interview, reading many weeks in advance worth of
| stuff about the company and their hiring process, learning
| etc. I practice alot, so I felt like I could do well with the
| Amazon interview. In fact, I did one once before and it
| wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it just didn't
| work out at the time for me to join.
| racl101 wrote:
| There's a lot of factors why it might have been that person's
| fallback even though it might have been your first choice.
| The product, the culture, the location, salary, WFH, options,
| benefits, etc.
|
| I knew a guy who would passed up working for Apple for a
| relatively unknown non-FAAANG company.
|
| People have their reasons. It's not that everyone working for
| Apple is lesser than. It's more that this guy had his own
| reasons.
|
| To each his or her own.
| hawaiianbrah wrote:
| This is the joke in Seattle. You can always get a job at
| Amazon. Not anymore, currently!
| bgro wrote:
| Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to
| consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path
| (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They
| still do leetcode screening don't they?
|
| IMO they've been harder than the others because the process is
| so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test.
| There's no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they
| changed that recently.
|
| You don't get to show off your leadership or any other skills
| this way. You either memorized the solution to the random
| leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Uh, they definitely ask you a bunch of questions and you
| basically need to speak to their leadership principles. Being
| good at leetcode alone can't get you in, or that's the
| impression I've gotten from friends who work there. But I
| suppose it depends.
| kypro wrote:
| I think he meant being an Amazon warehouse worker / delivery
| driver would get him by until he found something better.
| hn_acc_2 wrote:
| Actually, among the MAGMA companies I've found the _least_
| bias for leetcode-memorization at Amazon.
|
| My interview with Meta was exactly as you described (a CS
| riddle taken from a textbook, to be solved without running
| the code or receiving hints). But in my interview with
| Amazon, each coding interview also included a couple
| leadership questions. If you want you can look up the exact
| questions that they'll give you to test what they call their
| "Leadership Principles"
|
| Also the Amazon coding questions were not taken directly from
| Leetcode, and were easily reasoned out without prior
| knowledge of a special algorithm.
| malfist wrote:
| We have a question bank that we are required to ask from
| that can be found online.
|
| Coding questions and system design challenges are
| individual to the interviewer. Some are good, some are bad,
| some are leet code, some are reasonable, it's kinda a
| crapshot. I saw a bar raiser (a bar raiser!) asking path
| finding algorithms as his coding challenge which is nuts to
| me. All that signals is if you've worked with path finding
| algorithms before, or remember your college class that
| taught A*
|
| But I'll be honest, our interview process is public and
| online and hasn't changed in a long long time. We select
| mostly for people who have the spare time and dedication to
| learn our interview process.
| shuckles wrote:
| It's hard for me to interpret your comment since you
| never state who "we" refers to.
| turdprincess wrote:
| It could also signal that you got motivated and took many
| hours out of your busy day to do a meaningless task like
| memorize a path finding algorithms. This might be a good
| signal that you will also be motivated to spend many
| hours doing meaningless things at your job.
|
| Actually, if you think about it, the whole concept of
| getting a college degree isn't much different - its not
| about what you learn in the classes, it just shows that
| you have the capacity to go through an arbitrary social
| experience, follow a bunch of rules, learn some stuff,
| and stick with it for a few years - pretty similar to a
| job.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| They're well known for having one of the lowest hiring bars
| of the major tech corporations, certainly out of the
| traditional "FAANG" they are by far the easiest to get hired
| at.
|
| N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty,
| from my impression.
|
| Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and
| they had massive turnover rates.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Arrath wrote:
| That is a fairly uncharitable reading of that post, which
| mentioned nothing of the (perceived) abilities or skills
| of the engineers.
|
| Your account name leads me to believe you've been
| impacted by this, and I feel for you. I am sorry. I hope
| you're able to find a new gig relatively stress free and
| find yourself in a better place.
| codyb wrote:
| Yea I suspect many of us know people who're terrible at
| LEET code problems who're great engineers. And vice
| versa.
|
| I hope Parent gets the help they need. I am thankful I
| cannot imagine a world where... Google's "elite"
| engineers impacted my world in such a drastic manner.
|
| Good luck to you friend.
| rjsw wrote:
| Maybe Amazon is more confident that they can get good
| work out of a broader range of people.
| zwkrt wrote:
| Yeah I would say that Amazon has a ton of basic work that
| needs to be done. The website is so big and complicated
| and multi-faceted compared to some of the other big tech
| companies. Sometimes you really just need to hire a
| developer/team to ensure that the underwear size-picker
| is working correctly. Of course Amazon also has lots of
| insane CS-heavy infrastructure and algorithm work as
| well.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Internet forums are not good places to visit when you're
| in a stressful situation. The fact is, the parent post
| neither said nor implied the thoughts that you've
| attributed to them.
|
| You need to make a plan to find your next position,
| instead of looking for things on the internet to get
| offended by.
| i_love_music wrote:
| Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I really hope
| you're doing ok and seek appropriate mental health
| support. Don't fret over the ranking of companies - we're
| all dead and forgotten in a few generations anyways. This
| is true for every Google and Netflix engineer in
| existence.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| I see it the same way, once you were in and left on good
| terms, you are always welcome back . I treat it as my
| fallback too, the shifts are easy, all you have to do is not
| be late (or early, for that matter) and adhere to break
| times. If you do that and you are not the weakest performer,
| you will have a good life. It is one of the very few
| companies where taking ownership is really rewarded, they lay
| the path for promotions, they even ask you which role you
| would like in the future and no hard feelings if you leave
| for another department.
|
| I have never seen or witnessed micromanaging, the holiday
| system is the best I have seen. Keep in mind I was a fully
| virtual employee, maybe things are different in office.
|
| I know I can go back there if I like and enter at a level
| where I get stock compensation right away with a solid
| salary.
|
| If you collect plenty of accolodates and maybe get a badge or
| two, they will never forget you.
|
| I think they habe a very good screening process and a pretty
| good sense for hiring the right people at any level(the
| requirements are rather high for the salary).
|
| The reason why they like to re hire people is often the
| immense onboarding cost, anything level 3 and up requires
| quite some learning and training time before you can even
| think of being productive. If I was hiring, there is no way I
| would hire a level 5 from outside amazon if I could give that
| role to an experienced level 4 employee. All teams are pretty
| huge, think of lets say 10 head team, within the first six
| months, they will habe 2-3 months of training and upskilling,
| and really, you have to habe that training to do things like
| vcs, vat etc, as you will at least have to have some fba
| skills for that role.
|
| If Amazon is letting people go, it must be pretty bad,
| usually they are not cheap about redundancy, theu are wise
| enough to be ready for spikes in business. Not sure what has
| happened there and I strictly speak for office jobs in
| europe, everything else , I do not know. The whole thing is
| quasi subsidised by aws and this comes bit as a surprise to
| me.
|
| I prefer bit more risky endeavours and chose amazon whenever
| my risk apetite has decreased.
|
| Amazon is a rather solid employee if you perform, just be on
| time and have good adherence time, as a company with a
| million employees, this is understandable. It is also much
| less chaotic than you would imagine from such a giant
| corporate entity.
|
| If they need you for programming, aws sales, language skills
| and tax matters, you will be doing fine there. On tax matters
| or newly established teams, the next level is always in sight
| and within reach. I hope the severance packages will be fair.
| I struggle to understand the bad rep for amazon seen online,
| working for musk or google is many times worse. Facebook used
| to be pretty good from what I hear.
|
| Maybe its all individual perception and a bit of luck or
| misfortune.
|
| As for the screenings, yes, they do, but they do not care
| about memorized things, they try to care and see how you
| start to deal with an issue.
| throckmortra wrote:
| They clearly layout their interview process and even have a
| video series on YouTube explaining how to pass it. It is not
| difficult but time-consuming to learn their interview
| "language"
|
| Leetcode screens are a matter of grinding for a couple of
| weeks
|
| Source: received an offer from them in March
| newobj wrote:
| The median turnover at Amazon is 18 months. They have to hire
| a lot. The bar is just lower.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > They still do leetcode screening don't they?
|
| I mean that's a big part of what makes it so easy. Near zero
| "culture fit" or anything random you just need to solve easy
| problems.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| The culture fit for Amazon IMO comes down to
|
| "are you willing to work nights and weekends on a moments
| notice no matter what?"
| malfist wrote:
| Our training material explicitly excludes culture fit
| questions or decisions since it is a source of bias.
| nostrebored wrote:
| The entire interview at Amazon is based around culture fit.
| The tech bar is the same across levels. The ability for you
| to execute in the culture is the whole point of the
| interview.
| cr4nberry wrote:
| > You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode
| problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.
|
| I thought the point was to actually learn the theory behind
| the question so memorizing isn't necessary? Like for dp
| questions for example: it's easier to do them if you just
| visualize the dag
|
| The whole "memorize every question" shtick is the wrong way
| imo. Just seems very time inefficient to me
| chairhairair wrote:
| "You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode
| problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it."
|
| No? You can actually use code to solve problems. Don't buy
| into the defeatism surrounding leetcode interviews.
| brokencode wrote:
| I think the point is that it can be hard to legitimately
| solve some of those tricky leetcode-style problems under
| time pressure, with no access to outside resources, and
| with the knowledge that somebody is judging your every
| move.
|
| Memorizing the common problems gives you a big leg up on
| being able to successfully pass an interview.
| Kranar wrote:
| While memorization is involved, people make it seem like
| you need to memorize specific solutions to specific
| leetcode problems, and that's just not only false but
| also a bizzare and almost impossible strategy.
|
| What you do need to memorize are a small group of
| algorithmic designs and have a good sense of when to
| apply each one. The main ones include divide and conquer,
| greedy, graph, and what seems to be the hardest of them
| all, dynamic programming algorithms.
|
| It's disappointing that so few developers know these or
| are comfortable with these designs since employing them
| provides significant speedups to what would otherwise
| involve deeply nested loops or other naive brute force
| solutions. Becoming familiar with the broad set of
| algorithm designs is something most competent developers
| should invest some time in, and it's not like it requires
| years and years to become good at it but the benefits are
| enormous.
| senderista wrote:
| I have literally seen interviewees expected to come up
| with Floyd's linked-list cycle-finding algorithm
| independently (or rather, pretend they did).
| tstrimple wrote:
| Honestly the "right" answer in most of these types of
| questions is to search for a popular existing
| implementation. There is never a "we've got to solve this
| bubble sort algorithm in a locked room with no internet
| access" scenario. I get that they want to select for
| people who can solve problems by thinking their way
| through solutions with code, but I've never been
| convinced that solving leet code challenges is the way to
| do that. I'd also much rather solve problems without
| writing a bunch of code that has to be maintained, so
| engineers familiar with the tooling ecosystem for their
| platform of choice should be highly valued.
| newbYhrly wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what they're optimizing for.
|
| They don't want thinkers who re-invent the wheel?
| tstrimple wrote:
| Then why are they testing them on reinventing the wheel?
| Isn't that exactly what leet code is doing?
| newbYhrly wrote:
| No it's testing who copy-pasted a highly rated solution.
| zem wrote:
| i've never interviewed at amazon, or even heard much about
| their interview process, but the sheer amount of recruiter
| spam i get from them gives off a "desperate for engineers we
| aren't getting" vibe, so i can see why people think it would
| be easier to get in there than at the other tech megacorps.
| zwkrt wrote:
| I worked at Amazon for 5 years and was in over 100 interview
| loops. Amazon won't hire you if you don't have the skills,
| but they are/were relatively lax in hiring compared to other
| big FAANG companies. It is also helpful that they
| historically have been such a huge and growing company that
| if you have the skills and the basic interview techniques
| down, they will try pretty hard to find a place for you.
| Amazon at least used to also offer a down-leveled role if it
| was obvious that you were a good programmer but couldn't
| prove to the capricious hiring loop that you were going to
| perform at the level you were applying for. This means if you
| are a mid-senior level programmer that interviewing for
| Amazon is kind of a slam-dunk in the sense that you'll
| definitely get hired even if for a lower level.
|
| I have thought similar to the grand-parent commenter about
| having Amazon as a fallback in the Seattle area. Not my ideal
| but somewhere that is always recruiting me and would pay the
| bills if the smaller company I am working for went under.
| markdown wrote:
| > they will try pretty hard to find a place for you.
|
| Probably not working on the website though, which is hot
| garbage and has been for a decade.
| no_wizard wrote:
| As explained lower in the thread, I should have given more
| context to my offhand remark. Since I can't edit the post
| itself, here's the context:
|
| I say fallback in the sense that I felt confident I could
| interview there and apply without much friction. I got alot of
| LinkedIn invites from recruiters - typically once a week - for
| over a _year_.
|
| I also don't believe the interview is "easy", but it felt
| _available_ and I 'm someone who - even for companies that
| don't crazy rigorous hiring practices - goes really deep before
| any interview, reading many weeks in advance worth of stuff
| about the company and their hiring process, learning etc. I
| practice alot, so I felt like I could do well with the Amazon
| interview. In fact, I did one once before and it wasn't nearly
| as bad as I thought it would be, it just didn't work out at the
| time for me to join and I had to pass on the opportunity.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| I'd start with with a lot instead of al(l)ot from allocate...
| dehrmann wrote:
| 3% is 6 months of unregretted attrition for Amazon.
| recursive_ wrote:
| From what I've heard Amazon had laxed their URA targets during
| the peak pandemic years. This is likely the correction for
| this.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think Amazon realized that their URA targets were creating
| massive headwinds when they were trying to hire.
| insanitybit wrote:
| And how much is Bezos worth? If your company is posting profits
| and executives are rolling in unprecedented piles of money
| there's no excuse for layoffs.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| No excuse? Really? You don't want to dial that back a notch and
| acknowledge the pending recession and the rash of over hiring
| in the tech market?
|
| And perhaps you've forgotten, Bezos isn't CEO any more and
| doesn't have anything to do with day to day Amazon.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| Bezos worth is based on the company stock, and the stock going
| up or down does not conjure "piles of money" to the company.
| Executive compensation (any employees', really) is a matter to
| the owners of the company. I don't own any Amazon stock, do
| you?
| triceratops wrote:
| You don't have a pension plan, or 401k, or holdings in some
| index or mutual fund?
| sangnoir wrote:
| How about the sacred "fiduciary duty" to shareholders and the
| Wall street gods? Sacrificing thousands employees on the altar
| of cutting costs stays their wrath,and they will bless you with
| higher share prices.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _the sacred "fiduciary duty" to shareholders_"
|
| It's imaginary:
|
| https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-
| fiducia...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-
| co...
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-
| co...
| akira2501 wrote:
| Are you suggesting Bezos didn't earn that money yet? That he
| still owes some duty or service in exchange for the money he's
| already received? At what point can he say he's actually
| "earned" that money and can spend it in whatever way he
| pleases?
|
| Should we apply the same logic to your life? My life? Everyone?
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [deleted]
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