[HN Gopher] Amazon's Silent Sacking
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon's Silent Sacking
Author : doitLP
Score : 254 points
Date : 2023-12-30 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justingarrison.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (justingarrison.com)
| alephnerd wrote:
| They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India
| now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in
| India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was
| unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL
| cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
|
| Addendum:
|
| Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon)
| are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning
| $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where
| median incomes might be $3-5k
|
| This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more
| competitive.
| timeagain wrote:
| Maybe it is just circumstance but I had been working with devs
| in Hyderabad since at least 2016 when I was at Amazon. I'm sure
| they are expanding the workforce there, though
| alephnerd wrote:
| They've been in HYD for some time, but HYD is fairly new in
| the Indian software scene.
|
| Traditionally, Delhi NCR and Bangalore were the big 2 tech
| hubs since the 80s-90s, but politicians who were also massive
| landlords in Hyderabad [0][1][2] began giving tech companies
| tax incentives to move to Hyderabad in the early 2000s
|
| It began as low tier Infosys type work, but began climbing up
| the value chain in the 2010s
|
| [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu
|
| [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao
|
| [2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy
| justin66 wrote:
| I mean, I don't know what they do there, but haven't
| Microsoft had an office in Hyderabad for over 20 years?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Delhi NCR and Bangalore were tech hubs since the 1980s,
| hence why I'm calling Hyderabad (and Pune) new as they
| began sprouting in the early 2000s
|
| Indore is becoming the next Hyderabad now as well. It's
| in the same position that Hyderabad was in the early
| 2000s.
| debarshri wrote:
| I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc. There are
| multiple factors. Ofcourse from orgs perspective it is cost
| saving measure. But from another phenomenon that has happened
| is that graduates from lower tier colleges have gotten good in
| cracking leetcode, faang style interviews.
|
| There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these
| interviews in India.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > graduates from lower tier colleges
|
| Lower tier colleges have gotten much better in quality too.
|
| I remember Indraprashta came to recruit Indian PhD students
| at my Ivy League tier college to become tenure track
| CS/ECE/EE professors.
|
| Plenty of lower tier IIITs and regional engineering colleges
| are getting Western or Top Tier IIT trained faculty, and
| students are higher quality now as well.
|
| As the child of a dad who attended one of these no name RECs
| who ended up becoming tech leadership here in the Bay, I'm
| glad that this democratization has occurred. The BITS Pilani
| and IITian uncles were very snobby and annoying.
| raincom wrote:
| What you cite is one factor. Another factor is access for
| students. Once upon a time, curious students had two
| choices: buy books to learn on their own; or go to whatever
| low quality teachers they had. Cheap internet, YouTube,
| LibGen, other resources help students as long as the latter
| desire to learn.
| debarshri wrote:
| Quality is a relative term. We have been hiring in India
| for past 2 years. I can tell you there is lot of noise and
| no substance. There is only handful of good candidates and
| they know they are good.
| ahiknsr wrote:
| > I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc
|
| Facebook doesn't have a Engineering office in India.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Doesn't Infra have a presence in Bangalore?
|
| https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/634858362137026/
| hackernewds wrote:
| I have encountered this during my time recruiting as well,
| where the same position I applied for was also listed for 1 day
| (then taken down) in Hyderabad. Likely stealthily collect
| applications. Ultimately, they said I passed the rounds, but
| the role was cut.
|
| Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India
| robustly for dev positions.
|
| When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that
| you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt
| that it is solely infeasible for _you_ to wfh at _your billing
| rate_.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Humana is starting to hire nurses in the Philippines. One would
| think that's a national security hole but what do I know.
|
| The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets
| my vote.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You don't have to outlaw it, just make it so economically
| painful as to be outlawed.
| intended wrote:
| Oh, yes please!
|
| As much as I would like labor laws to be improved Globally,
| I doubt governments will allow this.
|
| That said, I am dying to see some country try something
| similar again. There is something beautiful when voters
| hold politicians up to their values, and politicans fail to
| explain the competitive realities to their voters.
|
| Making outsourcing economically unviable is a magnicificent
| contender.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Nursing was always dependent on Pinoy labor.
|
| Because PH used to an American territory until 1946, the
| education system is largely the same [0].
|
| PH is to the US Medical system as India/Pakistan/Bangladesh
| are to the UK NHS
|
| [0] - https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-
| ameri...
| wharvle wrote:
| Indeed, Filipinos are a big part of the _US military_ , and
| someone's worried about Filipino nurses being a security
| threat? Hahaha.
|
| https://news.mit.edu/2020/philippines-us-military-
| alliance-0...
|
| But I'm not sure how well the history of the US in the
| Philippines is taught even in gen-ed college history
| classes, let alone, say, high school. One of those topics I
| think most folks learn about either through personal
| interest, or as part of a history or politics _major_ in
| college, apart from maybe a passing mention when covering
| the tail end of 19th century US history, or maybe a low-
| context entry in coverage of WWII. I guess it 's not as bad
| as mistaking Puerto Ricans for "foreigners", at least.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > history of the US in the Philippines is taught even in
| gen-ed college history classes, let alone, say, high
| school
|
| Depends on the state. I grew up in California, so Asian
| American history is extremely prominent since 1st grade.
| wharvle wrote:
| Ah. Plains state here. Maybe that's to California as
| Native American history was to us. That, the "age of
| exploration", western expansion, very bad revolutionary
| war history, and the "cradle of civilization"
| (Mesopotamia) must, collectively, have represented 95% of
| all our time spent on history, K-6.
| wharvle wrote:
| We _have to_ import medical professionals (or hire offshored
| ones, for telehealth or whatever) if we don 't want our
| healthcare system to collapse. We're gonna need to do a lot
| more of it as the years go on, too.
|
| Too bad we can't import doctors. That's the worst bottleneck.
|
| We're all gonna spend our twilight years being cared for
| almost exclusively by people who speak English with a heavy
| accent. The ball's been rolling that way for some time and
| it's got enough momentum that making anything else happen
| will take many decades.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It's like a health care ponzi scheme, what happens when the
| imports get old? The solution again is more imports. What
| about the source countries, did they not need medical
| professionals?
| wharvle wrote:
| Same thing that happens to most who aren't doing pretty
| damn financially well in the US, I guess? All their
| savings gets siphoned into the system, then they die
| younger than they might have, and less comfortably than
| they should, unless family takes very good care of them?
| Then debt collectors try to trick anyone connected to
| them into paying for medical & other debts they aren't
| responsible for? The usual.
|
| Anyway, worker visas don't have to be a path to
| citizenship, so this may fall, for better or worse, under
| "not our problem", depending on how it's all structured.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Which visa is that for the US? The ones I looked at are
| dual intent. I'm more familiar with the UK (NHS) where
| imports are expected to stay. I'm also pretty sure that
| the dual intent is part of the ability to pay under
| market rates where the immigration potential is a fringe
| benefit captured by the employer.
|
| Honestly when the current crop of adults from the
| 'healthy at any size' era get old it's going to be a
| medical shit show, I'm pretty sure governments will end
| up resorting to Canadian style MAID for the poor, sick,
| and old as no-one will have the money for proper care.
| wharvle wrote:
| Oh yeah, it's gonna be _real_ bad when the "our 'thin'
| people would have been considered fairly chubby 40 years
| ago" millennial generation (mine) gets old.
|
| Science might be about to rescue us from that with
| Ozempic and friends, assuming those don't turn out to do
| horrific things to a person over time. Once some of those
| go generic and the prices plummet, anyway. But failing
| that, yeah, it's gonna be a lot of skinny immigrants
| helping obese, diabetic 70-year-olds with shot knees &
| backs get to the bathroom. Or maybe we'll get robots for
| that, by then, go full Wall-E, who knows.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Yeah it's the millennials I'm currently worried about,
| they're also quite relatively poor so I suspect not many
| will be able to afford to retire let alone a high level
| receive medical care.
|
| I'm actually quite hopeful that ozempic mainly works by
| helping reverses hormonal damage caused by bad diets.
| Ozempic causes low gut mortality which can be very
| unpleasant and potentially dangerous, there are already
| conditions with the same effects so it's possible to
| benchmark what long term effects will be like (It's not
| great). I think there are safe ways to do it and that
| will be figured out. I think it has already changed the
| culture for the better. I'm hopeful this high BMI era
| turns out to just be a phase instead of a one way
| ratchet. Where I live there are few overweight people so
| it's always a bit of a shock to me whenever I travel.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I know that if you have a PhD it's way easier to get
| permanent immigration status than it is with a MS or BS.
|
| I'd be surprised if the same weren't true for MDs.
|
| Edit: it's an O-1 visa. To get one you need to show
| "special skills" in your area. For an academic (and I
| presume for physicians) that would be things like good
| research publications and so on. You have to be above the
| norm in some way.
|
| The advantage of this visa class is apparently that it
| feeds directly into the green card system.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| All of society has that Ponzi scheme dynamic, due to the
| declining utility of a human being as they age, and the
| extended time that they remain a net loss as technology
| allows them to live longer.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Too bad we can't import doctors.
|
| ?
|
| My current two doctors appear to be native speakers of
| English, but the previous four or five were all clearly
| from the Subcontinent or East Asia.
|
| Note that I'm not criticizing them in any way... they were
| all perfectly fine doctors. I'm just wondering where OP is
| from that there aren't tons of imported doctors on staff.
| wharvle wrote:
| Not can't _at all_ but the licensing hurdles can be
| really difficult if they didn't go to med school in the
| US, as I understand it. Even from other countries that
| are clearly pretty good at educating & licensing
| doctors.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| For all this talk about "importing" human beings, why not
| "export" them instead? As in sending the patients abroad to
| be treated. Or is it wrong to uproot them to save some
| money?
| raincom wrote:
| Candidates can promise many things, but they won't pass laws
| to ban outsourcing. Even if they do, they dilute it to an
| extent that these laws become impotent by creative loopholes.
| pylua wrote:
| They might if the tax base decreases substantially and
| unemployment shoots up to unsustainable levels.
|
| The government definitely cannot afford , with the national
| debt, to lose tax dollars or to subsidize high levels of
| unemployment.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there's something in HIPAA or SOC 2 that
| ought to be preventing people outside the US from having any
| access at all to US patient data, but Humana likely has more
| lawyers who know these things than I do....
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
|
| https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/2083/do-
| the-...
| otikik wrote:
| I don't think outsourcing is the main problem with the
| American healthcare system. I encourage you to go a bit
| deeper and to not give your vote on a single bit of info. Try
| to expand to 1Kb.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >living in their ancestral towns and villages
|
| I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are.
| However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to
| the US that say they will never go back to India unless they
| are forced to even though comparatively make less money here.
|
| Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village
| has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can
| now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying
| much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing
| breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you
| probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice
| house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely
| crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up
| it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+
| complain about barely being able to afford their life.
|
| I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India
| salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill
| high tech salaries.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that
| say they will never go back to India
|
| Yep! My parents and I are the same. The QoL in even a 3rd
| tier cow town in the US will be better than an economically
| vibrant city in India or China. Having clean tap water is
| (imo) the pinnacle of a developed country.
|
| > things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still
| living in a mud hut
|
| True, but most Indian villages aren't like that anymore. They
| have all fairly developed now with electricity, WiFi, decent
| schools, etc. Go use Google street view - Indian villages may
| seem messy by Western standards, but they've gotten much
| better now.
|
| If you're someone who lived in small town or village India
| your whole life, and go to college to get a good job, if you
| have the option to earn a big city salary in your small town
| while being close to your family can be hard to beat.
|
| It's the same reason you see plenty of Techies take remote
| jobs and live near their families in the Midwest.
| kburman wrote:
| > They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to
| India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name
| universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something
| that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices
| to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away
| from Bangalore.
|
| Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on
| their universities. It's not new.
|
| > expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad
| while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
|
| Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it.
|
| > Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly
|
| 3 days from office like all the other office.
|
| > Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their
| ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be
| $3-5k
|
| Covid time is long gone.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > hyd low CoL
|
| Lower than Bangalore or Gurgaon. It's easier to operate a
| tech company from HYD financially than in Haryana or
| Karnataka.
|
| > Covid time is long gone
|
| Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely
| in tech from their ancestral villages in
| Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.
| kburman wrote:
| > Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working
| remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in
| Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.
|
| What I can say is that there is no special treatment for
| SDEs working from India, especially regarding the WFH
| policy.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Oh, you're talking solely about Amazon. Ok fair.
| pylua wrote:
| The U.S. government should be concerned. The U.S. tax base
| could very well implode with outsourcing, ai, and offshoring in
| the next 10 years.
| alephnerd wrote:
| This is why you encourage immigration.
|
| If you prevent talent from coming to the US, companies will
| follow the talent.
|
| This is why American cybersecurity and networking has almost
| entirely been outsourced to Israel and India and chip
| manufacturing to Taiwan and South Korea.
| pylua wrote:
| I do not understand how we got to this point. India is not
| in the U.S. sphere of influence and has not even voted to
| condemn Russia.
|
| It's really a sign of how weak the U.S. government has
| become, which is heartbreaking. US has found it too
| expensive to invest in its own citizens. It's almost a
| ticking time bomb.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence
|
| Financing the Abraham Accords [0], using American engines
| in tanks [1], American fighter jet engines in Indian
| fighter jets [2], and being a part of 2 bilateral treaty
| organizations [3][4] absolutely puts India in the US
| Sphere of Influence.
|
| > has not even voted to condemn Russia
|
| India will never piss off Russia, because India doesn't
| want Russia to join the Chinese camp [5]. By keeping
| trade and defense ties with Russia, India minimizes the
| chances of Russia becoming pro-China instead of neutral
| during an India-China war (which almost happened in 2020)
| [6].
|
| Mistreatment of Indian students in Ukraine during the war
| made a vote in favor of Ukraine politically untenable
| during election season [7]
|
| [0] - https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-
| us-railway-...
|
| [1] - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logist
| ics/ameri...
|
| [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/why-ge-pl...
|
| [3] - https://www.state.gov/i2u2/
|
| [4] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-
| room/statements-releases...
|
| [5] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-
| emerging-w...
|
| [6] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-
| gen-narav...
|
| [7] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-
| crisis-stra...
| pylua wrote:
| In some ways it is a U.S. ally. But don't tell me you are
| going to buy Russian oil and not side with the us in
| Ukraine and tell me you are under our influence.
|
| Any development in a country that has not washed its
| hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.
|
| In addition, the recent argument with Canada over the
| killing over a citizen on Canadian soil comes into play
| here. That is not what s country under western influence
| does.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > you
|
| I'm American.
|
| > are going to buy Russian oil and not side with the us
| (sic) in Ukraine
|
| Well,
|
| 1. That oil goes to the EU. If there's a buyer, there's
| going to be a seller [0]
|
| 2. It's at margins barely above the cost to extract,
| which is as big a financial hit you make make [1]
|
| 3. As pointed above, China is the bigger bad to India
| instead of Russia. It's better to keep countries neutral
| in a future India-China war
|
| > Any development in a country that has not washed its
| hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.
|
| Thank god you don't work at the State Department. That's
| how you alienate every country that isn't in North
| America and Europe.
|
| China would have the pick of the litter.
|
| [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-27/
| europe-is...
|
| [1] -
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/revenues-
| russias...
| pylua wrote:
| I understand the need for the us to sacrifice somewhat in
| order to tame the bigger bad.
|
| However, the us is operating from weakness here which is
| not okay and the situation should have never been allowed
| to develop to this point. Ironically it may be
| outsourcing and offshoring in the first place that led us
| here.
|
| US critical infrastructure development should not be
| outsourced to countries who have any contact with
| countries that are we are in a proxy war with.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| No international relations expert, afaik, would say India
| is in the US sphere of influence; the US specifically
| says India is not (in what I've seen). India is an
| independent power that is growing its relationship with
| the US. It also has relationships with Russia and with
| others. China happens to be an adversary, which
| strengthens the US relationship for now.
|
| India is nearly unassailable. Nobody can really conquer a
| country of 1 billion people anyway, economically they
| have the size (and therefore power) to be independent-
| minded, and geographically there is no neighbor that is
| now a serious threat: China can bicker and skirmish but
| would have to cross the Himalayas to fight a war, which
| is impossible. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, but those
| are useless other than to deter an existential attack by
| India - using them would be suicide. Bangladesh lacks
| economic, political, and military power. Others are too
| small.
|
| India doesn't need to be in the US 'sphere' and serve US
| interests.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| India is _assassinating people on US and Canadian soil_.
| And more importantly, the US and Canadian governments are
| being very officially-public about it.
|
| Let that sink in.
|
| I'd be shocked if China isn't assassinating people too.
| They definitely have established "police stations" here
| and are conducting operations against dissidents and
| their families, but maybe it hasn't crossed into actual
| murder. If it has, the US and Canada aren't talking about
| it; they're barely talking about, or doing anything
| about, the secret police stations.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > India is assassinating people on US and Canadian soil.
|
| I've clearly missed something here. Where can I learn
| more about what you're referencing here, or what Google
| search would point me in the right direction?
| swalberg wrote:
| The Washington Post has written about this a fair bit,
| including an article from the editorial board.
| "washington post indian assassination" should give you
| some reading.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Basically India made plans to assassinate someone on US
| soil, got found out and then carried it out on Canadian
| soil.
|
| Here's the first hit for "India assassinate Canada"
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/canada/india-
| assass...
| secstate wrote:
| Old story retold. The Claudian Roman government doubled
| down on the distinction between barbarian and Roman
| civilian and used shitty rhetorical tools to denigrate the
| barbarians. This all despite the fact that most Romans
| farms and undesirable jobs were still being done by
| "barbarians." It's almost like looking into a mirror of
| history. The end for Rome was not far beyond Claudius.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Which Claudius?
|
| I never read Roman history beyond 6th and 7th grade
| history and AoE 1's campaigns, but I think Roman
| analogies would make it easier to drive my point to a
| couple people.
| pylua wrote:
| I feel like the correct compromise for our conversation
| would be requiring strict clearance control for products
| in certain sectors.
|
| The reality is that if you work on a banking product for
| instance you might find an exploit you can use and keep
| secret and use to your countries benefit. That's why
| these positions need clearance controls.
|
| Even a benign program like a text editor could have a
| back door installed to spy on the us.
|
| I am curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
| alephnerd wrote:
| There is no solution. US, Israeli, and Indian cyber-
| infrastructure is completely intertwined.
|
| There's no possible way to decouple without reversing 30
| years of development.
|
| The only solution is to justify to Israel and India why
| they should continue to align to the US, instead of
| hacking it on their own.
|
| This justification comes from the carrot (FDI, IP
| Transfers) and the stick (bad press, cultivating
| alternative allies, tarriffs)
|
| The era of Hyperpower is over. Regional Powers have
| returned.
|
| The US Policy world has recognized this for a decade and
| is operating under those assumptions. The issue is the
| type of person who gets their news from CNN, Fox, Reddit,
| Zeihan, Telegram, etc isn't exactly the kind to read
| policy papers or watch C-SPAN
|
| > Even a benign program like a text editor could have a
| back door installed to spy on the us.
|
| It goes both ways. Meta is an American company with
| development done in the US. Everyone uses WhatsApp at the
| senior levels outside of North America. Everyone other
| than China uses Google as their primary search engine.
| Everyone uses MS or Apple as their primary OS
| pylua wrote:
| I would feel better if some of positions being outsourced
| required some sort of clearance . I really feel like
| certain development , like banking products / power grid
| / cyber security products for instance, should require a
| clearance to work on.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > This is why you encourage immigration.
|
| Our problem doesn't really seem like a lack of
| encouragement for immigration. We have plenty of people
| trying to come here, we either don't want the people
| attempting to come or don't want immigration at scale at
| all.
|
| Social programs and entitlements are really all the
| encouragement needed for immigration, as long as you're
| legally allowed to immigrate and get a job at all. Is the
| question really how do we encourage the "right" kind of
| immigrants for the skills or roles we want to expand?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > how do we encourage the "right" kind of immigrants for
| the skills or roles we want to expand
|
| Remove a decade long backlog for Indian nationals coming
| to work in Skilled fields (STEM, Accounting, Healthcare,
| Finance, Law) by speeding up processing times by hiring
| more bodies at USCIS Processing Centers.
|
| And also maybe not forcing every Chinese national who
| studied STEM in China to go through enhanced background
| checks [0].
|
| And also hiring more immigration judges (I knew a former
| Immigration Judge with the DHS - they de facto had a
| hiring freeze since the 2010s, leading to case backlogs).
|
| Tl;dr - stop defunding the DHS and USCIS
|
| [0] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/06/0
| 4/2020-12...
| sanderjd wrote:
| Maybe ... but this is almost word for word what my college
| counselor told me in 2001 when encouraging me not to study
| computer science, and I've heard some variant of it again and
| again ever since. What I think is that supply and demand will
| continue to ebb and flow, as will compensation, but that the
| ability to create software is a useful skill that will
| continue to be compensated pretty well for the foreseeable
| future.
| pylua wrote:
| It will need to be tied in with a real abet engineering
| discipline the future , at least domestically.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate the tolerance our system has for
| paying people to do otherwise unnecessary jobs simply to keep
| employment high and people distracted.
|
| Our system would indeed implode if many went unemployed.
| Companies would go down with it though, they need people
| employed so they can spend money and keep the gears of
| capitalism turning.
|
| I know I sound very cynical here but I don't even mean it as
| a bad thing. Its just the way this works, for anyone looking
| to down vote a cynical sounding take I'd be really interested
| to hear what I might be misrepresenting.
| nradov wrote:
| This is nonsense. There is no "system". Individual
| companies don't hesitate to lay off employees if that
| improves profits. While a few worthless employees can slip
| through the cracks at large companies, there is zero chance
| that employers continue paying large numbers of employees
| to do unnecessary jobs. Boards have no loyalty to abstract
| concepts like capitalism.
| pylua wrote:
| The only issue I have with that is that they will not allow us
| citizens to live there and take on jobs.
|
| If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there
| and accept a lesser salary.
|
| Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India
| as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.
| paxys wrote:
| Who says you can't do that? They would be _thrilled_ to have
| silicon valley (or equivalent) talent working for India
| salaries.
| pylua wrote:
| I doubt India government would grant a business visa for
| that.
|
| They don't want other countries citizens competing for jobs
| in their own country, which is effectively what is
| happening in the us now.
| alephnerd wrote:
| They do, and plenty of Westerners (Indian origin and non-
| Indian origin) return to India to work for Indian
| companies, found their own companies, or manage American
| operations.
|
| Though, IME, it tends to be Japanese, Israeli,
| Singaporean, and Korean expats who can hack it in India.
| Western European and Americans are too soft.
| pylua wrote:
| I have not seen it happen in a permanent way.
|
| I doubt a visa for generic remote based web dev work
| would get approved. In fact, I believe the visa even
| states you have to have a skill that is not readily
| available in India.
|
| The reality is your generic dev would probably not
| qualify especially if they are outside of a company.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Amazon won't fire me
|
| Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from
| loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper,
| less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person
| who published a modest amount of info about internal
| communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee
| handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice
| warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in
| the future?
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| > we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of
| info about internal communications, which is a violation of
| policies in our employee handbook
|
| Isn't this the author's goal though?
| abeppu wrote:
| If the author is going for severance, isn't that less likely
| if they're being fired for cause, vs part of a layoff?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Nope, you get severance either way.
| jldugger wrote:
| In what planet does Amazon offer severence to a person
| they are firing for cause?
| JustExAWS wrote:
| This planet?
|
| I happen to have first hand experience with Amazon's PIP
| process...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988
|
| (I seem to have done something to anger the HN gods)
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm confused. Author's team has been eliminated but he is still
| employed by Amazon? What's he doing now?
| burlesona wrote:
| Resting and vesting.
| timeagain wrote:
| Historically Amazon gives devs some number of weeks to find new
| work internally if they cut a department. Sales and admin
| aren't normally so lucky...
| jzb wrote:
| He explains in the post. "Our number one priority is to find
| another job." I believe it's implied "within the company."
|
| This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that
| will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to
| find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a
| bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we
| really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to
| retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other
| open roles."
|
| Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's
| available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If
| they don't need that position anymore they should cough up
| severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out
| and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
| smarmgoblin wrote:
| In addition the roles are all RTO-enforced (implying his
| current one is not), so it may be impossible for him to take
| those roles.
| burlesona wrote:
| It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company
| wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of
| ideas for how I could use the time...
| mooreds wrote:
| Have been in this situation before. Sounds like fun, actually
| melts your brain.
| dharmab wrote:
| I know someone who has been in this situation for _years_.
| But his true passion is an outside of work outdoors hobby,
| which is where he spends about 38 of his work hours each
| week.
| mooreds wrote:
| Wow, I guess that is good for him. What would he do if he
| needed to find a new job?
| glimshe wrote:
| Worst job I've ever had was one where I had nothing to do and
| yet I was forced to go to the office every day.
| thih9 wrote:
| It wouldn't be literally nothing - in practice it would be
| meetings, reviews, reports, interviews, etc.
| caesil wrote:
| Keep in mind you are still likely bound by an expansive
| intellectual property clause in your employment contract that
| says the company owns all work you do, even outside normal
| business hours.
| applecrazy wrote:
| non competes are not enforceable in california and a few
| other US states iirc, although if there were to ever be an IP
| lawsuit, it would be a war of attrition (with odds highly
| stacked against the engineer)
| alkonaut wrote:
| If I could be paid to browse HN and make my un-sellable
| software synths and path tracers all day I'd be as happy as
| can be. Even if I could theoretically work on something I
| could sell, I'd probably rather write something fun than
| something useful if food on the table was already secured.
| delfinom wrote:
| NY just made such invention assignment clauses retroactively
| illegal and void as of November, wooo for anyone living in NY
| _heimdall wrote:
| Is that clause going to hold up in court if the work is done
| outside work hours and done without use of any work hardware
| or software?
|
| My understanding has always been that the line is simply to
| do my own projects on my time with my hardware.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that your employer owns work you do for
| your employer, and things you do on company time or using
| company equipment. But this "they own everything you do
| forever even at 2AM at home using your own computer" meme
| gets repeated all the time and it's complete bullshit
| regardless of what's actually in your employment contract.
| And this ignores the fact that the vast majority of employees
| in the US _don 't have employment contracts at all_ and/or
| live in states that explicitly make these broad types of IP
| assignment clauses illegal or at least unenforceable.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I was stuck in one of these roles for a while. It's mind
| numbing.
|
| While you can't work on many projects - due to IP rules - you
| can often improve your skills and learn. Do you have a personal
| improvement/education budget? Use it to take relevant courses,
| buy books, etc. Do you have an equipment budget? Use it to
| upgrade to the ergonomic keyboard.
|
| The _worst_ case is you still get laid off but now you have
| things you can take forward. A better case is that you find
| another role at the company with the new understanding.
|
| Either way, follow the policy exactly. Don't screw around and
| give them grounds to fire you.
| padthai wrote:
| Interesting that they feel that they are "trailing in AI". The
| second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate
| it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.
| paxys wrote:
| It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year
| after year after year that they work in a shit engineering
| culture. No, nothing has changed in the last month or last
| quarter. The company was always like thus. If you are feeling the
| heat now it just means that your org is the latest to find itself
| in the line of fire.
|
| And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your
| colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh
| faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue.
| There is a reason the company has among the lowest average
| tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.
| vinnymac wrote:
| I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years
| ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job
| was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and
| getting to see the sun.
|
| Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at
| Amazon.
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not
| fair.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| In my experience professors are very good candidates for
| top tech companies - many have management experience, many
| have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them
| already. I doubt this professor didn't have a choice.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yikes, I've had the opposite experience, uniformly.
| Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then
| slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that "managing"
| students, writing grant proposals, and running research
| projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of
| engineers inside a large complex project.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Ok, but that doesn't change the fact that they get offers
| and thus have many choices.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The
| below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are
| good or great.
|
| Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks
| "I'll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my
| mortgage." They arrive and freak out because the
| incentives are totally different. They spend their days
| trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D
| projects (e.g. "hey everyone, let's explore type
| systems!"), but the working developers around them are
| not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can't
| get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns
| out their coding skills are below that of the incoming
| junior engineers who they used to teach.
|
| Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project
| is cancelled -- an indignity which they would never
| experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2
| year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have
| made at a university.
|
| And now they can return to academia having paid off some
| debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says
| they have Real World experience at a BigCo.
|
| Again, that's not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the
| bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many
| times - just last month I watched a team of academics get
| torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole
| mismatch.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This sounds like a Google experience - not something that
| happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor
| joined Amazon again after complaining.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened
| there as well.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not
| fair.
| goostavos wrote:
| I quit and went back. "Boomerangs" are extremely common.
| The golden handcuffs are hard to shed. Also, Amazon has its
| problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but
| it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of
| the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and
| fantastic people.
|
| yep, working at Amazon (AWS specifically) is like playing
| for the 2000/10s Patriots. Belicheck will work you to the
| bone and indoctrinate you into the AWS Leadership
| Princip... er, I mean the "Patriot Way", and your SVP Tom
| Brady will chew you out in the "correction of error"
| process. But if you want to be at a place where people
| want to win at all costs--with all of the pros and cons
| that entails--there's no better place to be.
|
| Amazon hate comes from people who don't see a problem
| with getting the Washington Commanders giving you a $100
| million contract to put in the bare minimum effort. To
| some people that's a dream deal, but not for everyone. To
| each their own.
| caslon wrote:
| Given the average tenure of an NFL player is relatively
| short, wouldn't it make more sense to go for what would
| offer the highest reward with lowest CTE risk?
|
| A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars.
| Washington doesn't even have income tax.
| finnh wrote:
| The "Washington" in "Washington Commanders" is
| Washington, DC. Not Washington State (which has no income
| tax).
| mjr00 wrote:
| That's what I mean, it depends on what the "highest
| reward" means for each person. $100m is $100m, but what's
| Tom Brady remembered for, and what's Albert Haynesworth
| remembered for? One is near-unanimously considered the
| greatest of all time, and the other is known for being
| one of the worst free agent acquisitions of all time.
| They both have more money than they know what to do with,
| but one _probably_ feels a bit better about his career.
|
| This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also
| pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can
| potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are
| willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in
| order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I
| built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some
| people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine
| building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever
| see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine
| too! There's room on the planet for both types of
| companies, thankfully.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh, Amazon absolutely is cut throat and ruthless. But always
| within the law, never caught cheating. And it moves
| incredible fast at incredible scale, so you learn more in a
| year there than you do in 5 elsewhere.
|
| Some people are repulsed by that, others drawn to it and some
| thrive under these conditions. Heck, I really enjoy my life
| and job after Amazon. And still I miss the speed, the fast
| feedback on decisions and actions, the laser focused pursuit
| of a common goal, ruthlessly focused on efficiency, risk and
| details. Thought about going back there myself, lucky I
| didn't. Propably wouod have been equally lucky if I did.
|
| Amazon is a peculiar place.
| milkshakes wrote:
| amazon seems to be the place where the worst leaders i've
| experienced who have been forced out of the organizations
| i've been a part of all inevitably wind up. based on this,
| i don't think i'd ever like to work there.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Usually, people quality follows a normally distributed
| curve at any place I worked that had enougj peoole in
| each grouo to make it mathematically work. Amazon
| transfromed tgat, IMHO, into a bathtub curve, really
| great (and ruthless, driven, qualified) folks at the top
| end, then nothing, finally those only checking one of the
| above mentioned boxes and offsetting the others with
| excelling at politics. S I said, a peculiar place.
|
| Something else I learned the very hard way: what
| constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of
| the time highly subjective.
|
| That being said, realizing Amazon is not a place for you
| _before_ joining is the best thing you can do. I have
| seen my fair share of people that realized _after_ being
| hired, and for them the place was hell. Careerwise, and I
| explicity talk about white collar folks, Amazon had no
| negative impact on them. But going through personell hell
| 50+ hours a week for months until ypu found something
| else or you are let go during probation is torture. I
| know, I had the same thing after Amazon once, it sucks
| and drains you dry.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I hate to say this, but I genuinely think customers are going
| to find AWS become more unreliable as time goes on.
|
| It seems to me that you can have high levels of reliability, a
| great working culture and high levels of staffing, but if you
| mess with any one of these elements you will find the wheels
| start falling off the train.
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| I think this is true of any company. As things get larger,
| red tape increases, and the mess of spaghetti code and
| complexity/inter-dependencies of systems means it gets harder
| and harder for any one person or team to fully understand the
| environment and avoid/recover from issues.
|
| I actually think that the "pizza team" model in Amazon can
| help mitigate this, as each individual team operates as its
| own entity that is discouraged from relying on other teams
| for uptime... but this is only effective to a point.
| chris_wot wrote:
| As the article points out, this is a very expensive way of
| operating and requires very high headcount. They don't want
| mass layoffs because of the cost of doing so, thus they
| employ the unethical tactic of making life miserable for
| the ones they would have tried to lay off.
|
| What it also means is that they can use younger and cheaper
| workers. They can also outsource their work. Thus my
| concerns about reliability.
|
| It seems like a house of cards. I truly wonder for how long
| they can keep this up. Given our reliance on cloud
| computing and their prominent position within it, it may
| become a very rocky ride at some point for businesses who
| have transitioned their operational infrastructure to AWS.
| I think a lot of people treat AWS as an infinite resource
| that will never run out and will be completely reliable
| forever. I think, sadly, many organisations may get a shock
| some time into the near future.
| pylua wrote:
| Here is maybe an uncomfortable truth for software
| engineers: it's more efficient from a cost perspective to
| just something out there that is good enough, even if it
| makes no logical sense and is a mess.
|
| Maintainability and readability are best solved through
| brute force hiring instead of better practices.
| chris_wot wrote:
| In what world does maintainability and reliability
| increase through brute force hiring of low skilled and
| experienced staff?
| pylua wrote:
| The world where good enough / more cpu resources and just
| works is easier to get to than design the system in a
| logical way.
| brunooliv wrote:
| It's already happening... it's a total mess of weird
| microservices that make no sense to reason about and the
| hidden costs on things like free tier etc... not good
| seadan83 wrote:
| I think I may disagree about the causes. Amazon A/B tests
| just about everything, the implication being hidden costs
| would have been found in A/B testing to net increase
| revenue. That is just profit motive and business ethics
| coming into play.
|
| The scattering of weird microservices I think is the same
| reason the Amazon detail & home page never get a full
| ground-up update. It's hard to do large scale data
| experiments to demonstrate the benefit, and it's too many
| teams with too much at stake (too many cooks)
| jocaal wrote:
| > Amazon A/B tests just about everything
|
| Are they testing for the UI's that confuse customers the
| most? \s
| seadan83 wrote:
| In a way actually! The things that are hard to A/B test
| get neglected. If you need A/B testing (ie: data) to make
| any decision, then places where data is purely
| qualitative - there will be no data to be had and
| therefore no decision can be made.
|
| The Expedia example really comes to mind too of micro-
| optimizations and everyone working towards their own
| org's goal can all make sense individually, but really
| fail when taken as a whole:
| https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/upstream-thinking-saved-
| exped...
|
| Expedia had an example of this: - the sales team wanted
| sales - the phone support team wanted to turn over calls
| quickly -
|
| If there were a way to measure confusion, it would be
| improved and
|
| Can I A/B test whether there will be a 10% increase in
| sales if I lower prices on Ec2 instances by 5% - YES! Can
| I A/B test that the presence of 30 service options is the
| tipping point of spending 1 hour to get something done vs
| wanting to hire an "AWS"
| seadan83 wrote:
| My fault for a milquetoast response. I disagree. My
| thoughts are informed here by insider experience at
| Amazon. I believe I observed these problems over a decade
| ago (hidden fees, high attrition, poor culture, scattered
| & non-consolidated service offerings). EG: There were a
| number of places that could have had a better customer
| experience, but A/B testing showed there was more money
| to be made than customers lost. Second example, seeing
| what was required to get 2 to 4 teams to cooperate was
| impressive.. The detail and home page touches the bread
| and butter for entire orgs, thousands of people,
| ramifications for dozens of teams and then dozens of
| backend teams behind them.
|
| I believe it was an Amazon VP that I was talking who
| pointed out that the homepage and detail page had not
| changed very much over time at all (lots of evolution,
| but never revolution, never fully redone, never will be
| fully redone).
|
| This was pertinent because we were in an org that ran
| offshoot sites, similar in a lot of ways, but less hands
| in the pot & we did have liberty to do a full rewrite of
| our detail pages & homepages. In the conversation, the VP
| of that org was highlighting that flexibility and went
| into small detail why that was not the case for the big
| mother-ship retail pages.
| simonw wrote:
| A/B testing is an Amazon thing, but is it also an AWS
| thing? I thought AWS engineering culture was pretty
| different.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Here is a page from AWS executives with insights on how
| your organization can also be data-driven too!
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-
| you...
|
| AWS does have differences for sure - but the "everything
| is only decided based on numbers unless you are Jeff
| Bezos" is universally true.
|
| Being that rigorous about data-driven-decisions is really
| quite powerful. The S-team are 1000% of this mind-set.
| I'm paraphrasing, the saying at Amazon that they tell new
| recruits and pride themselves over is that there are only
| three correct answers: "(1) Yes, and here is the data
| why. (2) No, and here is the data why. (3) I don't know,
| and I'll have the data shortly"
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change
| over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last
| month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as
| it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the
| company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has
| drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last
| several years to now not allowing it.
| paxys wrote:
| Company culture can change over time but that does not mean
| it _will_ change for the better over time. The problems I
| mentioned - cutthroat culture, stack ranking, PIPs, forced
| cuts, high attrition - have all been a thing at Amazon for at
| least the last 15 years.
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in
| context of this article. The article doesn't mention most
| of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention
| cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article
| is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a
| demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you
| compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was
| encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.
| paxys wrote:
| The mass layoffs were 1.7% of the company, and the author
| himself says they didn't have much of an impact. It's no
| different than what every other big tech company did, and
| their numbers were a lot worse. The rest of what he talks
| about ("Making them miserable and silently sacking
| them.") is what I'm referencing. RTO might be the latest
| instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift.
| Amazon has never been an employee friendly company.
| Forcing people to quit when a department's salary gets
| too much or when they are nearing their 3rd or 4th year
| vesting periods is basically part of the manager handbook
| over there.
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| > RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't
| some big cultural shift.
|
| Again, this is just demonstrably false. But if you want
| to continue to have some personal vendetta against
| Amazon's culture, you do you.
| paxys wrote:
| Are you implying that amazon allowed remote work prior to
| the pandemic?
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| From personal experience: yes. But I don't really see
| what that has to do with anything, because even just
| looking at during the pandemic (remote work culture) to
| now (in-office culture) is a demonstrably different
| culture, so I still have no idea what you're arguing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That's a specious argument. It includes all of the
| warehouse workers, delivery drivers and other non blue
| badge employees.
| lozenge wrote:
| That's not really a culture, rather a policy.
|
| Culture is how people in the organisation think about work.
| Are they desperate to take credit? (Individual or team)
| Assign blame? (Individual or team) Overwork? Do they care
| about developing the employees' skills? Is the pay fair, are
| increases given to retain talent?
|
| Amazon's long had a culture of high pay, work people very
| hard, accept the high churn.
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| This is just arguing semantics over the word "culture", but
| I'll bite.
|
| The culture of Amazon during 2019-2022 was that people
| throughout the organization "thought about work" as
| something that could be done remotely (yes, even before
| 2020 there was remote work at Amazon), but required
| different working styles. There was more focus on employee
| engagement, encouraging things like taking online training
| or organizing team meetings that were focused on team
| connectedness. Teams were less overworked because there
| were always new people being hired to pick up the extra
| slack.Pay was constantly increasing, and especially so
| during the pandemic (Amazon famously removed its salary cap
| in 2022, and readjusted its entire pay scale to be higher).
|
| Post-pandemic, but pre-layoffs, Amazon encouraged work
| travel to go and see coworkers in-person. You didn't even
| need a reason to do so, but book the travel and your
| expenses would be auto-approved. Expense budgets were
| large, and planning team events or happy hours were
| encouraged. Pay increases continued. Rapid hiring and team
| growth only got more rapid.
|
| After layoffs happened, that all changed. Work travel began
| to be actively disallowed, pay increases slowed (or
| stopped). Team training became restricted unless it was
| free (and even then, only a certain amount of days were
| allowed). Hiring slowed to a crawl, so teams were more
| overworked, and overall mindset was more negative because
| you knew no help was coming.
|
| All of the things I'm describing are vast culture changes
| that I personally saw happen between 2019-2022. You can go
| ahead and call these "policies", but policies are an
| important factor that shapes culture.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| That's not true though.
|
| I've been working there for 6 years and the scale at which
| layoffs have been happening since 2022 is unparalleled to what
| has happened in the past.
|
| There may have been some rare team closures here and there
| before, but people could easily join another team and it was a
| rare event anyway.
|
| Now, since 2022 it has been massive team shutdowns with
| hundreds of people laid off every time, while there is a hiring
| freeze in the whole company. And this will continue in 2024.
|
| Amazon always had a cutthroat culture but at least if you were
| good (aka not PIPed) you knew you'd fine another team and
| weren't worried about not having a job the next day. This is
| not the case anymore.
| Kephael wrote:
| Google has been doing the same thing. The fact is that these
| companies simply have too many employees and they aren't able
| to properly utilize everyone.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| And yet... it's one of the most highly valued companies on the
| planet, and a clear #1 in cloud services.
| Podgajski wrote:
| This is a really ignorant comment. Of course this number one
| because the big money gets in early and gets out early. All
| the suckers are left behind. Financial capitalism doesn't
| care about companies, It cares about profit.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| There's no evidence of a big money exodus. The only
| potential company to leave for is Azure.
| Podgajski wrote:
| There's no evidence of a big money exodus....YET.
| randerson wrote:
| Or more companies can realize that they can be almost as
| productive on their own hardware as they can in The Cloud
| but at a fraction of the cost.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Blackberry was at its most valuable 2 years after the iPhone
| came out and a year before Android was released.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| If there was a cloud equivalent to the iPhone I feel like I
| would have heard about it. It could have been Kubernetes,
| but it hasn't been.
|
| Maybe it's them being behind on GenAI. Of course all of the
| OpenAI competition is trained on commodity cloud services
| that are basically lift and ship to any cloud with GPU
| capacity - so Amazon is at worst in the middle of the pack.
| cdibona wrote:
| But the iPhone came out in 2007 and the for g1, 2008.....
| so, uh.....
| lbrito wrote:
| "it wasn't like this X years ago. It is a shame you joined at
| this time."
|
| Heard that multiple times during my short tenure. Always
| smelled like bs to me.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Well, another option is it's true and it's monotonically
| getting worse. From my time at aws, it appears to be that's
| the case. It was better X years ago, and it will be worse at
| X+n years for all values of n and X.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Same at Google - was there from 2016 to 2023. And i
| strongly believe everyone at BigCo underwent a step-change
| in 2023.
|
| I do give the VP in TFA some credit for trying to give
| shelter and time. Google went rancid, you'd go to work one
| morning, get an unannounced event on your calendar, and be
| informed as a group you were locked out of everything
| except the internal job posting site and had 8 weeks to
| find a job. Meanwhile everyone had negative headcount. I've
| heard at least two dozen stories like that personally.
|
| Another effect is best communicated by a quote: "there's a
| fuck you got mine attitude." The internal peer support
| group i was a location lead for was overwhelmed by people
| with just bonkers stories of aggression and antisocial
| behavior from middle management punching down. I heard so
| many stories that wouldn't have gone down at even the
| strangest and most inexperienced startups I worked at.
| (Hiring friends with 0 experience, outright lying, pushing
| out people)
|
| The bullwhip effect of management not really needing to
| learn to capital-M manage and now being asked to really
| exposed a lot of issues. Breaks my heart. (I left because
| of this)
| LargeTomato wrote:
| Many managers don't know how to handle firings/layoffs
| and there's little incentive to because you're gone after
| the event anyway.
| belter wrote:
| "This year was worst than last year...But it will be better
| than next Year..."
| mjr00 wrote:
| Looking at the author's resume, they've only been at AWS
| since 2020. It's unlikely they have a very good understanding
| of how the culture has changed over time.
| BeefDinnerPurge wrote:
| It is true. Amazon was always brutal, but two-pizza team six-
| pager culture was a great place to rule in hell as opposed to
| serving in Heaven as a generalist at Google. Two-pizza team
| six-pager culture died sometime during the last decade. At a
| guess, when they imported so many AI academics and they
| brought all the toxic worst practices of academia to bear on
| it _.
|
| _ The Applied Scientist title at Amazon is the single worst
| thing they ever created: 15% higher comp and stock if any L10
| or up decides you are one, a 100% political position that set
| everyone against each other just like separating the bonus
| for the success of Google+ from the rest of Google did in
| 2011 (was there for that idiocy myself).
| ajkjk wrote:
| It is true now, and has always been true, that parts of the
| company are healthy places to work and parts are not. Despite
| the 'all bad' narrative you see around here. Not to defend
| Amazon, I mean, they ought to just get it to all be good and of
| course they won't. But it's annoying having to argue about this
| all the time instead of everyone just understanding that it's a
| mixed bag and which org you end up in counts for everything.
| gdiamos wrote:
| It's great to win, until you lose.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Amazon will always eventually Amazon.
| arrakeenrevived wrote:
| Maybe this is true for many parts of Amazon culture, but the
| big factor recently is that the RTO mandate is company-wide.
| With very few exceptions, it doesn't matter what org you're
| in, RTO affects you, and can have a drastic change on the
| entire company's culture.
| pas wrote:
| > which org you end up in counts for everything
|
| maybe... then maybe it's time to name those orgs instead of
| just weaving their legendarium web...
| snotrockets wrote:
| Every big enough company, is, for those not on the c-suite, a
| collection of 1000s of different companies with a single HR
| department.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| And it's also annoying to argue that "it's a mixed bag" is
| not an excuse for Amazon being _in general_ or _on average_ a
| huge step worse in terms of work life balance and
| pleasantness. You are much more likely to end up in a more
| excruciating role than the average software co.
| belter wrote:
| Even more funny to see a Developer _still_ employed at Amazon
| publicly bashing his Company and Manager on a public blog. The
| Next one-on-one will be _embarrassiiiiiing..._
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| He knows he's been laid off. His managers through the VP
| level know they're done for as well.
| earth2mars wrote:
| why silent sacking doesn't include severance package?! do you
| mean forcing people to quit which doesn't include severance. If
| there is no work, can't you start working elsewhere (or at least
| a side consulting job) until they fire and give severance?
| jzb wrote:
| Pretty sure Amazon's employment agreement / policies forbid
| moonlighting without manager approval. Which you're very
| unlikely to get if they're trying to move you out.
| insomniacity wrote:
| What are they going to do - fire you?
| otikik wrote:
| Probably yes, but also probably the person who would check for
| this kind of thing was probably let go already :P
|
| You can "help" your friend who is bootstrapping his startup.
| You can even book a room in the office and meet with your
| friend there. As long as you are available for work in the
| office, it can count as "training". Just don't be blatant about
| it. Like, reserve rooms on a different floor every day. Or I
| imagine that is how it would be done, I definitely didn't do
| this when I was benched on this big company for months.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I think they mean making people's lives miserable enough that
| they quit. Presumably they can live with whatever Amazon throws
| at them, and keep taking a paycheck until fired.
| chank wrote:
| > I've heard similar tactics being used at other companies-mostly
| large companies-and it'll only continue in 2024 as they make
| decisions that drive short term profits over all else.
|
| When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's
| the only type of decision making that will be done.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How can Amazon be guilty of incentivizing short term profit
| when their profit margin history looks like this?
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...
|
| Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta's 20%+ profit margins.
| hornban wrote:
| I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer
| profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked
| there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-
| sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions
| can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into.
| The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so
| the smart move would be to move the people involved into the
| company's AI efforts.
|
| I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon
| that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to
| something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly
| very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to
| hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure
| there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as
| long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent
| then there will always be a place for them to work on something.
| The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where
| everybody working there legitimately wants the company to
| succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in
| their own career path.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I've been on the other side of these decisions.
|
| It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just
| aren't enough positions to fill.
|
| Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other
| stakeholders to ensure financial viability.
|
| It sucks, but it is what it is.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Which tech CEOs were fired for making the wrong call and
| overhiring?
|
| I don't mind eye popping executive pay for exceptional
| performance, I mind that those positions have zero
| accountability.
| spdy wrote:
| Because they don't decide this on their own. A smart CEO
| gets board approval before going on a hiring spree, so
| afterwards, if the CFO shows a negative forecast, everyone
| can go, 'Oh, who could have seen this?'
|
| CEOs get fired if the board loses trust in their abilities.
| itake wrote:
| > As if the people who are working in those divisions can't
| adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into.
|
| Timing "we need this new team" with "We don't need this team"
| is a challenge. It is rare that both occur at the same time, or
| even the existing team's skill set matches with the new
| challenge.
|
| Shifting SREs to do machine learning is set up for failure.
| applecrazy wrote:
| minor nit: there are no dedicated SREs at amazon. but your
| point stands otherwise
| magicloop wrote:
| All tech companies I've been at have had this challenge of
| churn.
|
| As an engineer, the deeper the experience in a field, the
| more business value you can create (all else being equal). So
| when you switch speciality, value creation is going to take a
| hit. Some skills carry across directly, others take
| months/years to acquire.
|
| This is why companies can simultaneously be hiring teams and
| firing teams at the same time.
|
| If the team is doing something critical for the business
| strategy, they need to be on-point straight off the bat. That
| normally is achieved by buying start-ups or doing deep
| partnerships. (MSFT + OpenAI comes to mind).
| nameoda wrote:
| A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no
| impactful work and promises of impactful project work once
| headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on
| their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the
| foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise
| not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got
| the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-
| internal knowledge with them.
| yborg wrote:
| At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the
| writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing
| profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away
| from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the
| engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually
| increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find
| themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having
| to scrape by on $250K/yr...
| crtified wrote:
| Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term
| role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee
| approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix
| or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you)
| deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which
| then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain.
|
| Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-
| less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of
| the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions.
| While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
|
| I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting
| regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or
| restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions
| that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None
| whatsoever was shown to me.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My experience
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
| blagie wrote:
| I have never been laid off or fired*. However, for most of my
| adult life, a layoff would have been traumatic. I have a
| specialized skillset, and it takes a while to find jobs. In the
| meantime, I have living expenses. It's doubly hard to find a
| job unemployed. I don't want to be in that position.
|
| "Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm
| put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job.
| Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're
| giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer,
| please take it.").
|
| If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or
| documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary
| by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero
| income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If
| there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no
| one else has to.
|
| * I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a
| longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like
| a layoff or firing, through.
| eastbound wrote:
| > "We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but
| if you find a better offer, please take it."
|
| I'm an entrepreneur in France, and I had one employee I would
| have like to say that to, but it can so easily be turned
| against the employer... Unions and litigations have basically
| made honesty the worst choice in every situation. Only to
| discover afterwards that the person had been willing to go
| since 6 months already. The entire experience is stupid,
| stupid humans working (or not working) together.
| dougweltman wrote:
| Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of
| these businesses (let's exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons
| case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than
| what's needed to run those?
|
| There's this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to
| boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This
| reflects a _fundamental misunderstanding_ of investors think
| about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
|
| Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very
| little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They
| can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky
| projects, and do.
|
| This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting
| don't apply to them, but rather because they're able to optimize
| for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are
| such a tiny portion of what they're able to bring in: they're
| hoarding human resources, they're trying to develop second acts,
| they're able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that's
| worth it.
|
| When Amazon turns up the heat, it's not _primarily_ because
| they're worried about costs. It's because they want to get people
| out of there who don't belong there, and because return to office
| in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over
| the long term.
|
| These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as
| being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in
| focus, to turn around.
|
| Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder
| value creation -- it's the exact same rationale as overpaying
| staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets.
| Ship faster.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > Very few people are needed to run the technology elements
|
| Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the
| train you'll need next year.
|
| When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of
| innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing
| architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a
| significant change is not worth it.
|
| The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's
| no negative feedback for the error.
|
| And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing
| customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function:
| reduce it to running the old train.
|
| Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this
| evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative
| teams before you get left with the duty of managing the
| winding-down.
| dougweltman wrote:
| Did you stop reading the comment after the first line?
| iot_devs wrote:
| > Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of
| these businesses
|
| This is currently false, or at least very up to debate.
| mixdup wrote:
| >Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very
| little pressure to control costs
|
| This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and
| Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The
| "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally
| coming to an end
|
| Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not
| just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about
| is precisely what is happening now
| Podgajski wrote:
| Can't wait for the AWS outages. Good times ahead!
| nixass wrote:
| > There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE)
| throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don't
| notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon's silent
| sacking of thousands of people.
|
| Last sentence is pure bullshit
| caesil wrote:
| What do you think accounts for the increase?
| snotrockets wrote:
| Assuming that AWS (or any tech company) was/is better due to
| engineering doesn't align with reality.
|
| The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or
| over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities
| of their SaaS offering.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world -
| from employees as high-return investments that we want to
| maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would
| change the world and be the source of our future growth and
| success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on
| this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power
| struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will
| the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we
| given up on that?
|
| Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe
| some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude
| of a former time.
|
| Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new
| zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for,
| and doing good for others are all outre, often depicted as
| humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans
| and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters
| and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps
| more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist,
| which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
|
| The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are
| easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran
| circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in
| the future. You just need the courage of your convictions.
| Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots
| of work and risk) they will.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including
| meta. Band rooms too. It's mostly Amazon that's an absolutely
| awful, terrible, horrendous company.
| belter wrote:
| The managerial way to say it...The company is _frugal_
| senderista wrote:
| I couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do
| all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay,
| good colleagues, and good management.
| ejb999 wrote:
| and for anyone that actually believed companies cared about
| those things when they said them, I have a bridge in NY I'd
| like to sell you.
| concordDance wrote:
| A company is controlled by people.
|
| If those people care about those things (and aren't in a
| system that pressurises them not to or selects for people who
| do) then the "company" will also care about those things.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That's exactly the 'zeitgeist' I'm talking about:
|
| > Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and
| doing good for others are all outre, often depicted as
| humanly impossible and ridiculed.
|
| We all have better angels and worse; there's nothing special
| about the our worse ones that means they are somehow more
| fundamental or necessary.
|
| We actually can do much better - not perfectly, of course,
| that is a strawperson; but we can do much better.
| BeefDinnerPurge wrote:
| Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and
| leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and
| pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that
| keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
|
| But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from
| their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to
| be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices.
| The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do
| this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming,
| putting everything on "performance" etc.
|
| My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing
| from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his
| project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead
| of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he
| started giving fake status reports leading the management to
| believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
|
| But management was left picking up the pieces after his
| departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
|
| Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my
| company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up
| and running.
| lulznews wrote:
| Dude your VP rocks. Amazon sucks, RTO sucks, but none of that bad
| stuff will happen. The machine will keep chugging, and no one
| cares.
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