"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.
> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior.
The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.
The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight.
A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees.
Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews.
Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.
Managers are cogs too. The way to work that kind of system is to identify and exploit the fears of the boss or his boss.
I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.
You bring up an important point: employee evaluation at big corps isn't that different than it was before the internet. It's evolved, but only slightly. The permanence of data should cause management to completely re-imagine and deploy feedback.
I think people don't mind being judged / measured objectively. I think the problems / angst probably arise when you mix "managers" / subjectivity into the mix. I think objective measurement, that is truly useful, is hard to do in most cases.
>>We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on.
The only problem is life is pretty much an accumulation of incremental experiences.
Most people just can't wake up one day perform like a superstar at work for the same reason why a person can't just wake up and run a marathon without any practice. Like physical stamina, mental stamina too comes from a lot of practice done over years and "from their earliest years" performance matters.
Plus rewards come to a lot of long time sloggers, because they've been around long and have been putting their heads down and doing a lot of work.
When you are treated like a robot, as in the case of pervasive monitoring, then merit has little wait. Merit is about how you contribute over-all to a corporation and its functioning. This sort of management, individual management ignores that... as they are running a factory where you are a machine. Not a person. Machines gets monitored this way. Corporations would look at a department as a profit center or a loss center and leave the decision making of who is performing well or not to your manager. Here you are a machine at the beck and call of Bozo, or Bezos as the case might be.
I was interviewing for AWS, and it was a circus. Completely disorganized. However, I have to say, I enjoyed the parroting back of "the leadership principles" part. It was like being in the Soviet Union again and singing praises to the great party leaders. Very much worth wasting a day over it.
However my nephew didn't have such a fun time. He was working for one of their warehouses in Kentucky and they were ruthless to the workers like him. They had a snow storm, he got stuck in the snow and instead of being understanding they reprimanded him for it. He liked the pay but couldn't take the humiliating treatment, so he quit.
> They had a snow storm, he got stuck in the snow and instead of being understanding they reprimanded him for it.
Punishing an employee for risking their life to try to come in to a job they already hate? That's textbook sadism, ruthless is too weak a word. In inclement weather our critical staff can depend on officers in 4x4 vehicles to bring them in, with no reprimand for being late due to the weather. Non-essential staff are encouraged to stay home and avoid injury and possible death trying to make it to work.
Sorry to hear that. I work for AWS, and I like to think we're pretty organized. I'm not sure what part of your experience was "unorganized". You probably caught the team on a busy day or something.
LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really cares about them. You get upper management worship anywhere. It's the same thing as obsessing over celebrities.
Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair. One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job.
So, the great irony of the leadership principles was the lip service they were paid at Amazon and how much I miss them since leaving.
They're a seriously good bit of Amazon culture that's been perverted into something you can use to submarine any meeting. If treated honestly, they seem (to me, anyway), like a fantastic set of rules for governing a company's actions. Sadly, it's difficult to align incentives with actually honoring and encouraging those principles :(
Amazon tries to trap people through control by visas, and they will go so far as to relocate people overseas to Seattle. They have a fucked up system where rank and file get the darwin treatment but management gets the rewards. They will pay bonuses around $250k, $500k, $1 million to senior managers, directors, and VPs respectively to abuse the shit out of employees. The "PIP someone who is trying to get away from their abusive manager" is their oldest trick in their book.
Something needs to be done to help people financially who are looking for a way out from the abuse.
What really angered me about that article was Amazon trying to say that this was a "colleague" -- he was on a PIP. Which is pretty much Amazon speak for a dead man walking (no pun intended).
The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters.
PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out", offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on.
Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago.
When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will be the domain name in your email. Everything else will be coincidental.
Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and grow. To list a few things:
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself!
- No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
The worst part to me was that despite all of the claims of meritocracy, there was zero financial incentive to perform well during my four years there. That's because any previously-granted equity is counted against you when determining your total compensation for the next year. When those big year 3 & 4 equity vests kick in, they just stop giving you additional stock, because the stock you already had went up so much.
What this means is that in four years, despite glowing reviews every year and a promotion, I never got a meaningful raise/bonus/stock grant, because the stock was doing so well. My W2 income went up, but it was completely unrelated to my performance -- I could have done just enough to not get fired and would have made essentially the same amount. People who performed worse than me were regularly given larger stock grants.
It was super demoralizing to figure that out. Big part of the reason I left.
I was at AWS for six months as a contractor and a year as an SDE3.
Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year.
The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered food is a cute perk, but it's hardly critical.
I don't drink soda, but they had free coffee and tea. Tea is my drink of choice, so I was happy. Soda is bad for you anyway. ;)
They did have free "snacks" if you count breakfast cereal. Which many people would grab a cup full of as a snack (there were no bowls, oddly enough). There were a mountain of breakfast cereal boxes on every floor near the kitchen. But yes, they also had paid snack machines.
The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.
Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
And I think the latter really makes the difference. There are 20,000 people working at Amazon, according to the article. When you scale that big, some corners of the org are going to suck, and some will be better.
I may someday return to Amazon, now that they have an office near me in Colorado. But I'm still working on the game that I put on hold while I worked at Amazon, and I need to finish it before I reattach the golden handcuffs.
I don't work in SV so maybe my comment doesn't matter but most of these things seem pretty trivial....
> - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
I haven no equity in my company or opportunity to get any.
> - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
I don't think my company offers any relocation packages (I could be wrong on that) but even so this policy doesn't strike me as completely crazy.
> - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
My vesting schedule only vests after 6 years (with 20 percent vesting every year after the first). It's not great but on average it's not the worst AFAICT.
> - No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself
> - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
Both of these... We have nothing like it at all, I'd kill for a "shitty cafe". We have coffee and that's about it. This comment comes of as extremely spoiled to me.
> - Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
My job doesn't include being on call but I work with people who are, I don't fully understand what this bit is talking about. Are you woken up just to be told your "shift" is starting or is this just referencing being woken up because there is a problem? Cause that's kind of the definition of being on call....
Maybe I'm just naive and stupid to think my job is good (every job could be better of course) but from where I'm sitting 90% of your comment comes off as entitled and spoiled and it colors the rest of it.
At IIT Bombay Amazon arrived for recruitment. The AC in the hall was not working so all students tried to catch the window seats. The HR shouted at us claiming "If you want a job come and seat here else get out of the room" despite a student politely explaining why they are prefering to seat near a window. I learned that I should not be working there that very moment.
I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure; they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google. Also, according to the article 20k people work for them, although I am not sure if that was total or engineers.
I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.
Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.
Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.
Seriously, from your initial sentence I was expecting something way worse. Those problems seem very trivial to me compared to most normal jobs where you don't get offered anything at all, ever. Not to mention the many jobs where you get abused for real.
I interviewed with AWS. What struck me was how different the people were. The would-be peer manager I spoke with was upbeat, really enthusiastic about tech, his team, creativity, and balance. My next conversation with his manager (presumably the person I would work for) was entirely different - much harsher tone, seemed uninterested in answers longer than a sentence, zero sense of humor. Now, I haven't been around for a long time, but I'm past the 10 year mark. That was the first interview I've ever had where I unequivocally lost interest in the manager and the company in just 30 minutes, despite being very enthusiastic about the product itself.
They did not make me an offer, which is just as well as I would have declined. I doubt I did a great job of sounding interested past the 15 minute mark, which is really out of character for me.
Now to address some of your points, tech must be a different animal. I'll tell you about my benefits since I really like that HN is a place to really get some transparency, and probably by design, there isn't a lot of Fortune 500, non-tech firm representation here. So you can stop reading if you aren't curious, but for those that are, here goes.
I work in finance tech, but with a large, somewhat oldschool company, not a startup. I recently became a (junior) officer of this company. Comparatively, I don't think Amazon sounds all that bad in terms of the fringe items. For instance:
- I don't even get a free cup of coffee here - the cafeteria is pretty good, but not cheap
- Most people here don't get equity. We do have an employee stock purchase benefit that lets you buy at a discount with a reasonable holding period (90 days or 6 months, can't remember). For those that do have what I'd call retention incentives (either cash or stock), our vesting period starts at 3 years. This is separate from our bonus, which varies by level (and all levels get something), but vests when deposit hits your account
- Our 401k match is comparatively better. We match 1:1 up to 5%, and then I think we kick in roughly the same as a defined contribution, since we no longer offer a pension. So 10% in "free" retirement money each year. I believe matching begins on day 1 and vests immediately
- Tuition reimbursement is a funny thing. I haven't tried our benefit here since I'm done with school. However, I've been around my industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Fortune 500. Most companies offer 5-6k a year, and they all try their best never to pay it. At one company, who I won't name, I was told that my degree was not related to my job, so no benefit. Great, but the policy makes no mention of that, and the recruiter certainly doesn't undersell the benefit
- Oncall sucks. I've avoided it since I manage backend financial/data engineering processes, nothing customer-facing. I've covered myself as much as I've delegated, though, it's only fair
- Relocation was I think a year, and they covered everything - packing, moving, transporting our 3rd car, etc. Package is based on level and some other factors. As an employee now, though, I don't think there's ever any repayment period for internal relocation. They just cover it, and from what I hear, it's pretty comprehensive
I realize I'm not entry level, but the above applies to everyone here, except where noted. I used to think we don't pay Amazon salaries, but a peek at Glassdoor says that Amazon doesn't really pay that well, particularly for the cost of living around the HQ.
> The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan
Having escaped from an abusive manager myself, I can imagine what this person went though. Managers that are skilled in the art are able to inflict pain without leaving much of a paper trail.
I did ask for (and got) professional help, including medication. There's only so much stress 24/7 that you are able to handle before you start to crack. Who knows what would have happened if I just tried to ride it out.
I'd have gone bananas if I had been placed in a PIP instead. This was one of the possibilities identified by my branch predictor, so I was collecting a mountain of evidence against said manager. Thankfully, it wasn't needed.
(I realize that nowhere in the article it says a manager was the issue, but corporate pattern-matching gets pretty good after a while)
>The man survived the fall from Amazon’s 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said.
Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.
As has happened before on these threads, every opinion on Amazon is super negative. To balance things out I'll chime in to say that I had a highly positive experience working there as an SDE for 3 years, and would estimate that most of my coworkers felt the same way.
Very clever way to write the title and the article itself. You get the impression that 1) he is dead and after reading a bit more that 2) he survived a jump from a 12-story building.
From reading other articles, it seems he is alive and jumped from the 4th floor.
When I was young I quit MS rather than get fired. Looking back, I wonder if I should have just walked away without an exit interview. Perhaps get several more weeks pay. I too suffered under a PIP that proved to be pointless.
It's great how this no content article has been turned into a huge Amazon bashing thread that confirms everybody's biases against Amazon employment practices.
The facts are: a guy put in for a transfer, got put on a performance improvement plan, threatened self-harm, and then jumped off a building.
There are no details why he requested a transfer, the reasons he got put on a PIP, and if he was mentally unstable or not, where these fairly common life events would cause him to contemplate self harm.
You know what the worst part of my job at Amazon is? That I continually have to read about how terrible I am both on the internet and in real life (your average Seattlite seems to hate Amazon).
Just in this thread alone I've been accused of:
* Screwing employees over
* Being a slave in a sweatshop
* Insulted for not being able to use Bash (I can)
* Disorganized
* Not be trusted to talk about working at Amazon (lol)
* Fostering a toxic workplace
* A communist (my favorite insult)
[+] [-] Futurebot|9 years ago|reply
"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the...
Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.
[+] [-] 77pt77|9 years ago|reply
We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior.
The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.
The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight.
Nothing will change.
Edit: punctuation
[+] [-] ex_amazon_sde|9 years ago|reply
Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews. Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.
[+] [-] wyclif|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|9 years ago|reply
The only problem is life is pretty much an accumulation of incremental experiences.
Most people just can't wake up one day perform like a superstar at work for the same reason why a person can't just wake up and run a marathon without any practice. Like physical stamina, mental stamina too comes from a lot of practice done over years and "from their earliest years" performance matters.
Plus rewards come to a lot of long time sloggers, because they've been around long and have been putting their heads down and doing a lot of work.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] devoply|9 years ago|reply
Really this is just neo-taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticis...
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 years ago|reply
However my nephew didn't have such a fun time. He was working for one of their warehouses in Kentucky and they were ruthless to the workers like him. They had a snow storm, he got stuck in the snow and instead of being understanding they reprimanded him for it. He liked the pay but couldn't take the humiliating treatment, so he quit.
[+] [-] morganvachon|9 years ago|reply
Punishing an employee for risking their life to try to come in to a job they already hate? That's textbook sadism, ruthless is too weak a word. In inclement weather our critical staff can depend on officers in 4x4 vehicles to bring them in, with no reprimand for being late due to the weather. Non-essential staff are encouraged to stay home and avoid injury and possible death trying to make it to work.
[+] [-] Dickie_Sticks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amazon_employee|9 years ago|reply
LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really cares about them. You get upper management worship anywhere. It's the same thing as obsessing over celebrities.
Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair. One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job.
[+] [-] jsolson|9 years ago|reply
They're a seriously good bit of Amazon culture that's been perverted into something you can use to submarine any meeting. If treated honestly, they seem (to me, anyway), like a fantastic set of rules for governing a company's actions. Sadly, it's difficult to align incentives with actually honoring and encouraging those principles :(
[+] [-] amzn-336495|9 years ago|reply
Something needs to be done to help people financially who are looking for a way out from the abuse.
[+] [-] cwilkes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianggg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out", offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on.
(I know, I know, I know: "because laywers.")
[+] [-] sssilver|9 years ago|reply
When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will be the domain name in your email. Everything else will be coincidental.
[+] [-] u489utaa|9 years ago|reply
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
* I worked at AWS for 2 years.
[+] [-] peripitea|9 years ago|reply
What this means is that in four years, despite glowing reviews every year and a promotion, I never got a meaningful raise/bonus/stock grant, because the stock was doing so well. My W2 income went up, but it was completely unrelated to my performance -- I could have done just enough to not get fired and would have made essentially the same amount. People who performed worse than me were regularly given larger stock grants.
It was super demoralizing to figure that out. Big part of the reason I left.
[+] [-] SomeCallMeTim|9 years ago|reply
Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year.
The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered food is a cute perk, but it's hardly critical.
I don't drink soda, but they had free coffee and tea. Tea is my drink of choice, so I was happy. Soda is bad for you anyway. ;)
They did have free "snacks" if you count breakfast cereal. Which many people would grab a cup full of as a snack (there were no bowls, oddly enough). There were a mountain of breakfast cereal boxes on every floor near the kitchen. But yes, they also had paid snack machines.
The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.
Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
And I think the latter really makes the difference. There are 20,000 people working at Amazon, according to the article. When you scale that big, some corners of the org are going to suck, and some will be better.
I may someday return to Amazon, now that they have an office near me in Colorado. But I'm still working on the game that I put on hold while I worked at Amazon, and I need to finish it before I reattach the golden handcuffs.
[+] [-] joshstrange|9 years ago|reply
> - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
I haven no equity in my company or opportunity to get any.
> - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
I don't think my company offers any relocation packages (I could be wrong on that) but even so this policy doesn't strike me as completely crazy.
> - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
My vesting schedule only vests after 6 years (with 20 percent vesting every year after the first). It's not great but on average it's not the worst AFAICT.
> - No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself
> - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
Both of these... We have nothing like it at all, I'd kill for a "shitty cafe". We have coffee and that's about it. This comment comes of as extremely spoiled to me.
> - Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
My job doesn't include being on call but I work with people who are, I don't fully understand what this bit is talking about. Are you woken up just to be told your "shift" is starting or is this just referencing being woken up because there is a problem? Cause that's kind of the definition of being on call....
Maybe I'm just naive and stupid to think my job is good (every job could be better of course) but from where I'm sitting 90% of your comment comes off as entitled and spoiled and it colors the rest of it.
[+] [-] tn13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|9 years ago|reply
I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.
Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.
Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.
[+] [-] Kiro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rifung|9 years ago|reply
Is this weird? I only know of one or two coworkers who knows how to write bash scripts..
Despite almost knowing no bash, I was hired as an SDE1 at Amazon so your story adds up though!
[+] [-] rememberlenny|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manish_gill|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
This seems totally out of place to me. You have to pay for your own food, who cares? That's the way it is for pretty much everybody.
[+] [-] tedmiston|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellTheGlove|9 years ago|reply
They did not make me an offer, which is just as well as I would have declined. I doubt I did a great job of sounding interested past the 15 minute mark, which is really out of character for me.
Now to address some of your points, tech must be a different animal. I'll tell you about my benefits since I really like that HN is a place to really get some transparency, and probably by design, there isn't a lot of Fortune 500, non-tech firm representation here. So you can stop reading if you aren't curious, but for those that are, here goes.
I work in finance tech, but with a large, somewhat oldschool company, not a startup. I recently became a (junior) officer of this company. Comparatively, I don't think Amazon sounds all that bad in terms of the fringe items. For instance:
- I don't even get a free cup of coffee here - the cafeteria is pretty good, but not cheap
- Most people here don't get equity. We do have an employee stock purchase benefit that lets you buy at a discount with a reasonable holding period (90 days or 6 months, can't remember). For those that do have what I'd call retention incentives (either cash or stock), our vesting period starts at 3 years. This is separate from our bonus, which varies by level (and all levels get something), but vests when deposit hits your account
- Our 401k match is comparatively better. We match 1:1 up to 5%, and then I think we kick in roughly the same as a defined contribution, since we no longer offer a pension. So 10% in "free" retirement money each year. I believe matching begins on day 1 and vests immediately
- Tuition reimbursement is a funny thing. I haven't tried our benefit here since I'm done with school. However, I've been around my industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Fortune 500. Most companies offer 5-6k a year, and they all try their best never to pay it. At one company, who I won't name, I was told that my degree was not related to my job, so no benefit. Great, but the policy makes no mention of that, and the recruiter certainly doesn't undersell the benefit
- Oncall sucks. I've avoided it since I manage backend financial/data engineering processes, nothing customer-facing. I've covered myself as much as I've delegated, though, it's only fair
- Relocation was I think a year, and they covered everything - packing, moving, transporting our 3rd car, etc. Package is based on level and some other factors. As an employee now, though, I don't think there's ever any repayment period for internal relocation. They just cover it, and from what I hear, it's pretty comprehensive
I realize I'm not entry level, but the above applies to everyone here, except where noted. I used to think we don't pay Amazon salaries, but a peek at Glassdoor says that Amazon doesn't really pay that well, particularly for the cost of living around the HQ.
[+] [-] outworlder|9 years ago|reply
Having escaped from an abusive manager myself, I can imagine what this person went though. Managers that are skilled in the art are able to inflict pain without leaving much of a paper trail.
I did ask for (and got) professional help, including medication. There's only so much stress 24/7 that you are able to handle before you start to crack. Who knows what would have happened if I just tried to ride it out.
I'd have gone bananas if I had been placed in a PIP instead. This was one of the possibilities identified by my branch predictor, so I was collecting a mountain of evidence against said manager. Thankfully, it wasn't needed.
(I realize that nowhere in the article it says a manager was the issue, but corporate pattern-matching gets pretty good after a while)
[+] [-] SuperPaintMan|9 years ago|reply
Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.
[+] [-] daviross|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbcgerard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infinitone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkjk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madman2890|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tempest1981|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone else do this?
[+] [-] Merovius|9 years ago|reply
Internet: Let's get this thing to the Hackernews frontpage!
[+] [-] gtirloni|9 years ago|reply
From reading other articles, it seems he is alive and jumped from the 4th floor.
[+] [-] Buge|9 years ago|reply
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/27/body-appl...
[+] [-] msie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bystander876|9 years ago|reply
Hats off to those folks. It seemed like no time at all before they showed up and moved very quickly to help the injured man. I was really impressed.
[+] [-] jimmywanger|9 years ago|reply
The facts are: a guy put in for a transfer, got put on a performance improvement plan, threatened self-harm, and then jumped off a building.
There are no details why he requested a transfer, the reasons he got put on a PIP, and if he was mentally unstable or not, where these fairly common life events would cause him to contemplate self harm.
Nope, the pitchforks and the torches come out.
[+] [-] andy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plandis|9 years ago|reply
Just in this thread alone I've been accused of:
* Screwing employees over * Being a slave in a sweatshop * Insulted for not being able to use Bash (I can) * Disorganized * Not be trusted to talk about working at Amazon (lol) * Fostering a toxic workplace * A communist (my favorite insult)
[+] [-] khnd|9 years ago|reply