amzn-336495's comments

I agree. If you read the glassdoor reviews, engineers were posting warnings about Amazon back in 2008.

> What the hell does cheating mean in software development.

Management. At Amazon there are literally thousands of managers that don't know what the hell they are doing just waiting for you to code up something they can take credit for and keep their jobs. They hired YOU to do a real project that they can't cheat. If there was a cheat they would have already done it or gotten one of Amazons 15,000 other devs to do it. If they hire you its some combination of no one else can do it or no one better wants to expend the effort in a long drawn out assignment with low payoff.

Lets say you are smarter than 15,000 other people and actually found a cheat. Congratulations, that cheat is now the baseline expectations. You better have more tricks up your sleeve.

> No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago.

That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.

There are refresh equity grants unless you are on a PIP. Now you know what all the fucking PIPs are all about at Amazon (other than blocking your transfer).

You should not listen to what anyone at Amazon tells you.

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.

You don't have to worry about it with Amazon. Amazon definitely doesn't pay 170k to 99% of their SDEs. SDE2 total comp is under 150k and that is at least 95th percentile.

What are the major changes that were instituted and what are the results?

That is sad. They could have made double the SDE2 salary of $120k somewhere else. No one is really sure what Amazon PE's did or do to be a principal engineer. Most people think PE's bribed or extorted their way into the job at Amazon as that is the only realistic "path" to that particular job. All that Amazon SDE's know is that there are two levels, SDE 1 and SDE 2 which comprise 95% of Amazon SDE jobs and 99.9% of open positions. Both pay less than every other place.

An Amazon employee less than #10 does a seminar about SDE careers at Amazon where he/she brags about how Amazon fired all their early engineers because "they weren't good enough." Yeah the people who got Amazon off the ground weren't good enough. Then he/she talks about how if you want to be promoted you better start sucking up to the people deciding your fate in "smoke filled rooms" because you're wrong if you think it has anything to do with your work. This is supposed to be a seminar on how to get promoted at Amazon. It is truly vile and goes to the core of Amazon's culture. Smart people are only there to be exploited.

So I read this article interested to see how long engineer #1 lasted: 5 years.

What is likely occurring at Amazon is that the board has outlined that executive and line managers should be paid based on number of reports beneath them and this is a scheme simply to get more butts in seats so manager can be paid more. Before you say that can't possibly be correct, consider you don't know Amazon. At Amazon this sort of out in the open cheating or ability to game the system is seen as a mark of power. It's the same as cheating vendors or publishers. It's seen as a positive. Secondly the management culture is that employees are mere chaff to be used in any way possible to increase management compensation and power. There is absolutely no way this has anything to do with making Amazon better as a business.

>What are the attributes of a crappy manager?

The director in charge of Fire TV was part of a sex trafficking ring that victimized Korean slaves in Bellevue, WA. This person is under indictment in King County courts. The women were slaves who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia. No doubt this person still has lots of friends that are still in management at Amazon.

So, for context of "how bad can it really be?" read the above and let that sink in a little bit. This is not being forced to work on the weekend kind of shit. No woman should be setting foot on Amazon campus for their own personal safety.

Amazon is not in direct competition with those companies. Amazon bottom feeds on new grad hires, people with restrictive visas, and interns. Their 90th percentile pay for developers is going to be about $120k per year with maybe a $150k total comp target. They may hire a few dozen top people per year, but for the most part no one ever quits those companies to go to Amazon.

"I'm ex-AWS. Actually an ex-AWS hiring manager. My experience is at odds with the negative stories."

And then there is the Fire TV team who had to work under a director who was indicted for being part of a sex trafficking ring and is currently awaiting trial in King county courts. The women were slaves who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia. Yes, Amazon hired a sex trafficker/pimp into its management org. Parts of Amazon are totally corrupt. We can only imagine how much worse the people that hired this person are.

Oh...you think that stack ranking has anything to do with performance.

Changing teams is pointless. Every manager of every team at Amazon has burner employees whether anyone knows it or not. Part of being an employee is trying to determine if you are the burner. People are hired in as burner employees at Amazon. That is unless Amazon stopped doing company-wide stack ranking, which obviously it will never do since it legitimizes pass-the-buck and is so beneficial to the people making the rules.

I guarantee they told your execs something completely different because Amazon. SOP is to tell you don't worry be happy while loading you up with blame coming down from your director/VP. If you quit, everything they tried to secretly pin on you now focuses on your managers so they are desperate to keep you from quitting. Once you get to OLR the next year you'll get an unpleasant surprise and probably fired. This is called burn and churn management and Amazon is a master of it.

Amazon treats RSU's as cash compensation. It's a very stupid strategy to keep employees on the leash and from getting rich. If your RSU's double you won't get raises, bonuses, or more RSU's because your total compensation is above Amazon's "target" for you. This of course defeats the purpose of an incentive stock plan. Employee concerns are in no way aligned with the company when stock is just used as a cash bonus replacement. The ONLY reason people want stock is to make more than they could through salary. Amazon should just stop granting stock at this point since they too damn greedy to effectively use it to incentivize employees. People leave Amazon because if you want to get rich for your hard work you go somewhere else.

Why don't you quit? Serious question. Your boss says the stock is doing well and that's a reason to screw you on pay? Does anyone believe this shit? Compensation target is beyond stupid. At best it is a deferred compensation plan Amazon has manufactured to use in screwing employees while also boosting their income statement. RSU forfeitures at Amazon are in the billions. Hundreds of millions of their EBITDA can be explained by RSU forfeitures which Amazon controls the timing of.

Did you read the article at all? "Amazon laid off "dozens of engineers" in its Lab126 hardware unit"

They took tens of millions of dollars of revenue and built some huge balls in downtown Seattle, so I don't think they were hurting for money.