No wonder they are on constant recruitment overdrive. Calls from consultants recruiting for them have become worse than from banks offering credit cards.
It's visible from the outside too. We've worked with Amazon for years, around AWS, MWS, login and pay, etc., and it's a shambles. Nobody seems to stay more than ten weeks or so, points of contacts are always changing and one gets the feeling they're all bluffing because it's their first day - I don't know how they actually get anything done. They must have a core of people somewhere who aren't rotating rapidly, I suppose?
So even if only 25% of your frontline staff leave in a year... that is still a lot of time the higher guys that stick around need to spend teaching the new staff. If you couple with 25% of frontline staff left + need 25% new staff due to growth, you are in for a rough ride.
It's a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Abusing your employees can produce short term benefits. I think the point of the complaints and the growing resistance is the point of the parable of robbing Peter to pay Paul, that it doesn't work out in the long run.
If the API is the glue that ties business units together, you don't need as many knowledgable employees who understand the guts of the company -- the company itself is self-documenting.
They are at the correct side of the technology (with Cloud) and they excel at the race to the bottom (AKA sucking as employer and paying as little as possible).
So are most of the employers in Asia producing excellent gadgets (i.e. FoxConn).
The good thing with racing to the bottom is -well- sometime you reach it and then you either have to get better or perish.
This makes me wonder what would happen if you took a job there and just refused to do the sucking up? What if you just competently did what they asked and didn't worry about getting fired for bullshit reasons?
With that kind of turnover, it occurs me to that you very well could survive without doing all the soul-sucking bullshit because the managers simply couldn't afford to lose more workers.
I'm not the one to try it, though, as I've no interest in working in those high-stress situations in the first place. I'm fine with making a little less and having a personal life outside of work.
You can cruise and do nothing. I worked at Intel for 3.5 years and watched "old white guys" collect $200k+ in pay/bonus/stock and do about 1 month of real work.
But it is soul sucking...if you piss the wrong people off they will do their best to get rid of you and promote their lackeys. It really is welfare for the middle class.
In my current job that's all there is, and 1 month worth of work is pushing it, unless "work" also means manipulating the information and the situation, then they are working hard, giving their 100% in that department.
Its the old way of thinking, its like that episode of Seinfeld where Georges car breaks down at work and his boss who now sees his car parked there as he gets in and as he leaves thinks he is a great employee. Costanza is always working! Its easier to look at cars than numbers.
Because thats what i was exposed to. Im a 34 year old white guy and have no problem saying it felt like welfare for "middle" class. the bonus and stock handouts were absurd. Yes Intel has different races/gender (the diversity push is a joke), but on the software side it was dominated by one demographic.
Please stop. Invoking race was completely unnecessary for making your point. If you really meant class, you should have said so. I know middle class people of all backgrounds.
Amazon recruits heavily along fresh CS grads, so there's always more flesh for the fire.
As an intern, I worked on a team that was rapidly spinning apart. We were resource constrained, one of the team members was in Ireland (and he always seemed to need help from somebody else on the team), and the manager... I don't even know.
The first day I was there, he told me to write a tech spec for a new version of one of the team's projects. The examples he showed me were all pithy high-level algorithm overviews for small features, which had 0 relevance to my project. I spent a week and a half groping in the dark for what he wanted.
About 4-5 weeks in to the internship, I asked him how he thought I was doing. He told me to think about the Amazon leadership principals and to tell him how I thought I was doing next week during the one on one. What kind of manager doesn't give feedback, even when the employee asks directly?
The business owner was a tall guy with slicked-back hair. I was supposed to meet with him in the first week. He blew off four meetings with me over the first month before I stopped trying to schedule them. When he finally deigned to meet with me (7 weeks in), it was to tell me he wanted a feature that not only didn't exist, but was so far away from what was possible that I didn't even know what to make of it. He would also do this shit where he would try to take other people's food, which seemed to me like an aggressive display of dominance.
My mentor, a senior engineer, was the only one who was really helpful. It was he who read my code reviews, he who told me that he was impressed with how quickly I had learned the framework, and he who was actually setting goals for me that made sense. He said he had my back for the hiring meeting, which put me at ease.
I didn't end up getting hired. I read and reread the feedback document I got, trying to make sense of what had happened. I hit all of my deliverable dates, I know my code was clear and concise, I went to the social events and talked to people from all over the org... What could I have done better?
The answer I've arrived at is I should have sucked up. I should have tried to identify the people with real power, and done my best to make them happy. The business owner was in the hiring meeting, and if I had gotten him on my side, I could have written 12 loc total and still gotten a job. Amazon had been pretending to the new hires and interns that there wasn't any office politics, but I've never worked anywhere more political.
A friend of mine from university got a job in a different org inside of Amazon, and he told me that he looked at my employee feedback on the internal website and said that it didn't say anything concrete about why I hadn't hired, just stuff like "obviously skilled, but not a good fit." Maybe that's the truth. I've just started working for a company whose namesake was just nominated for CEO of the year, and I already feel more at home there than I ever did at Amazon.
The eating of other people's food is such a petty and transparent display of aggression that I don't understand why it isn't an instantly fireable offense. That just sums up the whole problem with the culture.
Pretend that you brought a take-out burger and fries back to the office for your lunch. As you take a bite of your sandwich, a hand snakes out and snags one of your fries, which then disappears into the smarmy maw of the boss of your boss.
He's not even hungry. He just wants to see what you do when he takes your food. It's a dominance test, and as childish and petty a test as anyone could possibly imagine.
Seriously, how would he do it? How would people respond? Would he keep eye contact the entire time he stole it and ate it to reinforce the dominance he had over them? Did he then tell them that coffee is for closers?
>This makes me wonder what would happen if you took a job there and just refused to do the sucking up? What if you just competently did what they asked and didn't worry about getting fired for bullshit reasons?
Having seen it occur to various people elsewhere where cultural rot had set in quite deeply, it's really quite simple.
Failing to suck up means you'll get mediocre to poor performance reviews. In places with stack ranking systems (reportedly Amazon is one of them), somebody has to be the goat and you basically are volunteering. You manager will say to you, with varying levels of sincerity, "I tried really hard to get you higher up in the rankings but there were a lot of people who did really strong work this year. You'll have to work extra hard next year to try to get a better ranking.". Unless you genuinely aren't doing a good job, you won't be punished directly but you won't get much in the way of raises, bonuses, or promotions either.
Eventually, people will notice that you have a long string of poor/mediocre reviews and relatively low level compared to your peers and will start assuming that you're not a good employee and look down on you. Internal transfers then become much more difficult and you become a prime target for being managed out or laid off.
Is it inherently better to work for companies that doesn't use stack ranking systems? What are the alternates, and can you briefly tell the differences?
Doesn't make any difference at all. Its the same thing. Rewards/bonuses/raises et al are always limited. And people who suck up make it big in any set up.
Almost everything I've heard about employment at Amazon has been negative.
Now obviously, I can't say whether that's fair to the company, however it must be costing them a lot of money. I bet there are a lot of people that have heard the din of politics and would never consider working there.
Are there any HN readers that are currently working at Amazon and that are happy?
I worked there as an SDE for ~3 years, until recently (in Seattle, in a core business area) and liked it a lot.. As far as I could tell, most of the people in my organization were very content with their jobs. We've of course talked about the negative reputation about the work environment. It seems like those conditions must exist somewhere, to hear this much about it, but they must be in other parts of the company since they're totally unlike what I've seen.
That or it existed until several years ago and the rumors have a time delay in coming out.
Unless the turnover is ludicrous such that very few lasted over a year, survivor bias would probably make it seem those left are content... For myself I've read a lot of really bad posts from ex-employees (and talked with a few as I'm in the area) and it's enough to make me never want to work there under even desperate circumstances despite my great appreciation as a customer and acknowledgement of their superior tech practices in some domains. (Like use of TLA+, being API-driven...) Maybe you can update me on these, but I currently ignore Amazon recruiters because I can't figure out which few-words complaint to send by itself in response: "free snacks", or "personal side projects including games", or "40 hour weeks", or "stack ranking", or "aggressive non-compete".
I don't think the people who stay for a long time are "starry-eyed". I think they're people who jive better with the culture. That perfectly explains why they like it there, too.
I did well with the culture, and therefore had a positive experience. I'm definitely aware of people who didn't. I'm also aware of people who weren't unhappy, but left for unrelated reasons (several because the weather in the Bay Area trumps Seattle for them. I don't know if I feel that way, having not lived down there, but I think Seattle's weather is vastly underrated.)
(I feel compelled to defend Amazon since I feel like the lone naysayer in this comment thread.)
Whoa, unless the bonus is astronomical, you would really need to question the offer, especially if relocation is involved. The longest earn-out I've ever had on a hiring bonus was 6 months, even then I left within 5 and didn't have to pay it back. The amount of things that can cause you to leave a job or be fired over two years creates a huge risk, and creates an incentive for your employee to fire you on your 23rd month.
a friend of mine who works at Amazon (Toronto), got an 8K signing bonus. He just graduated from University (and he worked there for 4 months before graduating on a co-op).
As for signing bonuses, I have read contracts from various startups that want you to pay your signing bonus (which is generally about 5k) back if you leave within the first year.
I have heard stories from other employees, claiming that entire teams were fired, and workloads were transferred to the remaining employees - however they have been just that - unverified rumors.
The three offers that I'm familiar with from three of the big ones were 2 years, though maybe it's different for new grads?
I totally agree, I don't really like it. I think, though, that the astronomically large bonuses are worse than the small ones. Paying back $5000 (+ income tax, mind you) is much easier than paying back $100k + tax.
An example of salary from one wholly-owned Amazon subsidiary:
Base salary 78k.
First Year signing bonus: 30k, 10 RSUs vest after first year
Second Year signing bonus 25k, 30 RSUs vest after second year
Third year & Fourth year, 40 RSUs vest after every 6 months of employment
This was directly from an entry level offer and it is general practice to get a salary increase at annual reviews and more RSUs for after your fourth.
Like many RSUs, if you leave before your RSUs vest, you forfeit them. This is pretty much your 4 year incentive to stay.
The income I was getting felt luxurious even without the RSUs. I viewed them as "promises of extra income next year" rather than "money I get this year but forfeit if I leave", which seems much healthier for many reasons. You're always on a revolving set of RSUs anyway; it's not like there's a point where they've all vested. In no sense is that 'handcuffs'. It's more of a guaranteed raise.
sign on bonus is the same as almost everywhere. You get the money up front and have to return it if you leave within a year.
RSUs are back loaded. I forget the exact numbers, but it is something akin to 5% vested after 1st year, then 15%, then 35%, so after 2 years the vesting schedule makes it pretty hard to walk away from, especially with the current stock price. "If I stay just another 3 months I get 45 thousand bucks over my salary... hmm...."
My close friend works there (in European branch) as an accountant and he says it is quite fine. He has to work hard, but rarely more than 8 hours a day. But he also confirmed to me that some things from that famous article are true, for example some people crying at their desk from overworking etc. Some of his colleagues are working long hours or even weekends, but according to his understanding, it is partially their own choice and it is not forced to do so.
I wish more of these stories had some indication of what department the author was from. I have a bit of a suspicion that the closer you get to the retail operation the worse it gets (and of course doing fulfillment in a warehouse is the belly of the beast). Part of it is certainly Amazon culture but part of it is surely that retail businesses are a grind. Margins are slim and there is constant pressure to gain every possible efficiency even at the cost of human pain.
The number of employees in a company doesn't necessarily limit its monopoly power or ability to collude, though.
If you tried this, you'd just get companies avoiding the law by working with subsidiaries or contractors, a bit like they do already for different reasons.
Certainly true, but this can be considered a (secondary) side-effect. Law could prohibit this behavior, but can of course never eradicate it.
As for your point about monopoly: I don't think it will be very easy to maintain a monopoly if the number of people you employ is limited (because other companies could easily equal that number of employees).
Make them follow the unix/oss philosophy? One task/ company? Fork the company by splitting of a unit from the original company, creating microservices for companies :) Make HR a company, make sales a company, etc etc....
There's a very famous paper on "The Nature of the Firm" by Coase that asks why this doesn't happen automatically in a free market: http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf
Nobody is forced to buy from Amazon. Why must the government be involved? These are consenting adults making choices. This isn't a cotton plantation in 1845. Employees don't like it: quit. If it hurts the bottom line, the company will adapt. If you think it should be different, start your own company.
Surely that would just lead to companies that own lots of smaller companies? (Aware this is already the case on a different scale) And then communication gets completely dredged between companies as there are so many to work with?
So, there are anti-trust laws in the US. This limits the size of companies based on market share. The goal of this is to limit monopolies. Capitalism is a great system at responding to market conditions and efficiently allocating resources. Capitalism is less effective when monopolies form, and it causes the business cycle which can be unpleasant and disruptive for the people participating in the economy.
The bad grammar makes it hard to take this post seriously (my something-is-off spam-detector goes off I guess, trained from years of sifting through fradulent emails).
A company doesn't really "sponsor" a TN visa, they just have to be willing to write a job offer letter that satisfies the border officer. This means it specifies the job is temporary (try to get it to say 3 years, as that's the longest they'll give you the visa for), it has a salary, and it has a listing of job duties that aligns with the NAFTA job class you're going for.
With the TN visa, you just need the proper documentation and they issue it at the border. The company doesn't need lawyers or filings; it's all on you.
I'm sure a big company like Amazon has experience here. If you're job hunting and are talking to smaller companies, you might have to educate them about how the TN works because many don't know it exists and assume they'll have to pay a lot of money to hire a Canadian.
If you've never come in on a TN visa before it's worth the ~$400 in lawyer fees to get them to review the TN letter and coach you on the procedure.
TNs are very easy to 'sponsor', companies far smaller than Amazon do so with no difficulty. My personal recommendation (don't quote me): don't even bring it up until you're well into the process, it's very easy to tack onto an existing offer.
Back when scrutiny of Amazon's working conditions blew up after a NYT investigation, there were several HN'ers who had good things to say about working there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
I've known a few Amazonians and their stores more or less mirror the bad stuff I've heard (they all worked in the retail part as SDEs, not AWS). Some of the details about software processes and team build-up/dissolving make me wonder how the site even stays on-line.
I also interviewed once with them for a TPM position and had a fairly weird discussion with the recruiter about compensation and had to field some pretty random interview questions. Nothing was particularly terrible about my experience, but it made me wonder if I wanted to move across the country for what looked like a very non-amazing job.
Let's assume the rants are true for the most part. How is it possible that so many people work for Amazon despite the antics, especially in Seattle where it should be possible to get a similar job elsewhere. Are there benefits people work towards while coping with the toxic workplace?
Or they thought it would be better than their previous place and were stuck once there. Or it was the only place to give them an offer. Or the money was too good to pass up despite the abuse. Or they accepted the abuse for the name brand on their resume.
Maybe they're trying to show off how tough they are. Nobody ever made the mistake of thinking military basic training was an all inclusive vacation. Its plausible.
In an absolute sense it may be a hellish place to work and the average turnover might for the sake of argument be 6 months. But lets say you have a job hopping stain on the resume and you gut out 9 months of amazon, well, that's fifty percent longer than most survive, that employee must have a cast iron stomach and be a focused dedicated team player, etc etc. Paradoxically Amazon being hell on earth is a benefit in that scenario, obviously you don't want to waste your life on HR nonsense, and if you can prove you're tough in 9 months instead of 2 years, well, thats great. Actually, make working conditions worse at Amazon if at all possible so "tough guys" can prove themselves in only two months instead of the made up 9 months.
Well, up until the stories started coming out, Amazon was (and still kind of is) a "big name". So if one of their recruiters comes calling, most people were willing to follow. They'd get their salary and stock golden handcuffs, and by the time they realized the truth, it's too late. You can't leave for a while because of the handcuffs, and what it looks like to leave an employer, especially one like Amazon, within 6 months to a year.
I know very well how little of the flexibility exists for most developers around the world, but I explicitly asked how Amazon can be a good opportunity in Seattle. I'm curious what the benefits are, since there are so many negative reports from insiders. There are many companies you'd expect to read similar reports about and don't, so either there's a negative Amazon press union somewhere, maybe those working in warehouses, or Amazon's office workplace is really as bad as people say.
An ex-Amazon engineer at a top tech company told me he felt that his current colleagues were higher-caliber than his colleagues at Amazon, and that many candidates that were rejected would have been accepted by Amazon. So that's a possible answer.
That being said, Amazon is still considered a top tech firm, even if it is a cut below Google/Facebook in prestige. There aren't many tech firms as well-known as Amazon. I can see many fresh grads going to Amazon for 1-2 years just to get it on their resume.
The median tenure is 1 year at Amazon. Lots of people cycle through there. Though plenty of people stay for a while. They pay alright and it's not too difficult to get hired.
Also, when I was working there I had a difficult time reconciling myself to how bad it was to work there. On paper it doesn't seem so bad. You get to work on pretty interesting stuff sometimes, you make good money, typically you only have to work 40 hour work weeks, etc. I convinced myself to walk away from a good chunk of money just in bonuses to get out of there, some people might be able to stick it out longer or find the money harder to leave behind.
The problem is that having such a huge portion of the economy being involved in knowledge work is a relatively new thing, and we don't understand the differences between knowledge work and physical work. And especially we don't have thoroughly established standards on what constitute good and bad conditions for knowledge work. We tend to think that sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day is "easy", but it very much is not. A stressful working environment for a knowledge worker is just as bad if not worse than a physical stressful job working extended hours. I only spent a year at Amazon, and most of the time I probably didn't even put in full 40 hour weeks, but I hated it there. In comparison I view the time I spent years ago doing data entry at sometimes up to 70 or 80 hours a week during peak times as comparatively inconsequential. Depending on the team you're on and so forth, working at Amazon can be a painful and stressful experience.
Take being on call for example. In theory this isn't so bad, it's good to give devs exposure to how the ops side of things works, and it's in theory good to give them ownership of their own mistakes so that they have incentive to write good code. The problem is, you're not in charge. You're never going to get permission to dump the resources into making everything run well, ever. Most teams have other priorities and they don't have enough resources to spare to allow you to properly fix the code you're responsible for. Worse, it's not even your code, it's code that was written by someone else years ago who also left years ago. And the next person is just going to get whatever mess you leave behind when you leave. So in the average case you can't actually work to improve things, so being on call is going to always be an extra pain, and a significant intrusion into your theoretically off-work life. Worse, it'll push you behind on all the other stuff you need to deliver.
Meanwhile, you have all the typical office BS of politics, ranking, bad corporate culture, reorgs, etc. that you have to deal with day to day. Some people manage to find good teams in that mess, and others manage to just turn off whatever makes people care about work and just suffer through it for the paycheck. But for a lot of people, more so the more you care, it'll be a stressful nightmare. And the easiest way to avoid dealing with all those problems is to just leave, which lots of people do.
From talking to ex-amazon coworkers you don't have to have gone to a handful of ivy league unis, you don't have to be exactly 22, you don't have to be a white male, you don't have to be in the same frat as the CEO. Doesn't mean you aren't going to get put thru the interview wringer like any other low social status job.
I interviewed there several years ago and although the interview process was long (several phone interviews and then a full day on-sight) it never really felt like a hard interview process. Of course after I interviewed there I heard nothing from them for 2 months, assumed they weren't interested, then they gave me a written offer out of the blue for a completely different job that had nothing to do with what I'd interviewed for and wasn't really aligned with my skills or interests, so I have no idea what kind of bizzaro twilight zone interview process I might have fallen into.
>The median tenure is 1 year at Amazon. Lots of people cycle through there. Though plenty of people stay for a while. They pay alright and it's not too difficult to get hired.
Curious - does this take into account their warehouse employees who are not FTE's and are seasonal or only FTE's?
Keep in mind that can be somewhat misleading, if you have 3 positions and for 2 of those you have people who have stayed there 5+ years but for the other one you have had 5 people cycle through at a year each the median tenure will still be just 1 year. Even so, that's a pretty scary stat.
14 hours/day of low-paying mindless work like installing software (or whatever the modern equivalent is) without constant interruptions is easy and lucrative compared to even 4 hours of stressful, dissonant, interrupt-driven work that is common today. both are considered knowledge work, and in the end, on an hourly basis, both pay basically the same.
the most stressful part of this entire industry, and i know this from experience, is fixing other peoples' problems on-demand. whatever form it takes, that's the absolute worst fucking job in this entire field, because you get blamed for problems you did not cause, and blamed a second time for not fixing it fast enough.
Don't feel too bad, the hiring process in tech is almost universally garbage, from every angle. It especially has a high rate of bad "no hire" decisions.
I know. What really frustrates me is the number of people who try to justify that high rate as if it were a good thing, or at least a not very bad thing. I'm at the point now where I take willingness to encourage people to re-apply in n months as a signal that a company's hiring process is bullshit and that I shouldn't apply.
I have been downvoted on reddit for saying this, but my opinion is that a company should be confident enough in a "no" that they won't reconsider that person for a substantially similar role.[1] If they aren't, they need to fix their hiring process so they are.
As an aside, the other thing that really pisses me off is to hear about how in-demand "software engineers" are while still having to deal with this crap. Seems like a self-imposed problem to me.
[1] "Substantially similar" here means same level, same stack, and same team, as appropriate for a particular company. IMO level should largely be irrelevant at larger companies because a candidate should be judged on hireability into any level and an offer made at the highest one appropriate. If there isn't one appropriate but a slot opens up within a reasonable amount of time, an offer should be made to previous interview candidates who passed that bar but failed the higher one, without the need to re-interview.
I don't know if you've been on the other side of the equation, but it's also just as terrible. You get maybe 1 in 10 people that you can pass from one stage to the next (i.e. resume review to phone screen, phone screen to interview, interview to job offer).
One of the biggest problems is that it's just very difficult to gauge someone's competency well (even broadly) in a short amount of time. Worse, most folks who do interviews are unwilling to acknowledge how difficult a task it is and how bad they are at it. And the high level of legitimate rejections makes it easy to imagine that all of your rejections are legitimate.
It's very unfortunate because hiring is one of the most important things anyone does at a job, and hiring well (especially finding competence that other companies have passed over) is a major competitive advantage.
> You get maybe 1 in 10 people that you can pass from one stage to the next (i.e. resume review to phone screen, phone screen to interview, interview to job offer).
Where I currently work I have not been involved much in the early screening. My understanding is that resume to screen is about 1:4 and screen to interview is about 1:10. I have been involved with the interviews, and our interview to offer is somewhere between 1:2 and 1:3. Our screen includes a 2-hour timed coding test, though, so I think it is fairly effective at filtering the poseurs. Prior to this I didn't have any visibility into the results.
This is tangential, but I often wonder how much of the phone screen and on-site failure rate has as its root cause a poor resume filtering function. When you say you only screen the top 10% of resumes, are you really screening the top 10% of candidates? I know it's a really hard question to answer, but it seems like many companies don't want to try to answer it.
> Worse, most folks who do interviews are unwilling to acknowledge how difficult a task it is and how bad they are at it.
This is one thing that really bothers me about this industry. So many companies think it is acceptable to just yank semi-random engineers out of their daily routine to go interview a candidate. I came from the traditional engineering world, and we got training before we were assigned to interviewing candidates. Furthermore, for our first interviews we were always paired with another interviewer who had significant experience.
> It's very unfortunate because hiring is one of the most important things anyone does at a job, and hiring well (especially finding competence that other companies have passed over) is a major competitive advantage.
What is ridiculous is the number of people who treat hiring as a distraction from their real job. If you want any sort of management responsibility, hiring is part your job.
Exactly. So many devs thrust into the role of interviewer basically just want to look for people who are like them, or find ways to flatter themselves at the expense of the interview process. So many interviews boil down to "guess what answer I'm thinking of", even when that answer isn't actually the best solution to the problem, and often when there's no straightforward way to get to that answer unless you already know of it. And that's on top of all of the other ridiculous problems in the "hiring funnel" that lead up to that point. It's crazy how few people are actually invested in improving the situation given that there's such a huge return on investment possible.
I'm sure one factor is its probably relatively easy to get hired there with solid benefits and pay. While we always hear about great paying jobs (etc.) on HN, most people don't look that hard when searching for a new job. If Amazon pops in with everything they want (salary / benefits wise), they may be reluctant to go on that 4th, 8th... 10th interview.
I work at Amazon, getting paid just shy of $200k/year. My team spends like 80% of the time doing whatever we think will make the product better. The rest is devoted to operations and handling requests. I don't take my laptop home when I'm not on-call, which isn't that awful. If witnessed half as much fuckery as I see espoused on this site or in the NYT article, I'd finally respond to the google recruiters that hit my inbox weekly. Or idk, maybe start a company, or retire early. I actually enjoy Amazon though. It's an elegant organization that can create product that speaks to the customer, then iterate it to maturity. I imagine in the process of getting where we are today some highly distressed pockets developed and asinine managers got promoted to incompetence, but I haven't witnessed it yet. Also probably helps that a ton of tech companies have popped up offices in Seattle and the demand for engineers is staggering.
Supposedly it varies heavily from organization to organization. I work with people from multiple orgs. All of them seem pretty happy. Also, this is probably a violation of some policy which would be a tragic uncuffing of my badass golden handcuffs. Kind of sad that people probably get paid to monitor social media for company image. Probably a good start-up idea there if you squint hard enough and are willing to tolerate a large sales staff with long engagements and a lumpy revenue stream.
Any insight into why specific teams/managers aren't being anonymously named and shamed at this point if it is that bad? Seems almost inevitable at this point.
I can't imagine being wronged hard enough to do something like that. Then again, this twilight amazon I keep reading about on the internet might be bad enough.
So how do all these Amazon engineers stand living and working there in Seattle when there's no high-speed internet access anyway (according to what I've read online)?
I have gigabit, condointernet. Not sure where you heard that rumor. I made 200k year and took the abuse as long as I could. I made it about a year before I voluntarily quit. Now Im unemployed burning savings and still after months, still not ready to work again due to the absolutely heinous ptsd-style shit I had to go through. Maybe when this summer is up I'll find a new gig. Amazon is shit, good people get abused and ridiculed for making good money. Its the exact opposite of what should happen when you are a skilled and well meaning communicative dev. Im pretty sure the less you make the better you will get treated there, because the entire company is about "customers" and even extracting value from employees. Every employee has a target on their back.
I'm sorry you had a lousy time at Amazon, but that's not really what I was talking about, I was talking about the state of Seattle internet access. I read it all the time on the internet, in various message forums. From what I've read, in many places in Seattle (the city, not surrounding municipalities), there simply is no high-speed internet because Comcast doesn't feel like building it, and the city council doesn't feel like doing anything to force them to. It's basically a big joke and a huge irony because Seattle is a tech hub with Amazon and Microsoft there as well as a bunch of other tech companies.
As for your situation, I'd encourage you to get out there and look for a new job ASAP. I've had a bunch of different jobs in my career and for me it was actually pretty refreshing starting a new job somewhere. Of course, after a while the grim reality would set in about how this place wasn't that great (usually it was something in the job that changed, such as new management), but for a while they'd usually be pretty fun since their expectations of a new-hire are pretty low, and some jobs actually were pretty good all around. Don't just sit around and stew about your last job; get out there and get a new one and you'll forget about that last horrible one before long. Also, the longer you stay unemployed the harder it'll be to get a new gig, so don't wait.
I would like to hear something from the other side but not many employees create entire sites dedicated to documenting management/abuse problems. That's a sign right there that it seems serious :(
I constantly read how badly the pickers in the (European) dispatch centers get treated. They can get away with it because those are low wage jobs and the workers easy to replace. It becomes more evident that this is a fundamental issue in the company's culture.
I've learned that there are only two things managers are responsible for - getting the performance and achieving the goals the company has set for them, and keeping their people. If you achieve goals but don't keep your people, you've lost.
Don't work for Amazon, don't buy from Amazon if you can.
I've started to order my books through my local bookstore recently, it's surprisingly easy. I do my research online (often times via AMZN tbh) and pick up the books on my way from/to the office.
Exactly this. Besides not paying a fair amount of tax (= not giving back to society), it also drains money out of local economies if everybody just buys everything from Amazon.
You first have to explain the worship of local economies and small stores. 99% of the time they can't give you a better price, because their overhead isn't optimized and/or they operate at much smaller scale.
So your suggestion is basically to support the less efficient businesses.
In arenas of scale, yes. If you are the low-cost, mass offering, then wringing out unit economics is all that matters to you. Your customers are interchangeable and you can safely assume that there are more price-sensitive ones than there are those who value morals higher.
Morals are God's concern, therefore it's up to God to enforce them. God needs to reach his hand down and decree to the land that thou shalt not abuse your employees. This reverberates throughout the land and causes the powerful to tremble in fear. They all get together in a room and quietly make plans to appease the masses so they don't pray for blood or start a revolution.
Of course, in this case God is the government. Given enough political pressure, legislators can pass laws that change the landscape of commerce. Pressure can compel prosecutors to prosecute, regulators to punish. The threat of these punishments is often enough to keep the unscrupulous in line and allow the virtuous to have their say.
Local bookstore has the value of being a bookstore. Personally I love the feeling of space filled with works of print, any of them browsable by will. The experience of connecting with something physical is what makes it different from just browsing amazon's kindle store.
It's not only about efficiency. Unlike Amazon, a real bookstore is a lot of fun to browse in. Being able to browse real shelves, hold and flip through real books for an hour or two is a great leisure activity in itself. Now that stores are closing and it's at risk, I'd even pay a small entrance fee if it meant keeping the good ones open.
Though I agree that a larger chain bookstore with more selection offers more value than a small bookstore, for me it's more about real-world vs. online, not large vs. small business.
If your goal is to reward businesses that operate at the highest efficiency, then you are correct; supporting local businesses doesn't make sense to you.
If you have any kind of self-interest, though, supporting local businesses should be your priority. How does it benefit you to send your money away from your city or town so that it does not get re-invested in the area directly surrounding you? A lower share of your money gets re-invested in roads and schools through taxes and it has a multiplying effect when local businesses shutter frequently. It lowers real estate prices (assuming you own real estate, this matters) and reduces the quality of life of those around you; a factor which tends to cause an increase in the crime rate.
Your argument is essentially, "Why eat at anywhere other than McDonalds? They have the most efficient supply chain."
That argument breaks down when you realize that your local businesses aren't buying the goods or services that you can provide locally.
You should really be buying from the people and businesses with the fewest trade transactions from your customers. Once upon a time, that meant buying local was a smart move, but now it's more complex.
Since I, as a software developer, do not have any small business customers, the tightest possible trade graph loops that could return my own spending back to me all go through the larger national- and international-scale businesses.
Generalizing, I should prefer to buy from the companies that spend the most on software and software development, or who often buy from companies that spend a lot on my industry.
If I go to the farmers' market, I should prefer to buy from the stand that uses Google Pay or Stripe or Square or Bitcoin--or even Paypal--than from the one that is cash-only. Failing that, I should buy from the guy who has the newest tractor, with programmable GPS-assisted steering and blinking LEDs on the cup holder. Failing that, I should buy from the guy that spends the most on MMORPGs and dating websites.
Anything invested in a place will never pay off if I have to move away from it. And if I move, I can always prefer to move to the places that already have good schools and roads and parks without any additional investment from me.
Why should I eat anywhere other than McDonald's? Every chain and franchise restaurant runs McDonald's management software. They have touchscreen POSTs, and reprogrammable menu displays, and video screens at both of the dual drive-through lanes. They are consistent and inexpensive and "invest heavily" in R&D. Because sometimes I just want a convenient variety of salubrious and tasty food to eat, that's why. When Just-Down-My-Street Diner hires me to remodel their website, that's when I should prefer to eat there out of pure economic self-interest.
>That argument breaks down when you realize that your local businesses aren't buying the goods or services that you can provide locally.
That is a specific exception, maybe only to you. Just because you cannot find local customers doesn't mean that small businesses don't source software developers locally. I have done software development work for several businesses directly in my zip code, some of which I am also a customer.
You seem to specifically avoid the argument that small businesses in your area pay taxes for services that you consume directly. Why, exactly, is it more beneficial to you that your farmer plays an MMORPG than pays an override real estate tax that funds expanding a school in your neighborhood to better handle class sizes?
Also, you must not have a stake in the real estate market if you only care if the McDonald's in your neighborhood stays open.
>When Just-Down-My-Street Diner hires me to remodel their website, that's when I should prefer to eat there out of pure economic self-interest.
Again, just because you aren't currently engaging in this kind of business doesn't mean other people aren't. I find your argument very strange; that you can't work for local companies.
I can work for local customers, but I am not currently. They have been outbid by non-locals.
If you are hired by local business, then by all means, patronize those businesses in return. But as long as I am not hired by them, don't tell me I should, just because it is in your economic self-interest for me to do so.
You are very astute. I haven't had any stake in any real estate market anywhere since I lost the majority of my positive net worth to the real estate market in 2007. (Thanks very much for reminding me of that.) So whatever real estate market I happen to be in can go copulate with itself. I'm not buying anything I can't really own ever again.
Anecdotally, the property taxes I pay (that are included in my rent) go to the county--as do the business taxes paid by businesses on my side of the county line--and that county has refused to remit any portion of those funds to my city, which spans two counties, for the provision of services to city residents. As a result, the schools are overcrowded and other city services have been cut. So they can go copulate with themselves, too.
In contrast, McDonald's has never failed to give me the same consistent experience whenever I pay them their menu price from my own pocket. "My community" can't ever seem to uphold its end of any implied social contracts, but at least McDonald's can always sell me a Big Mac when I can afford one.
Having been repeatedly shown that loyalty no longer exists, if it ever did, I am now a strictly transactional mercenary, following tit-for-tat cooperation strategy, because that is what is in my economic self-interest. I am not going to "buy local" because it has feel-good marketing around it. I will buy local only if I see a specific benefit from it, and I have never actually seen one.
"Buy local" is marketing bullshit from people who don't admit that they would benefit from it far more than you ever will, and from people who hypocritically do their own buying non-locally.
Money doesn't get tired climbing hills or crossing rivers. Geography is continually becoming less important to economics. Buy closer to you as measured by your social network graph, not as measured by physical distance.
What's a 'fair' amount of tax? It doesn't drain local economies: it drains local retail, but if local retail were more competitive, then they'd be more competitive. Why should I subsidize local retail by paying higher prices? I don't owe local retail anything. If they aren't providing a better value (either through lower prices or better service,) then why should I buy from them? It's not my fault they can't compete. Amazon wasn't always big. They started small as well -- however they knew how to innovate which is a skill most local stores lack because they still use a distribution model from the 1800s.
I think you can make the argument that if you have strong local business it improves your neighborhood by keeping that money local, where it is reinvested either directly (e.g. your neighbor who owns the local hardware store has more money to buy things, upgrade his house, etc.) or through taxes. This leads to better schools, infrastructure, etc. There ARE drawbacks to having a giant centralized but convenient all-in-one supplier that can undercut the little guy on price and timeliness; you lose something along the way.
I am not blameless in this; we just bought a house, and although we have a locally owned hardware store that I try to go to first, there are so many things I have had the options of A) waiting 7+ days for them to get it in, B) getting it from Home Depot/Lowes within an hour, or C) getting it delivered from Amazon Prime tomorrow. It is nearly impossible to compete with that, but I WANT to support my local guy whose family has owned the business since the 60's. I don't know what the answer is.
An amount that a similar national company would have to do.
International companies have a way of shifting earnings into jurisdictions where they don't need to pay much taxes, since there is still a race to the bottom between countries. 'Better they pay us 2% of revenues that that other country 10%.'
(This has noting to do with the way the supply chain is done.)
Almost every big company [1] does something or the other that is so bad ethically (and sometimes legally too) that if we decided to boycott, we'd end up boycotting them all - and this is assuming people are even willing to, which most people aren't (convenience and product price trumps everything else to most). I just wish there is a way to protest and protest strongly enough for them to change their behavior. There have been some good attempts [2]. What else can a normal person do to protest?
Lots of people boycott Walmart for various reasons. They recently closed a bunch of stores, but that seemed to have more to do with the failure of the small store concept. They're still making tons of money though.
I give the Walmart example because the boycott sentiment has been around for so long. For companies as big as them and Amazon, even if boycotts hit the bottom line somehow, would they be able to sort that out from all the other factors that affect revenue and profits? It's like flies buzzing around an elephant. I doubt they'd make the connection and decide, "Oh, we'd better change the way we do business!"
It seems the only effective way might be to get high-impact media coverage. But then their spin-masters go on tv to neutralize the damage and everything stays the same.
You can find positive and negative anecdotes about any company, but with Amazon it's a qualitatively different situation. It's a long-term ongoing pattern of unethical behavior, a cacophony of negative feedback that outweighs the positive. The way they treat their blue-collar employees, white-collar, business partners, sellers, etc. (All parties except the buyers.)
I've stopped buying from them but I'm realistic, very few people will care enough to do so, not enough to affect their bottom line. I do it because it supporting them would feel wrong to me. Not because I expect I can make them change.
I don't shop at a few places (Walmart etc), can add Amazon to that list. Will it make any difference though? You and I are probably in the rounding error minority, unlikely to move the needle. We can feel good about our choices though, I don't see any other positive result.
it's only a matter of time before Amazon has a recruitment problem that it can't fix.
That is to be seen. There are lots of horrible employers who are still around (EA for example). Supply of workers is much greater than demand (even software industry is not immune to it as more and more youngsters enter the profession)
I concur - it feels like all of our money goes to the same unavoidable group of people in the end. I've tried to boycott a number of large groups but it's so difficult and obfuscated. Try boycotting Sony or Nestlé... good luck with that. I have yet to find a workable solution. Most of them require constant work and vigilance - enough to invade every economic decision you make. Because it requires more transparency than is available are almost impossible to integrate into a daily lifestyle. An illustration of this: "where does your favourite Cafe buy the chocolate for its hot cocoa? If they buy a prepared mix, then who do they pay?" etc etc
I'm still searching for and working to develop a good solution to minimise the flow of my economic output to those who do undesirable things with it.
At least with food, we have the option to shop from local farmers markets (wherever possible). But it is nearly impossible to do it with electronics, clothing etc
>I've started to order my books through my local bookstore recently
Yeeaah, about that... Last time I ordered a book at my local book store, they just ordered it of Amazon. The guy behind the counter tried to remove the Amazon packing discreetly, but failed.
If book stores are going to be complain about how Amazon is putting them out of business, they should at least not use them as a supplier.
Is it possible their usual supplier just couldn't get them that book for whatever reason? It's not necessarily a good idea to explain that to the customer and have them decide "much less hassle to use Amazon for everything then", than to order off Amazon and sell it to the customer at cost and hope they come back.
Probably their usual supplier is slower. I haven't had a bookstore order something for me in a few years, but it used to take more than 2 days to get the item. I'm guessing that the distributors that supply bookstores are optimized to deliver large shipments, not one-off orders.
When I worked retail we stocked books from one vendor that actually sold their products directly on Amazon at a lower cost than they'd sell to their wholesalers. We'd gladly take that discount instead of paying a premium for ordering directly from the publisher. We also used that as an opportunity to drop ship. The business sold books to get people in the store to buy higher ticket items so feeding the Amazon machine was a neutral affair.
Whereas here in Germany, ordering English-language books through my local bookstore is something like €50-per book cheaper than trying to order through Amazon. For them the work of getting the book from some foreign book distributor into their store is bread and butter. For some reason, for Amazon, mailing things out is a big thing that requires huge markups.
That's rather interesting, because my experience is from trying to order an English-language book in Denmark. I got to pay the Amazon price plus a little extra to the book store for their trouble (and I had to pick it up at the book store, rather than my mailbox).
Then again Danish book stores are insanely crummy. Most of them are somewhere between an arts and crafts store and a book store. Many even add a toys section. The selection of books is a joke in most of them. For the largest chain of book stores, books almost seems to be a secondary product.
I think the books I was getting were not directly available from Amazon, so they devloved into a web-service that more or less bought the things from UK book suppliers and fedexed them to me.
And then theres the shop itself. Hugendubel is a big chain and all its stores seem to have at least three stories. I guess boxes and boxes of overseas books fly every week to some distribution centre where they then get sent along to the stores along with the far larger bulk of German-language books.
Walgreens, Best Buy, and Newegg turned out to have better deals for the last few things I would have bought from Amazon. Lower or equivalent prices and free shipping without having to pay $100/yr or have a $50 order.
Well, of course you get fired. You're obviously a malcontent, and clearly not a team player. But, in fairness to Bezos, this is pretty much SOP at many companies.
1-2 years ago, before all the public coverage, I was interviewing one person from amazon. He was not happy with his former work situation (pager duty pushed on him, requests in the evening, ...) and he was terminated in the trial period because he brought it up to HR. I didn't believe him at that time.
The main thing about trial periods in the US is that benefits and perks generally don't kick in until after. For instance, at my old job, people didn't start accumulating vacation days until they were 90 days in.
It's another one of those inventions that heavily favor the employer at the expense of the employee.
That's interesting. With the exception of retirememt contributions, I've never worked at a place that withheld any benefits. I have had trial periods where I got a raise after proving suitability for the role.
I don't think (most) benefits are withheld in canada (or in europe). The point of probation there is to provide an initially relaxed (labor protections wise) 3~6 months "at will" to check for actual suitability since you don't really know whether things work out until work's actually been done. Breaking the relationship later is a more involved and expensive process and the thinking is that within the early 3~6 months the employee would know whether they want to stay, and the company whether they want to keep.
agreed. I got my benefits (stuff that the province doesn't cover - like perhaps some $$ prescription or eyeglasses) day 1 of new job, and probabtion is 6 months (i.e. can be let go without the whole "improvment plan"). Other places will have shorter probation and maybe full benefits after 30 days
edit: I am in Ontario and I know a guy in the medical feild that had a 1 year probabtion
The maximum length of this kind of probation is, afaik, set by provincial labour law and is 3 months in all but three provinces (nb, pei, and the Yukon). Employers can go lower, but not higher.
Though I think they can withhold benefits for longer than that separately from the probation period, but that's kind of rare I think.
Really withholding benefits in Canada is pretty different than in the us, though, since here it means you don't buy glasses for three months and there it means you'd better not break your legs.
That's not necessarily why employers do it, I'm sure some do though.
It costs a lot in terms of productivity, time, and dollars to bring someone new into the company. As an employer I don't know if you've completely misrepresented yourself or not- especially as a developer. I've hopefully done my best to make a good hire and be forthcoming in helping you make your best decision as well, but just like in dating, we're not necessarily sure how this thing is going to go at first.
In the tech industry I've never come across an employer that withheld insurance during the first 90 days, and most I've come across have you accruing your vacation immediately as well. I've seen employers in other industries (like manufactring) withhold all benefits until the 90 day mark though.
All my discussions with new hires on the 90 day trial period go something like this: "We're going to meet more frequently than we normally would, I'm going to give you more frequent feedback than I normally would, and I'm going to review your work much more often than I normally would in order to make sure that you're not getting lost in how we do things and that I can help you out with anything as fast as possible."
If you're a smart employer/manager you're going to use that arbitrary trial period to aggressively make sure your new people succeed. If you suck, you look for a problem and cut bait.
It depends on the state. Most companies have a 'trial period' where the manager doesn't have to go through the full HR process to remove someone. It's pretty much a 'you're an employee, but not really an employee.'
Personally, I think it's pretty crappy as it means that the company has all the leverage if they make a bad hiring decision, the person is let go after already potentially leaving another job for this one.
This is true, but a smart (and moral) manager will still try to not make bad hiring decisions. If the team sees a constant rotation of new faces they may get scared off.
It depends on the state, though most are "at will." Some companies will do a "trial period" in which some of your benefits are held back for anywhere from 60-90 days, so that may be what the parent is referring to.
On the other hand I question the "wisdom" of saying anything negative about a past employer, no matter how deserved it may be. It's just a big "never do it!".
But I still disagree. I don't own a company (yet), but I would like to have employees, who are strong enough, to tell the truth, even though it might hurt some feelings.
And if they honestly can tell me, what they like or did not at their former place, it would be much easier for me and also for them, to decide, if they would fit in this (imaginary) company.
And if, later, my company would be bad in their perception, they may say so, in the next interview.
I just like solid facts, even though they are sometimes not nice.
It's not necessarily about "bad style". It's possible to share legitimate reasons for leaving a company if asked in an interview, but you have to be careful. It's really bad to turn it into a time to badmouth another company.
It is frankly risky to say anything bad about a previous company, because even something minor like, "management micromanaged too much" could be interpreted by a cynical interviewer as "this person doesn't get anything done and whines when someone asks him what he's doing with his time." But even a good interviewer will take it as a bad sign if you spend five minutes enumerating everything you hate about your previous/current employer.
> It's possible to share legitimate reasons for leaving a company if asked in an interview
If the legitimate reason would be, that they micromanaged everything, because of lack of trust, even though I delivered results and that the general atmosphere were a mixture of hate and distrust, then I would very much say so in the next interview, if asked. And if they then won't take me, I would assume it is because the new place is similar and they just don't like people talk about it. So no place where I want to be anyway ...
If you start talking about an atmosphere of "hate and distrust", you're getting into territory where it sounds like either 1) you are hyper negative and make exaggerated complaints, or 2) you lack the social skills to recognize that an interview is not the place to vent, even if your complaints are legitimate.
An interviewer can't see anything about your history except what you tell them, and any decent interviewer will know not to take your word as gospel. So you need to look at anything you say through the eyes of a person who knows is making a guess at the accuracy of everything you say. It's totally possible that if you say your old employer has a culture of distrust and hate, you're telling the absolute truth. It's also possible though that you are a problematic employee and you're bitter because you were fired/pushed out for being unpleasant and incompetent. So you need to be careful how you present your story so that it's hard to interpret negatively.
I've seen employees who really didn't do anything useful. I've seen managers work with them for months trying to resolve issues. I've seen those same managers resort to micromanaging because at some point that's all you can do. And I've seen those problematic employees finally get pushed out and then rant on Facebook and in person about how terrible their manager and/or the company were, when I know for a fact that they were the bulk of the problem.
Imagine if you asked the interviewer how they felt about their current employer and they told you it's pretty good except that the guy you're replacing was terrible, that he was incompetent and constantly angry and despite constant oversight he never delivered anything of value. This should be a point of concern for you. Was the previous employee the entire problem? Is the position overworked? Did manager deal with it but berating the employee to just do more rather than working with the employee to fix the problems? And will the company badmouth you to others if/when you leave?
And this is exactly what both sides can find out, if people are encouraged to speak openly.
A bad employee stays a bad employee, even though he hides the truth by not bitching and a bad company stays bad, even though nobody dares to talk about it. But with honesty people find out those things more quickly ...
The interviewer is not evaluating your old company. To the extent that the interviewer asks, they are trying to find out about you. The interviewer at WidgetsCo doesn't care at all about the work environment at FlibbetsCo unless he's thinking about interviewing there himself or he's considering poaching some employees. If the interviewer at WidgetsCo asks "why are you leaving Flibbets?", he's actually trying to find out if there's a problem with you.
If you want to speak up at your current employer to resolve issues, I would generally encourage that. There's clear value in being honest with your employer and trying to work out issues (though there can also be risk if you have a really unhealthy relationship with management). Being "honest" with an interviewer about your current company doesn't solve anything. You won't fix problems with your current employer by telling a new company about them. You won't likely discover anything useful about the new company. And they won't likely learn anything useful about you, because it's impossible for them to tell if you're just bitter and spiteful or if you had legitimate problems caused by the company.
I worked for a smaller company that did not have an HR department. You actually could tell the truth. That was pretty awesome. I wish more places were like that.
Don't be silly. "Truth" has context. This is like saying you should tell everybody about the trouble you have in your marriage - because "truth". The new employer has no business knowing what trouble you had internally - and worse, new employers don't like it because they will assume what you do in this interview you will do in the next one - when you leave that new job and now talk about the new company's internals.
> when you leave that new job and now talk about the new company's internals
See also the other reply, but I seriously don't see why that would be bad for my (imaginary) company, unless I want to hide, that my company is indeed "bad"
> This is like saying you should tell everybody about the trouble you have in your marriage - because "truth"
And no it is not. You don't tell everybody, but your close friends - because they are interested and might be able to help
And having a potential employee telling honestly you, what he did not like at his former place, is a very good context for useful information, to find out, if he fits.
Because if he didn't liked it for example, that in the last company they expected results ... than you know, that he probably won't fit in your place as well.
But if he tells you, that they focused much more on formalities, than on results, then you maybe say "welcome home", we also like more the latter ...
> A prospective new employer may ask you why you left your previous job and what you liked and didn’t like about your employer. This line of questioning is designed not only to learn more about you and your professional history but also to find out about how you’re likely to characterize your new job in the future. If you talk poorly or complain, it sends a red flag that you are unprofessional and lack company loyalty.
> how you’re likely to characterize your new job in the future. If you talk poorly or complain, it sends a red flag that you are unprofessional and lack company loyalty.
If a company expects me to lie in the future about my potential bad experience, it would not be a company I would work for.
Sure, just "bitching" and whinery complaining ... no, nobody likes that and people who do that. But why should a company get my loyality, if they are indeed bad?
How then can others be warned about abusive - and in the case of amazon they were abusive[1]- past employers?
[1] FWIW, I've had some bad jobs, usually because they were startups where people didn't know what they were doing. Well meaning people in over their heads can be tough but fun and the furthest things from abusive. Amazon was organized to abuse employees as a consequence of protecting management egos.
Did you already forget that bluelu - the parent commenter - talked about a job interview here? You feel you need to warn your new employer to not apply for a job at your previous one?
Nobody prevents you from doing everything else. But this is a job interview, and how you behave here shows how you will behave in the future. You think it's a good idea to show your new employer that you will shit-talk them next time?
Please read what I wrote above about "truth". You don't tell people your marriage problems because "truth". You just don't go around telling people about your private problems under the banner of "truth". This sounds like yellow page journalism - "We must drag this into the public because 'truth'!". No. It's telling you choose to ignore 90% of what I said in the comment you replied to. You just like to argue and "to be right". I don't think you are actually interested in truth, but it's a nice narrative tat you carry in front of you like a holy banner.
This topic has been discussed here on HN repeatedly, what I said initially has always been the recommendation.
> A prospective new employer may ask you why you left your previous job and what you liked and didn’t like about your employer. This line of questioning is designed not only to learn more about you and your professional history but also to find out about how you’re likely to characterize your new job in the future. If you talk poorly or complain, it sends a red flag that you are unprofessional and lack company loyalty.
The short version is that Mao encouraged people to openly express non-communist political philosophies and then killed or imprisoned those who had done so.
It refers to the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China.
Excerpt from the wikipedia article [1]:
> The first part of the phrase is often remembered as "let a hundred flowers bloom". It is used to refer to an orchestrated campaign to flush out dissidents by encouraging them to show themselves as critical of the regime, and then subsequently imprison them. This view is supported by authors Clive James and Jung Chang, who posit that the campaign was, from the start, a ruse intended to expose rightists and counter-revolutionaries, and that Mao Zedong persecuted those whose views were different from the party's.
This Hundred Flowers campaign actually started 1956, about 10 years before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966) though it of course was a part of the development leading to the latter.
Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign from the 1950s. Citizens actively encouraged to share their opinion on their regime in order to help improve their country and "let a hundred flowers bloom" with different schools of thought.
Many who expressed critical opinions ended up under investigation and in prison labour camps.
Just as an (offtopic) add-on, Guy Kawasaki uses the term "Let a Thousand Flowers Blossom" in a positive way to describe letting people use your product however they see fit, instead of trying to corner and limit it to a specific use, "let a thousand flowers blossom" and let people discover new uses for your product
Exactly. I exclusively encourage anonymous, evidence-based whistleblowing to reduce odds of damage to whistleblower. It's a ridiculous notion that whistleblower should suffer negative consequences if it's illegal or harmful activity they're revealing. Let those doing the harms own up to it.
If Amazon try this in NSW, Australia then they want to watch out. If they get a complaint about bullying and it's not dealt with, directors can go to prison.
> Nothing matters more to me than the well-being of our employees, and our HR staff will continue to work their fingers to the bone— not seeing their families or friends or anything at all outside their offices [...]
Is their HR outsourced? Because they should also be their employees, right? :D
EDIT: Judging from the down votes, I guess that someone didn't get the sarcasm. :)
The reason I refuse to work for Amazon is because they claim ownership of every side project you make on your own time, with your own equipment, just because you are employed there.
This isn't true. They own side-projects the relate to your direct job or that can directly compete with Amazon. If your side project is a compression algorithm and you work in website design, Amazon doesn't really have any right to your stuff.
It's actually a pretty standard invention agreement across tech companies.
Sadly, this seems to have changed. Several years ago the policy used to be that what you developed on your own time was your own, and even if you used company resources and spent time while at work on "your own" inventions, they still belonged to you as long as it wasn't an excessive amount. For example, if you printed out something or used a copier, or did a google search at work, etc. It seems they decided that was too good for the drones though.
everyone's quitting... but Amazon's hiring does not seem to be picking up slack (unless they just increase the workload on current employees).
I mean, if a lot of people were quitting, recruiters would be trying their best to replace them. While I have seen a lot of open positions on amazon.jobs, they have been open for months (some even for a year) and are still accepting resumes (they seem to be taking their time replacing people if at all).
and in all honesty, I'd still want to work there if I can get a chance (so if Amazon employees / recruiters are hiring in Canada, please email me).
I have had a couple of amazon recruiters contact me (I applied via their website), and both appeared to be confused (I wanted a position in Toronto/Vancouver) which they assured me was what I was selected for (to go through the interview process). However after the first online test, they changed it to a Seattle-based position and made me do the test again.
As for the entry level jobs, it's weird because I applied to both SDEI (0 - 3 yrs of exp) and SDEII (1 - 3 yrs of exp) - and they rejected me for SDEI (which I'm more qualified for) while I was "under consideration" for SDEII.
Sometimes you get a bad manager or you get into a bad situation. Sometimes you don't. Without the details on why this person actually was fired, we're just speculating and adding more to rumors.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 435 ms ] threadPeople usually quit fast.
If the API is the glue that ties business units together, you don't need as many knowledgable employees who understand the guts of the company -- the company itself is self-documenting.
If you're guessing correctly, this will probably be the future of the development business.
Are we sure we want to keep inflating supply with all this "everyone should code" nonsense?
IIRC, 15% per year is pretty standard in the software industry. I think Google's figure was something like 5% when I was there.
With that kind of turnover, it occurs me to that you very well could survive without doing all the soul-sucking bullshit because the managers simply couldn't afford to lose more workers.
I'm not the one to try it, though, as I've no interest in working in those high-stress situations in the first place. I'm fine with making a little less and having a personal life outside of work.
But it is soul sucking...if you piss the wrong people off they will do their best to get rid of you and promote their lackeys. It really is welfare for the middle class.
Why did you inject race into the conversation for no reason? I've seen layabouts of every description
As an intern, I worked on a team that was rapidly spinning apart. We were resource constrained, one of the team members was in Ireland (and he always seemed to need help from somebody else on the team), and the manager... I don't even know.
The first day I was there, he told me to write a tech spec for a new version of one of the team's projects. The examples he showed me were all pithy high-level algorithm overviews for small features, which had 0 relevance to my project. I spent a week and a half groping in the dark for what he wanted.
About 4-5 weeks in to the internship, I asked him how he thought I was doing. He told me to think about the Amazon leadership principals and to tell him how I thought I was doing next week during the one on one. What kind of manager doesn't give feedback, even when the employee asks directly?
The business owner was a tall guy with slicked-back hair. I was supposed to meet with him in the first week. He blew off four meetings with me over the first month before I stopped trying to schedule them. When he finally deigned to meet with me (7 weeks in), it was to tell me he wanted a feature that not only didn't exist, but was so far away from what was possible that I didn't even know what to make of it. He would also do this shit where he would try to take other people's food, which seemed to me like an aggressive display of dominance.
My mentor, a senior engineer, was the only one who was really helpful. It was he who read my code reviews, he who told me that he was impressed with how quickly I had learned the framework, and he who was actually setting goals for me that made sense. He said he had my back for the hiring meeting, which put me at ease.
I didn't end up getting hired. I read and reread the feedback document I got, trying to make sense of what had happened. I hit all of my deliverable dates, I know my code was clear and concise, I went to the social events and talked to people from all over the org... What could I have done better?
The answer I've arrived at is I should have sucked up. I should have tried to identify the people with real power, and done my best to make them happy. The business owner was in the hiring meeting, and if I had gotten him on my side, I could have written 12 loc total and still gotten a job. Amazon had been pretending to the new hires and interns that there wasn't any office politics, but I've never worked anywhere more political.
A friend of mine from university got a job in a different org inside of Amazon, and he told me that he looked at my employee feedback on the internal website and said that it didn't say anything concrete about why I hadn't hired, just stuff like "obviously skilled, but not a good fit." Maybe that's the truth. I've just started working for a company whose namesake was just nominated for CEO of the year, and I already feel more at home there than I ever did at Amazon.
Congratulations on avoiding that place.
Oh my God, please explain this.
Pretend that you brought a take-out burger and fries back to the office for your lunch. As you take a bite of your sandwich, a hand snakes out and snags one of your fries, which then disappears into the smarmy maw of the boss of your boss.
He's not even hungry. He just wants to see what you do when he takes your food. It's a dominance test, and as childish and petty a test as anyone could possibly imagine.
I don't even know how anyone passes it, either.
Having seen it occur to various people elsewhere where cultural rot had set in quite deeply, it's really quite simple.
Failing to suck up means you'll get mediocre to poor performance reviews. In places with stack ranking systems (reportedly Amazon is one of them), somebody has to be the goat and you basically are volunteering. You manager will say to you, with varying levels of sincerity, "I tried really hard to get you higher up in the rankings but there were a lot of people who did really strong work this year. You'll have to work extra hard next year to try to get a better ranking.". Unless you genuinely aren't doing a good job, you won't be punished directly but you won't get much in the way of raises, bonuses, or promotions either.
Eventually, people will notice that you have a long string of poor/mediocre reviews and relatively low level compared to your peers and will start assuming that you're not a good employee and look down on you. Internal transfers then become much more difficult and you become a prime target for being managed out or laid off.
Now obviously, I can't say whether that's fair to the company, however it must be costing them a lot of money. I bet there are a lot of people that have heard the din of politics and would never consider working there.
Are there any HN readers that are currently working at Amazon and that are happy?
That or it existed until several years ago and the rumors have a time delay in coming out.
I did well with the culture, and therefore had a positive experience. I'm definitely aware of people who didn't. I'm also aware of people who weren't unhappy, but left for unrelated reasons (several because the weather in the Bay Area trumps Seattle for them. I don't know if I feel that way, having not lived down there, but I think Seattle's weather is vastly underrated.)
(I feel compelled to defend Amazon since I feel like the lone naysayer in this comment thread.)
As for signing bonuses, I have read contracts from various startups that want you to pay your signing bonus (which is generally about 5k) back if you leave within the first year.
I have heard stories from other employees, claiming that entire teams were fired, and workloads were transferred to the remaining employees - however they have been just that - unverified rumors.
I totally agree, I don't really like it. I think, though, that the astronomically large bonuses are worse than the small ones. Paying back $5000 (+ income tax, mind you) is much easier than paying back $100k + tax.
This was directly from an entry level offer and it is general practice to get a salary increase at annual reviews and more RSUs for after your fourth.
Like many RSUs, if you leave before your RSUs vest, you forfeit them. This is pretty much your 4 year incentive to stay.
EDIT: Clarifying RSU forfeiture
RSUs are back loaded. I forget the exact numbers, but it is something akin to 5% vested after 1st year, then 15%, then 35%, so after 2 years the vesting schedule makes it pretty hard to walk away from, especially with the current stock price. "If I stay just another 3 months I get 45 thousand bucks over my salary... hmm...."
Because capitalism is great for competition, until a company has grown so big that there is no choice left. Both for the consumer and the employee.
Also, big companies usually have an internalized economy, which limits its usefulness for the outside world.
Basically, keeping companies small would increase the modularity of the economy.
If you tried this, you'd just get companies avoiding the law by working with subsidiaries or contractors, a bit like they do already for different reasons.
As for your point about monopoly: I don't think it will be very easy to maintain a monopoly if the number of people you employ is limited (because other companies could easily equal that number of employees).
Source -- I am an armchair internet economist.
Wouldn't they look good as my first job in my resume for a person who recently graduated that never had a software job?
It was my first software job and as far as I can tell it's an amazing thing to have on my resume.
With the TN visa, you just need the proper documentation and they issue it at the border. The company doesn't need lawyers or filings; it's all on you.
I'm sure a big company like Amazon has experience here. If you're job hunting and are talking to smaller companies, you might have to educate them about how the TN works because many don't know it exists and assume they'll have to pay a lot of money to hire a Canadian.
If you've never come in on a TN visa before it's worth the ~$400 in lawyer fees to get them to review the TN letter and coach you on the procedure.
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home
Which from my understanding is a collection of anonymous rants from Amazon employees, and the posted link is just an example.
As someone already posted, it would be interesting to hear if someone in HN can provide some counterexample, or if the rants are spot on.
Here's an anonymous comment that backed Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065713
(there were plenty of negative experiences too)
I also interviewed once with them for a TPM position and had a fairly weird discussion with the recruiter about compensation and had to field some pretty random interview questions. Nothing was particularly terrible about my experience, but it made me wonder if I wanted to move across the country for what looked like a very non-amazing job.
Their inventory system is totally screwed up, worst I ever seen. I can't understand how they can run their company the way they do.
Examples:
http://www.orensmoneysaver.com/2016/03/amazon-and-mysterious...
"I sent in 14. 14 were received, 1 was lost and 1 was found. How many should have? 14
How many does Amazon say I should have? 11. How many units do I actually have? 9."
In an absolute sense it may be a hellish place to work and the average turnover might for the sake of argument be 6 months. But lets say you have a job hopping stain on the resume and you gut out 9 months of amazon, well, that's fifty percent longer than most survive, that employee must have a cast iron stomach and be a focused dedicated team player, etc etc. Paradoxically Amazon being hell on earth is a benefit in that scenario, obviously you don't want to waste your life on HR nonsense, and if you can prove you're tough in 9 months instead of 2 years, well, thats great. Actually, make working conditions worse at Amazon if at all possible so "tough guys" can prove themselves in only two months instead of the made up 9 months.
That being said, Amazon is still considered a top tech firm, even if it is a cut below Google/Facebook in prestige. There aren't many tech firms as well-known as Amazon. I can see many fresh grads going to Amazon for 1-2 years just to get it on their resume.
Also, when I was working there I had a difficult time reconciling myself to how bad it was to work there. On paper it doesn't seem so bad. You get to work on pretty interesting stuff sometimes, you make good money, typically you only have to work 40 hour work weeks, etc. I convinced myself to walk away from a good chunk of money just in bonuses to get out of there, some people might be able to stick it out longer or find the money harder to leave behind.
The problem is that having such a huge portion of the economy being involved in knowledge work is a relatively new thing, and we don't understand the differences between knowledge work and physical work. And especially we don't have thoroughly established standards on what constitute good and bad conditions for knowledge work. We tend to think that sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day is "easy", but it very much is not. A stressful working environment for a knowledge worker is just as bad if not worse than a physical stressful job working extended hours. I only spent a year at Amazon, and most of the time I probably didn't even put in full 40 hour weeks, but I hated it there. In comparison I view the time I spent years ago doing data entry at sometimes up to 70 or 80 hours a week during peak times as comparatively inconsequential. Depending on the team you're on and so forth, working at Amazon can be a painful and stressful experience.
Take being on call for example. In theory this isn't so bad, it's good to give devs exposure to how the ops side of things works, and it's in theory good to give them ownership of their own mistakes so that they have incentive to write good code. The problem is, you're not in charge. You're never going to get permission to dump the resources into making everything run well, ever. Most teams have other priorities and they don't have enough resources to spare to allow you to properly fix the code you're responsible for. Worse, it's not even your code, it's code that was written by someone else years ago who also left years ago. And the next person is just going to get whatever mess you leave behind when you leave. So in the average case you can't actually work to improve things, so being on call is going to always be an extra pain, and a significant intrusion into your theoretically off-work life. Worse, it'll push you behind on all the other stuff you need to deliver.
Meanwhile, you have all the typical office BS of politics, ranking, bad corporate culture, reorgs, etc. that you have to deal with day to day. Some people manage to find good teams in that mess, and others manage to just turn off whatever makes people care about work and just suffer through it for the paycheck. But for a lot of people, more so the more you care, it'll be a stressful nightmare. And the easiest way to avoid dealing with all those problems is to just leave, which lots of people do.
Curious - does this take into account their warehouse employees who are not FTE's and are seasonal or only FTE's?
Keep in mind that can be somewhat misleading, if you have 3 positions and for 2 of those you have people who have stayed there 5+ years but for the other one you have had 5 people cycle through at a year each the median tenure will still be just 1 year. Even so, that's a pretty scary stat.
the most stressful part of this entire industry, and i know this from experience, is fixing other peoples' problems on-demand. whatever form it takes, that's the absolute worst fucking job in this entire field, because you get blamed for problems you did not cause, and blamed a second time for not fixing it fast enough.
Well, that makes me fell better about being rejected. :/
I have been downvoted on reddit for saying this, but my opinion is that a company should be confident enough in a "no" that they won't reconsider that person for a substantially similar role.[1] If they aren't, they need to fix their hiring process so they are.
As an aside, the other thing that really pisses me off is to hear about how in-demand "software engineers" are while still having to deal with this crap. Seems like a self-imposed problem to me.
[1] "Substantially similar" here means same level, same stack, and same team, as appropriate for a particular company. IMO level should largely be irrelevant at larger companies because a candidate should be judged on hireability into any level and an offer made at the highest one appropriate. If there isn't one appropriate but a slot opens up within a reasonable amount of time, an offer should be made to previous interview candidates who passed that bar but failed the higher one, without the need to re-interview.
One of the biggest problems is that it's just very difficult to gauge someone's competency well (even broadly) in a short amount of time. Worse, most folks who do interviews are unwilling to acknowledge how difficult a task it is and how bad they are at it. And the high level of legitimate rejections makes it easy to imagine that all of your rejections are legitimate.
It's very unfortunate because hiring is one of the most important things anyone does at a job, and hiring well (especially finding competence that other companies have passed over) is a major competitive advantage.
> You get maybe 1 in 10 people that you can pass from one stage to the next (i.e. resume review to phone screen, phone screen to interview, interview to job offer).
Where I currently work I have not been involved much in the early screening. My understanding is that resume to screen is about 1:4 and screen to interview is about 1:10. I have been involved with the interviews, and our interview to offer is somewhere between 1:2 and 1:3. Our screen includes a 2-hour timed coding test, though, so I think it is fairly effective at filtering the poseurs. Prior to this I didn't have any visibility into the results.
This is tangential, but I often wonder how much of the phone screen and on-site failure rate has as its root cause a poor resume filtering function. When you say you only screen the top 10% of resumes, are you really screening the top 10% of candidates? I know it's a really hard question to answer, but it seems like many companies don't want to try to answer it.
> Worse, most folks who do interviews are unwilling to acknowledge how difficult a task it is and how bad they are at it.
This is one thing that really bothers me about this industry. So many companies think it is acceptable to just yank semi-random engineers out of their daily routine to go interview a candidate. I came from the traditional engineering world, and we got training before we were assigned to interviewing candidates. Furthermore, for our first interviews we were always paired with another interviewer who had significant experience.
> It's very unfortunate because hiring is one of the most important things anyone does at a job, and hiring well (especially finding competence that other companies have passed over) is a major competitive advantage.
What is ridiculous is the number of people who treat hiring as a distraction from their real job. If you want any sort of management responsibility, hiring is part your job.
As for your situation, I'd encourage you to get out there and look for a new job ASAP. I've had a bunch of different jobs in my career and for me it was actually pretty refreshing starting a new job somewhere. Of course, after a while the grim reality would set in about how this place wasn't that great (usually it was something in the job that changed, such as new management), but for a while they'd usually be pretty fun since their expectations of a new-hire are pretty low, and some jobs actually were pretty good all around. Don't just sit around and stew about your last job; get out there and get a new one and you'll forget about that last horrible one before long. Also, the longer you stay unemployed the harder it'll be to get a new gig, so don't wait.
Despite this, from the outside at least they still seem to execute flawlessly and are still adored by geeks who don't work there.
I've started to order my books through my local bookstore recently, it's surprisingly easy. I do my research online (often times via AMZN tbh) and pick up the books on my way from/to the office.
So your suggestion is basically to support the less efficient businesses.
Morals are God's concern, therefore it's up to God to enforce them. God needs to reach his hand down and decree to the land that thou shalt not abuse your employees. This reverberates throughout the land and causes the powerful to tremble in fear. They all get together in a room and quietly make plans to appease the masses so they don't pray for blood or start a revolution.
Of course, in this case God is the government. Given enough political pressure, legislators can pass laws that change the landscape of commerce. Pressure can compel prosecutors to prosecute, regulators to punish. The threat of these punishments is often enough to keep the unscrupulous in line and allow the virtuous to have their say.
It can be useful to remember that economics is primarily a branch of rhetorical moral philosophy - not an empirical science.
Though I agree that a larger chain bookstore with more selection offers more value than a small bookstore, for me it's more about real-world vs. online, not large vs. small business.
If you have any kind of self-interest, though, supporting local businesses should be your priority. How does it benefit you to send your money away from your city or town so that it does not get re-invested in the area directly surrounding you? A lower share of your money gets re-invested in roads and schools through taxes and it has a multiplying effect when local businesses shutter frequently. It lowers real estate prices (assuming you own real estate, this matters) and reduces the quality of life of those around you; a factor which tends to cause an increase in the crime rate.
Your argument is essentially, "Why eat at anywhere other than McDonalds? They have the most efficient supply chain."
You should really be buying from the people and businesses with the fewest trade transactions from your customers. Once upon a time, that meant buying local was a smart move, but now it's more complex.
Since I, as a software developer, do not have any small business customers, the tightest possible trade graph loops that could return my own spending back to me all go through the larger national- and international-scale businesses.
Generalizing, I should prefer to buy from the companies that spend the most on software and software development, or who often buy from companies that spend a lot on my industry.
If I go to the farmers' market, I should prefer to buy from the stand that uses Google Pay or Stripe or Square or Bitcoin--or even Paypal--than from the one that is cash-only. Failing that, I should buy from the guy who has the newest tractor, with programmable GPS-assisted steering and blinking LEDs on the cup holder. Failing that, I should buy from the guy that spends the most on MMORPGs and dating websites.
Anything invested in a place will never pay off if I have to move away from it. And if I move, I can always prefer to move to the places that already have good schools and roads and parks without any additional investment from me.
Why should I eat anywhere other than McDonald's? Every chain and franchise restaurant runs McDonald's management software. They have touchscreen POSTs, and reprogrammable menu displays, and video screens at both of the dual drive-through lanes. They are consistent and inexpensive and "invest heavily" in R&D. Because sometimes I just want a convenient variety of salubrious and tasty food to eat, that's why. When Just-Down-My-Street Diner hires me to remodel their website, that's when I should prefer to eat there out of pure economic self-interest.
That is a specific exception, maybe only to you. Just because you cannot find local customers doesn't mean that small businesses don't source software developers locally. I have done software development work for several businesses directly in my zip code, some of which I am also a customer.
You seem to specifically avoid the argument that small businesses in your area pay taxes for services that you consume directly. Why, exactly, is it more beneficial to you that your farmer plays an MMORPG than pays an override real estate tax that funds expanding a school in your neighborhood to better handle class sizes?
Also, you must not have a stake in the real estate market if you only care if the McDonald's in your neighborhood stays open.
>When Just-Down-My-Street Diner hires me to remodel their website, that's when I should prefer to eat there out of pure economic self-interest.
Again, just because you aren't currently engaging in this kind of business doesn't mean other people aren't. I find your argument very strange; that you can't work for local companies.
If you are hired by local business, then by all means, patronize those businesses in return. But as long as I am not hired by them, don't tell me I should, just because it is in your economic self-interest for me to do so.
You are very astute. I haven't had any stake in any real estate market anywhere since I lost the majority of my positive net worth to the real estate market in 2007. (Thanks very much for reminding me of that.) So whatever real estate market I happen to be in can go copulate with itself. I'm not buying anything I can't really own ever again.
Anecdotally, the property taxes I pay (that are included in my rent) go to the county--as do the business taxes paid by businesses on my side of the county line--and that county has refused to remit any portion of those funds to my city, which spans two counties, for the provision of services to city residents. As a result, the schools are overcrowded and other city services have been cut. So they can go copulate with themselves, too.
In contrast, McDonald's has never failed to give me the same consistent experience whenever I pay them their menu price from my own pocket. "My community" can't ever seem to uphold its end of any implied social contracts, but at least McDonald's can always sell me a Big Mac when I can afford one.
Having been repeatedly shown that loyalty no longer exists, if it ever did, I am now a strictly transactional mercenary, following tit-for-tat cooperation strategy, because that is what is in my economic self-interest. I am not going to "buy local" because it has feel-good marketing around it. I will buy local only if I see a specific benefit from it, and I have never actually seen one.
"Buy local" is marketing bullshit from people who don't admit that they would benefit from it far more than you ever will, and from people who hypocritically do their own buying non-locally.
Money doesn't get tired climbing hills or crossing rivers. Geography is continually becoming less important to economics. Buy closer to you as measured by your social network graph, not as measured by physical distance.
I am not blameless in this; we just bought a house, and although we have a locally owned hardware store that I try to go to first, there are so many things I have had the options of A) waiting 7+ days for them to get it in, B) getting it from Home Depot/Lowes within an hour, or C) getting it delivered from Amazon Prime tomorrow. It is nearly impossible to compete with that, but I WANT to support my local guy whose family has owned the business since the 60's. I don't know what the answer is.
International companies have a way of shifting earnings into jurisdictions where they don't need to pay much taxes, since there is still a race to the bottom between countries. 'Better they pay us 2% of revenues that that other country 10%.'
(This has noting to do with the way the supply chain is done.)
[1] Some examples here - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4wpl0i/whats_a_b...
[2] https://www.buycott.com/campaign/browse
You have. Trough your money.
I give the Walmart example because the boycott sentiment has been around for so long. For companies as big as them and Amazon, even if boycotts hit the bottom line somehow, would they be able to sort that out from all the other factors that affect revenue and profits? It's like flies buzzing around an elephant. I doubt they'd make the connection and decide, "Oh, we'd better change the way we do business!"
It seems the only effective way might be to get high-impact media coverage. But then their spin-masters go on tv to neutralize the damage and everything stays the same.
I've stopped buying from them but I'm realistic, very few people will care enough to do so, not enough to affect their bottom line. I do it because it supporting them would feel wrong to me. Not because I expect I can make them change.
With its current practices, it's only a matter of time before Amazon has a recruitment problem that it can't fix.
That is to be seen. There are lots of horrible employers who are still around (EA for example). Supply of workers is much greater than demand (even software industry is not immune to it as more and more youngsters enter the profession)
I'm still searching for and working to develop a good solution to minimise the flow of my economic output to those who do undesirable things with it.
Yeeaah, about that... Last time I ordered a book at my local book store, they just ordered it of Amazon. The guy behind the counter tried to remove the Amazon packing discreetly, but failed.
If book stores are going to be complain about how Amazon is putting them out of business, they should at least not use them as a supplier.
My local bookstore gives me Amazon's price, and has an understanding that my name doesn't go on the order.
Better yet: the library.
Then again Danish book stores are insanely crummy. Most of them are somewhere between an arts and crafts store and a book store. Many even add a toys section. The selection of books is a joke in most of them. For the largest chain of book stores, books almost seems to be a secondary product.
And then theres the shop itself. Hugendubel is a big chain and all its stores seem to have at least three stories. I guess boxes and boxes of overseas books fly every week to some distribution centre where they then get sent along to the stores along with the far larger bulk of German-language books.
Hat off.
Apparently if you actually try it, you get fired:
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for...
Well, of course you get fired. You're obviously a malcontent, and clearly not a team player. But, in fairness to Bezos, this is pretty much SOP at many companies.
It's another one of those inventions that heavily favor the employer at the expense of the employee.
edit: I am in Ontario and I know a guy in the medical feild that had a 1 year probabtion
Though I think they can withhold benefits for longer than that separately from the probation period, but that's kind of rare I think.
Really withholding benefits in Canada is pretty different than in the us, though, since here it means you don't buy glasses for three months and there it means you'd better not break your legs.
(IANAL)
It costs a lot in terms of productivity, time, and dollars to bring someone new into the company. As an employer I don't know if you've completely misrepresented yourself or not- especially as a developer. I've hopefully done my best to make a good hire and be forthcoming in helping you make your best decision as well, but just like in dating, we're not necessarily sure how this thing is going to go at first.
In the tech industry I've never come across an employer that withheld insurance during the first 90 days, and most I've come across have you accruing your vacation immediately as well. I've seen employers in other industries (like manufactring) withhold all benefits until the 90 day mark though.
All my discussions with new hires on the 90 day trial period go something like this: "We're going to meet more frequently than we normally would, I'm going to give you more frequent feedback than I normally would, and I'm going to review your work much more often than I normally would in order to make sure that you're not getting lost in how we do things and that I can help you out with anything as fast as possible."
If you're a smart employer/manager you're going to use that arbitrary trial period to aggressively make sure your new people succeed. If you suck, you look for a problem and cut bait.
Personally, I think it's pretty crappy as it means that the company has all the leverage if they make a bad hiring decision, the person is let go after already potentially leaving another job for this one.
But I still disagree. I don't own a company (yet), but I would like to have employees, who are strong enough, to tell the truth, even though it might hurt some feelings. And if they honestly can tell me, what they like or did not at their former place, it would be much easier for me and also for them, to decide, if they would fit in this (imaginary) company.
And if, later, my company would be bad in their perception, they may say so, in the next interview.
I just like solid facts, even though they are sometimes not nice.
It is frankly risky to say anything bad about a previous company, because even something minor like, "management micromanaged too much" could be interpreted by a cynical interviewer as "this person doesn't get anything done and whines when someone asks him what he's doing with his time." But even a good interviewer will take it as a bad sign if you spend five minutes enumerating everything you hate about your previous/current employer.
If the legitimate reason would be, that they micromanaged everything, because of lack of trust, even though I delivered results and that the general atmosphere were a mixture of hate and distrust, then I would very much say so in the next interview, if asked. And if they then won't take me, I would assume it is because the new place is similar and they just don't like people talk about it. So no place where I want to be anyway ...
An interviewer can't see anything about your history except what you tell them, and any decent interviewer will know not to take your word as gospel. So you need to look at anything you say through the eyes of a person who knows is making a guess at the accuracy of everything you say. It's totally possible that if you say your old employer has a culture of distrust and hate, you're telling the absolute truth. It's also possible though that you are a problematic employee and you're bitter because you were fired/pushed out for being unpleasant and incompetent. So you need to be careful how you present your story so that it's hard to interpret negatively.
I've seen employees who really didn't do anything useful. I've seen managers work with them for months trying to resolve issues. I've seen those same managers resort to micromanaging because at some point that's all you can do. And I've seen those problematic employees finally get pushed out and then rant on Facebook and in person about how terrible their manager and/or the company were, when I know for a fact that they were the bulk of the problem.
Imagine if you asked the interviewer how they felt about their current employer and they told you it's pretty good except that the guy you're replacing was terrible, that he was incompetent and constantly angry and despite constant oversight he never delivered anything of value. This should be a point of concern for you. Was the previous employee the entire problem? Is the position overworked? Did manager deal with it but berating the employee to just do more rather than working with the employee to fix the problems? And will the company badmouth you to others if/when you leave?
A bad employee stays a bad employee, even though he hides the truth by not bitching and a bad company stays bad, even though nobody dares to talk about it. But with honesty people find out those things more quickly ...
If you want to speak up at your current employer to resolve issues, I would generally encourage that. There's clear value in being honest with your employer and trying to work out issues (though there can also be risk if you have a really unhealthy relationship with management). Being "honest" with an interviewer about your current company doesn't solve anything. You won't fix problems with your current employer by telling a new company about them. You won't likely discover anything useful about the new company. And they won't likely learn anything useful about you, because it's impossible for them to tell if you're just bitter and spiteful or if you had legitimate problems caused by the company.
See also the other reply, but I seriously don't see why that would be bad for my (imaginary) company, unless I want to hide, that my company is indeed "bad"
> This is like saying you should tell everybody about the trouble you have in your marriage - because "truth" And no it is not. You don't tell everybody, but your close friends - because they are interested and might be able to help
And having a potential employee telling honestly you, what he did not like at his former place, is a very good context for useful information, to find out, if he fits.
Because if he didn't liked it for example, that in the last company they expected results ... than you know, that he probably won't fit in your place as well.
But if he tells you, that they focused much more on formalities, than on results, then you maybe say "welcome home", we also like more the latter ...
http://work.chron.com/should-say-asked-previous-employers-32...
> A prospective new employer may ask you why you left your previous job and what you liked and didn’t like about your employer. This line of questioning is designed not only to learn more about you and your professional history but also to find out about how you’re likely to characterize your new job in the future. If you talk poorly or complain, it sends a red flag that you are unprofessional and lack company loyalty.
If a company expects me to lie in the future about my potential bad experience, it would not be a company I would work for. Sure, just "bitching" and whinery complaining ... no, nobody likes that and people who do that. But why should a company get my loyality, if they are indeed bad?
[1] FWIW, I've had some bad jobs, usually because they were startups where people didn't know what they were doing. Well meaning people in over their heads can be tough but fun and the furthest things from abusive. Amazon was organized to abuse employees as a consequence of protecting management egos.
Nobody prevents you from doing everything else. But this is a job interview, and how you behave here shows how you will behave in the future. You think it's a good idea to show your new employer that you will shit-talk them next time?
This topic has been discussed here on HN repeatedly, what I said initially has always been the recommendation.
http://idealistcareers.org/you-left-a-job-on-bad-terms-now-w...
http://work.chron.com/should-say-asked-previous-employers-32...
> A prospective new employer may ask you why you left your previous job and what you liked and didn’t like about your employer. This line of questioning is designed not only to learn more about you and your professional history but also to find out about how you’re likely to characterize your new job in the future. If you talk poorly or complain, it sends a red flag that you are unprofessional and lack company loyalty.
Over and out, it's getting ridiculous.
why not?
The short version is that Mao encouraged people to openly express non-communist political philosophies and then killed or imprisoned those who had done so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
Excerpt from the wikipedia article [1]:
> The first part of the phrase is often remembered as "let a hundred flowers bloom". It is used to refer to an orchestrated campaign to flush out dissidents by encouraging them to show themselves as critical of the regime, and then subsequently imprison them. This view is supported by authors Clive James and Jung Chang, who posit that the campaign was, from the start, a ruse intended to expose rightists and counter-revolutionaries, and that Mao Zedong persecuted those whose views were different from the party's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
Many who expressed critical opinions ended up under investigation and in prison labour camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
"Let a hundred schools of thought contend"
Ah, how history repeats itself.
> Apparently if you actually try it, you get fired
Apparently, firing ensures that there is no further "abuse".
Of course! What more efficient way could there be to identify and weed out potential troublemakers in the organization?
That is to identify dissenters so that they can be eliminated before they create some damage in the news. Not to solve any of their problems.
Whistle blowing never works. Its a mechanism to identify dissenters and eliminate them.
Also, what effect will this have on people using Amazon? Should we try to use Google cloud offering instead of AWS?
I guess with any service that offered super cheap costs, there was a place where something had to give...
If they used Amazon's own services, IP and other logs would be available to Amazon's internal investigators without so much as a subpoena.
The old Mini-Microsoft blog was on a Google service as well.
"Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints"
http://www.theonion.com/article/jeff-bezos-assures-amazon-em...
Is their HR outsourced? Because they should also be their employees, right? :D
EDIT: Judging from the down votes, I guess that someone didn't get the sarcasm. :)
It's actually a pretty standard invention agreement across tech companies.
I mean, if a lot of people were quitting, recruiters would be trying their best to replace them. While I have seen a lot of open positions on amazon.jobs, they have been open for months (some even for a year) and are still accepting resumes (they seem to be taking their time replacing people if at all).
and in all honesty, I'd still want to work there if I can get a chance (so if Amazon employees / recruiters are hiring in Canada, please email me).
I mean, there are always recruiters, but the Amazon ones are always like "You've got 1month+ experience, you get a job!"
I was always put off by how entry level they sound.
As for the entry level jobs, it's weird because I applied to both SDEI (0 - 3 yrs of exp) and SDEII (1 - 3 yrs of exp) - and they rejected me for SDEI (which I'm more qualified for) while I was "under consideration" for SDEII.