Amazon built a new unit to fix its engineering culture

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-created-a-new-builder-experience-team-to-fix-developer-culture-2022-9

by firstSpeaker • 4 years ago

112 153 4 years ago

businessinsider.com

firstSpeaker4• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/aRauw

snarkerson• 4 years ago

Maybe the adversarial evaluation process has a poisonous effect?

jsnell• 4 years ago

Stripped of fluff, the main point of the article seems to be that their engineers are doing too much manual repetitive work, due to bad tooling and processes. Why would that be caused by their performance review system?

anderber• 4 years ago

Why spend time building tools that will help others if you're competing against them?

mathattack• 4 years ago

I’ve found tooling lags behind in places where incentives are too short term, or most of the funding comes from projects (rather than durable product teams). I’m not saying this is Amazon.

innagadadavida• 4 years ago

Why would that be caused by their performance review system?

May be because their performance review prioritizes employee contributions that impact bottom line immediately instead of building infra that might improve developer productivity?

sidlls• 4 years ago

Easy: tooling and process are often seen as being of little importance because they’re not easily associated with metrics that are important in toxic review process cultures. Engineers who like working on these things are treated as second class citizens and performance reviews will reflect that.

(I don’t know that this is the case with Amazon: I’m just providing an anecdote based on my observations at places I’ve worked.)

closeparen• 4 years ago

You can't manage what you don't measure. Developer tooling quality impact on revenue is very difficult to measure. Therefore, a rationally managed organization cannot authorize any work on developer tooling.

jejeyyy77• 4 years ago

They're trying to fix this with dev tooling, which is the least of their problems...

choudharism2• 4 years ago

TBF, that was scrapped in 2017. Source: worked there.

There was a clear culture shock for some of the more seasoned Amazonians (and you could see a fall out effect with some "mails to your manager" every now and then if you crossed a Grand Poobah the wrong way), but to all of us "newer" hires, the times of adversarial review were just a story.

stevewatson301• 4 years ago

I’m not sure how you can say that given news reports like these in 2021, see https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570579/amazon-performanc...

paganel3• 4 years ago

Have never worked at Amazon nor do I know anyone who did, what exactly did that entail? "Snitching" on your co-workers? I'm asking because a quick web search didn't help me too much.

maybedev3• 4 years ago

Brazil should be gone

jonhohle3• 4 years ago

Really? I miss Brazil and version sets regularly and often think about reimplementing the parts I find valuable on top of an existing package system.

Having self contained workspaces with all dependencies in any language, fine grained ability to replace any package with a local build, and the simplicity of package config (for most languages) was awesome.

Having to use _n_ language dependent build systems without interface pinning or reproducible builds since leaving sucked, imho. Checking out a package and running `bb` to get an artifact was just so satisfying.

maybedev3• 4 years ago

3p packages...Python...

vamega• 4 years ago

Nix will get you most of this. It's got a learning curve, but I think it pays off and is not bad if you're familiar with the Brazil concepts.

Having to set up a million dependencies just to begin to start working on a codebase is a nightmare, and Brazil makes that easy.

ChadyWady• 4 years ago

I would check out <https://nixos.org/> if you're looking for a similar experience to Brazil.

My own opinion is that the Brazil had far too many running parts. I didn't like that reproducibility required the tool interacting with 3-4 different services, and I'm much more a fan of having the source code repository act as a single source of truth for reproducibility. Plus, using Brazil meant you had to use their entire tech stack, where GitLab/GitHub beat them by far.

Insanity• 4 years ago

For people without knowledge of Brazil (the tool), this is an odd statement.

But, FWIW, I actually like Brazil.

maybedev3• 4 years ago

But, FWIW, I actually like Brazil.

You mean the country, not the tool, right?

jonhohle3• 4 years ago

When I taught new hires about Brazil, the common response was to revile in horror that they’d have to learn (not their favorite language specific build tool). It didn’t take long, however, for most people to see its benefits and then get past that initial bias.

paganel3• 4 years ago

Thank you, I knew people hate on Bolsonaro and the like and that the elections there are coming this weekend but that shouldn't be enough reason to want an entire country to "be gone". Suffice is to say that I was confused.

ajkjk• 4 years ago

Brazil (and Apollo/Pipelines, although I've heard those might be gone now?) are the things I miss the most from working there ~8 years ago.

dixie_land2• 4 years ago

brazil and (legacy, non-EC2) Apollo beat any build and CI system out there

nickm12• 4 years ago

I was confounded by Brazil for my first 3-4 years of working with it. The lightbulb clicked on just as I was ready to move on and at my next job, I missed Brazil terribly (maybe it was just Stockholm syndrome).

I eventually boomeranged back to Amazon and have found the middle ground. When used right, Brazil solves a lot of problems and day-to-day I enjoy working with it much more than not. The trouble is that almost all teams don't know how to use it and tie themselves up in knots of their own making. Third party software is also a problem. I hope Peru comes through, but so far I haven't worked with it, for good or for bad.

stevievee• 4 years ago

"...the retail giant has pledged to become the Earth's Best Employer, not just for frontline warehouse workers but for corporate and technical employees, too..."*

* As long as it doesn't interfere with the share price and exec bonuses

vertis• 4 years ago

Barely a day goes by without a story about how badly Amazon treats it's non-tech workers. Combine that with the stack ranking and, like you, I'm not convinced.

I would argue you can't fix the tech employment without fixing the rest. One bleeds into the other. I would never consider working for a company that can't treat it's more replaceable employees well.

gumby2• 4 years ago

Are they still doing stack ranking and hire-to-fire?

twic• 4 years ago

Is "software builders" an Amazonism, or did this guy come up with it, and either way, are they aware how weird and insular that makes Amazon sound?

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

Jassy has used the "builders" term for years while leading AWS. It was a central theme in many of his keynote speeches. I think it was chosen specifically because it was not an industry-standardized (and watered-down) term.

https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ among many other AWS docs that use the builders language.

socialismisok4• 4 years ago

That language predates Jassy, it was there back around 2012 at least.

discodave• 4 years ago

Amazon has had an org called 'Builder Tools' or some variation on that for over a decade (maybe much longer?). That team has historically owned the systems for build, deployment, source control etc. AWS also uses the 'builder' terminology a lot in their marketing. E.g. Werner saying 'Now go build!' at the end of his keynotes, and the 'Build On AWS' campaign.

mmmeff• 4 years ago

I quit a few months back and hope it continues to crumble. You won’t be missed, Amazon. After 5 years and countless long nights, I was thanked with a pay cut and ignored when petitioned, even after rearchitecting the entirety of one of their floundering subsidiaries and leading a team of 10 thru it’s execution. The reason? One of my junior engineers missed a deadline. When petitioned, my cries were ignored and I was recommended to boomerang if I wanted a pay raise.

At the same time, a friend was interviewing for the exact same senior engineering role and received an offer. The total compensation he was offered in his first year was nearly double my pay. He didn’t even take it - another company offered him more.

bogomipz2• 4 years ago

"When petitioned, my cries were ignored and I was recommended to boomerang if I wanted a pay raise."

Is petitioning a process in AWS? What does boomerang mean here?

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

Boomerang is “leave and come back” (quit, get a job elsewhere, later re-apply).

55555• 4 years ago

I don't know but I imagine it means to leave and then come back.

jvolkman2• 4 years ago

Leave and get rehired.

ertemplin• 4 years ago

(Disclaimer: I left Amazon about 6 months ago)

Petitioning isn't a process in AWS, but you can ask your manager for a raise if your projected total compensation isn't to your satisfaction.

Boomerang means you leave the company, get another job, and then come back to the company with much higher compensation. It's a way for otherwise happy employees to fight salary compression.

itsyaboi2• 4 years ago

To be frank, this compensation issue isn't a problem specific to Amazon. It's common knowledge that if you want significant raises (50%+) you have to jump among the FAANGs/Tier1 companies, mainly due to the external vs internal offer policies. An internal promo will get you into the bottom of the next pay band versus an external offer which usually puts you near the top. The compensation delta can be in the 6 figures for non-new grad roles. This holds true all the way up to director level roles in my observations.

Fair or not, this is currently the optimal career/comp progression strategy, although recent hiring downturns might change the meta(heh)game to favor internal candidates. We shall see.

dixie_land2• 4 years ago

very true. your manager and skip might be able to see your impact and performance, but for people who control the purse strings, the only value you can prove is a better offer.

joezydeco• 4 years ago

Stories like this are the reason why I keep turning down Amazon recruiters, not the lack of shiny/speedy tools. This article is fluff. And I'm glad you got out.

spelunker• 4 years ago

I'm curious, do you mean pay cut as in literally they changed your total comp or pay cut as in the share price of AMZN dropped?

oneepic• 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm sure there might be some guy going "but, but, it depends on your team! I've never seen this" --but Amazon has a large variety of bitter ex-employees and horror stories.

coredog642• 4 years ago

RE: Boomerang, Amazon changed the policy recently. If you return within one year at the same level, you get the same comp you left at. A comp increase requires a new level and a full loop. The upshot is that you have to have proof of impact for that new level for boomerang to be worth it.

phillipcarter4• 4 years ago

It'd be great to read about all the things this internal DevX org has been able to improve after some time.

Internal developer experience is extremely important. One codebase I worked on used to have a 24-hour, nondeterministic CI run. A teammate brought that time down to ~45 minutes (it's a big codebase with a ton of tests) and made it deterministic. Everything got better:

* Faster turnaround time for external contributions (it's OSS)

* Ability to be relied on to get a critical fix in and tested in under an hour

* Much faster local build times

* Removed reliance on some old busted internal infrastructure so we could use much better, different infrastructure, and make the build/test runs the same across any OS rather than rely on windows so much

* Everyone was happier in general

If we could have gotten a full CI run down from 45 minutes to 15 minutes, that'd be great. And there was still quite a lot of technical debt in the tests themselves, since they should be able to run a lot faster than they did. But even with that in mind, the difference was night and day.

johnbellone• 4 years ago

This kind of stuff is right my ally and I'd love to connect with someone at Amazon about how they're tackling these problems. Does anyone know someone that would like to grab coffee to chat about it?

gumby2• 4 years ago

Your note is unlikely to yield a result. It does end with a call to action but doesn’t explain why someone should respond.

It’s nice and short but needs one more sentence in the middle. This is up your alley — great! But do you want to compare notes? Do you want to get hired? What’s in it for someone from Amazon to respond (or harder, since you’re asking for an intro: why would someone send this to a friend?)

I get a lot of messages like this and usually ignore them because they lack any reason to respond.

zach_garwood3• 4 years ago

I would love to find a full-time position of just doing this kind of work. Nearly every place I've worked had some hacked together system that mostly worked, but wasn't enough of a pain for management to dedicate time to. I'd have to steal time away from the feature mill to make some little improvement, and everyone would agree that, yes, it did make things a easier for the devs, but no, we can't just have you out there working on things willy-nilly when there are features to churn out!

Ozzie_osman• 4 years ago

We carved a role for that at my current startup (dev team ~10 people). We maintain a technical roadmap, which includes platform improvements, dev tooling, infra, etc. Other team members jump in to help out if there's something they're particularly excited about or can do well, but one person is dedicated to this work.

Most large companies have teams for this. I've found that the earlier in a company's life you add someone dedicated to this the better.

arohner• 4 years ago

We're hiring for this role in the UK and parts of the EU: https://boards.greenhouse.io/griffin/jobs/5252742003

cwalv2• 4 years ago

PE at Meta is a bit like this. When people ask what it is, my best description is "SWE that focuses on non-functional requirements" (called 'better engineering' internally)

endtime2• 4 years ago

A lot of companies have this role! EngProd at Google, Eng Efficiency at Roblox (let me know if you're interested), and I'm sure plenty of others as well.

daggersandscars• 4 years ago

I created this role at my current firm. While I don't know your circumstances, here's what I did to get it funded:

* Got buy-in from my coworkers

* Collected data on how much wasted dev time there was

* Collected data on what we would gain (be specific: time to live, faster release cadence, more releases, whatever is real and appropriate)

* Collected data on what clients would gain (errors more likely to be caught before release, more features, etc)

* Present to boss, refine message, keep going up the ladder

MVP for a PoC, in my opinion:

* Come up with project goals as a team

* Sane branching strategy. Can be done at the team level if needed by making a team-level "main"

* Standalone (meaning no-deploy, "devops" framework independent) unit testing system. Use the one that comes with your language if it doesn't stink. Add unit tests to new code.

* Basic build & test system. TeamCity is easy to deploy, configure, and maintain on-prem, Jenkins supports complex use cases. Automatically run on commit to the team-level main. Allow devs to run on-demand for their feature branches. Use other systems (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, etc) if you have the budget.

Keep it simple. Don't worry about pull requests and approval chains at this point. Automatically build it, test it, and put it someplace it could be deployed.

0x4454422• 4 years ago

At almost every company I’ve worked for I would estimate that if I worked on or made changes like you have described the benefit to cost ratio would be multiples larger than any of the actual features I worked on. This was always perplexing until I realized my assumption that managers were given a pool of money and were judged on the ROI they generated on that money was false.

flashgordon• 4 years ago

Hmm the title made me believe this was to fix the use-and-throw-workers culture. Didn't realise it was about fixing tooling. Wonder if anything else was done to fix the disregard for wellbeing and safety?

phillipcarter4• 4 years ago

Orthogonal concerns I think. The pessimist in me says they won't be doing much, but I think they did announce something about making working conditions better for the bulk of their workforce in warehouses, but I won't be holding my breath.

_fat_santa2• 4 years ago

This type of bureaucracy is not only harmful to dev culture, it's also outrageously expensive. I've been on an engagement with a large healthcare provider and the dev culture there is very similar to Amazon, loads and loads of procedure and bureaucracy. Now i get a certain level of that at any company, but you often find yourself going: "does it really need to be this hard". Tasks that would take you an hour outside of this companies ecosystem would take you 3-4 inside the ecosystem.

It's annoying to devs but should be alarming to management. You're literally spending 2x to 3x the required amount on your labor because of your inefficiencies. Personally I found it easy to convince management of changes like this when you pitch it like: "How would you like to reduce your labor costs by 2x". Now granted many people at these places are salaried which makes this a bit of a moot point but most software shops contract out alot of work, and that's where you're really paying for your inefficiencies.

foobarian• 4 years ago

Heh, watch out for empire-building middle managers. "Hey how would you like to reduce your headcount by 2x" will not go over well.

dicriseg• 4 years ago

It’s more like, “How would you like to get twice as much done?”

I don’t work at Amazon, but I’m sure there’s plenty for folks to do.

ryandvm• 4 years ago

Yup. This is an especially dangerous suggestion when you work for a government contractor. Since a lot of them have their profit margin capped at a specific percentage, the only way for them to increase total profit is by increasing the size of the project.

Suggesting efficiencies that would reduce headcount is a good way to get on executive leadership's threat radar.

Man, I do not miss working for a fed contractor.

bumby3• 4 years ago

While it's true that arbitrary bureaucratic inefficiencies can get out of control, sometimes "good" bureaucratic requirements can get inflated with the arbitrary ones, simply because people don't understand their reason in the first place. This leads to a Chesteron's fence scenario [1].

Anytime somebody say's something like "does it really need to be this hard" or "all you've got to do..." should make sure they fully understand the rationale behind the requirements. A lot of times, those requirements can be met in a more efficient manner, but sometimes the seemingly "efficient" path will cause more second-order problems down the road because of those blind spots. What you often find in both camps (those bluntly instituting the requirements and those saying they should go away) is a lack of understanding of the entire system dynamics.

[1] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

im3w1l• 4 years ago

Chestertons fence is basically a prior: Things are the way they are for a good reason. It can be more or less applicable in different contexts, and I'm not sure I would give give bureaucratic procedures such a benefit of the doubt. On the contrary, I think that any departure from doing something in the simplest possible way has to be accompanied by strong evidence.

_fat_santa2• 4 years ago

What I found is almost the inverse of a Chesteron's Fence. Often times I see a complex process and start asking the reasoning behind such a process, everyone I talk to always has the same response: "you know I'm not sure why we do it this way, but it's important that we do it this way". At the end of the day you realize that no one really knows why they do a thing a certain way, and they are too afraid to change it.

I remember working for an insurance company in IT and we would always get a type of ticket that we were told to re-assign to another team. When I asked the obvious question of "why doesn't that team we send it to get it in the first place", I got all sorts of answers basically culminating in: "I don't know but it's the process and it's important". I eventually got someone to walk me through it and admit through their own answers that there was really no good reason to keep this process manual, as it must have been a holdover from when they had an older ticketing system. Even with all this it was impossible to change that process (at least while I was there) because the answer was always: "yeah your idea sounds good, I don't really see where we could break anything....but what if we do break something, let's just keep it as is".

0x4454422• 4 years ago

Now granted many people at these places are salaried…

This shouldn’t make a difference because in theory they would be doing 2x more work which is essentially cutting their salary in half. I realize that the dev team being twice as efficient doesn’t necessarily double the unit’s revenue but it’s some multiple.

jvolkman2• 4 years ago

Sounds like a Day 2 move.

phillipcarter4• 4 years ago

The corporate speak can be hard to stomach sometimes :)

ctvo• 4 years ago

Internal tooling is a mess at most companies I've worked at. At a certain scale it's worth the savings to standardize, improve, and reduce the shared friction costs.

Stripe, as it has scaled, has ran into challenges and invests in the same efforts. FB internal tooling was (is?) a mess. It goes on. The surprise here is it's such a late investment from Amazon, but it's worked for them thus far. I'm guessing the returns on +1 engineer has plateaued or declined, leading to this effort.

mv4• 4 years ago

Re: FB - still is.

jollyllama• 4 years ago

"Being an engineer at Amazon is more button-clicking than development," the slide said, quoting an unnamed Amazon developer.

You guys get to click buttons??

buscoquadnary• 4 years ago

Lucky ducks. Development at my org largely consists of going around to every different possible "partner" to get buy in to have a meeting, to discuss approval of permissions to do something. I think the new metric used to asses an organization is PPS (Powerpoint Slides) to LOC ratio.

champagnepapi• 4 years ago

What about the hire to fire, and crazy amount of pips they do? How are they going to fix that part of the culture? These two are the biggest reason why I turn down amazon recruiters.

endemic• 4 years ago

Churn and burn, baby!

afroisalreadyin2• 4 years ago

At the moment, the general impression I get from people working at Amazon is "Join for the experience, get it on your CV, move on after a year". This is even across departments and countries. The wife of a very good friend who lives in China is working there since nine months in some kind of operations role, and made up her mind months ago that she wouldn't take it any longer than a year. Here in Berlin, I just recently talked to a dev who left exactly a year after he started. He said it was interesting seeing the whole AWS machinery from the inside, and there was quite a lot to learn in terms of process and management, but shoving around legacy Java was just not worth it.

breitling• 4 years ago

legacy Java

I'm starting to feel very old

Is Java considered legacy now?

azmarks• 4 years ago

Java came out 3 (or is it 4) recessions ago. There are entry level developers who were born after I started using it. It's a legacy technology.

ketzo• 4 years ago

I just recently left a job that had a lot of pre-Java 8 still running.

That’s legacy Java.

valbaca• 4 years ago

"legacy Java" is legacy, but it doesn't necessarily mean that "Java is legacy"

afroisalreadyin2• 4 years ago

I didn't mean "Java which is legacy", rather "Java code that is legacy". I think it was also running on old versions, don't remember how old though.

bearjaws• 4 years ago

Amazon was a good gig to join (on the AWS side) 4 years ago, not so much now.

Reason being everyone I know who got in around 2018 has options that cost a fraction of the current stock price. The job is still boring/miserable but when you are clearing 600k+ annual income...

Now if you join, you can bet its a far worse deal and you will make far less than those who just happened to join earlier, even if they're checked out...

There in lies one of their problems, the incentives are for checked out people to stay and 'click buttons' while performing as much CYA as possible.

ogn3rd5• 4 years ago

For reference, entering in July of 2016 got you $700 RSU's. Today that's the equivalent of a $35 share.

retinaros• 4 years ago

not sure what you are saying the stock lasts 4 years any new stock you getting in between will be at market price so you not gonna clear 600k after 4years but only base +new stock.. if amazon stock goes up the next 4years newcomer will get 600k too

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

I'm hearing tales left and right like that; one part of the tales is that you get stocks or stock options, BUT you have to eat a shit sandwich for years before you can 'cash out'. This is the companies' golden handcuffs; they know the job is shit, but you'll get a big payout if you manage to keep it up for at least X time.

The other one is that compensation and competition is sobering up. I have one former colleague who claims that they earn 3x as much working for a US company than they did our previous job, but I don't see much exorbitant wages being thrown around. Second, that company he works for now has set a hiring stop; the explosive growth and demand from US based tech companies is slowing down or coming to a halt.

fjabre• 4 years ago

AWS console is one of the most poorly developed builder tools Ive ever encountered for a company like Amazon, from a UX perspective at least.

I may like some of the services like s3 but will never rely on AWS for anything more that that. Logging into the aws console makes my blood pressure go up.

pyb2• 4 years ago

What do people think of DevX groups in general? I'm not sold, but in my (only n=1) experience, it'd be best to try to address the cultural problems that led to the perceived need for DevX.

For instance : if build times are really bad, maybe it's because developers don't feel empowered to fix this as part of their day-to-day work.

helen___keller3• 4 years ago

At first I was going to disagree but now I'm rethinking.

The need for these DevX groups comes from the fact that at Amazon's scale, there's lots of powerful tools, such as a massive internal build system and such.

So, one answer is that you need DevX groups, because it makes no sense to have each of the thousands of developers learn how to tinker/fix the huge custom amazon build system (IE empowering individual devs).

A second answer might be that there shouldn't be massive internal systems in the first place.

A lot of the brilliance of AWS was reducing the differentiation between internal and external teams as consumers of services[0]. The buildup of massive internal systems probably shows that Amazon hasn't gone far enough, and DevX failures are just a symptom.

pyb2• 4 years ago

I can't speak for AWS ; my experience is at a much smaller company, where the DevX team was mostly busy with enforcing coding standards and other uniform "best practices" upon other teams.

OTOH if your build system needs a lot of tinkering/deep knowledge to be used effectively, maybe it needs a redesign. This would be a job for the tools team rather than DevX.

socialismisok4• 4 years ago

Amazon built a business on hiring starry eyed engineers and then burning them to ash. I worked for them for 6 years and holy shit I'd never go back.

Their reputation is catching up with them and their lack of stock growth is highlighting their comp deficiencies.

voidfunc• 4 years ago

Always amused on Blind about people posting leaving Microsoft for Amazon because TC is the only thing folks seem to focus on there. I've known dozens of Amazon engineers and I've never met one that was happy.

mynameisash2• 4 years ago

At the risk of sounding the "+1" bell...

I left Amazon due to it being a total shit show (for me and my mental well-being but also for the team I was on). Went to Microsoft and found it to be absolutely wonderful. I was working at 6pm one day and my manager, as he was leaving, chided me and said, "Go home to your family. Work will be here in the morning."

I have had friends/colleagues leave to go to Amazon for the TC. One even tried to get me to go over there for a PE role that likely would have meant a huge pay increase. But I value my sanity and have no plans to go back there ever.

phillipcarter4• 4 years ago

The Microsoft boomerang is very common. Leave, get some better pay elsewhere, then come back and get hired into the level you feel that you should have been promoted into internally (with more pay).

Justsignedup2• 4 years ago

Spoke to an Amazon sr engineer a week ago.

"its incredibly high pressure and demanding, but worth it"

The money is the drive. And I worry about going for a money job that I hate because getting used to the lifestyle will mean it is that much harder to leave. I am already in that boat where leaving my current job basically means a pay cut or going to a FAANG. It is very limiting especially with family pressure.

zeruch• 4 years ago

TC seems to be the only focus on Blind. It's almost laughable, but I suspect the demographics on it skew very early stage career/young.

And yes, I've met two people who worked at AWS and liked it, essentially because they were hyper-specialized and had the rare cushy gig there. Everyone else loathed it within months, and no one lasted longer than a few years because AWS squeezes out 'productivity' with everything short of rusty pliers.

mountainriver• 4 years ago

Agree, recently worked at a company that was acquired by them and ran the other direction.

Most devs I know see their endless recruiting emails as a trope at this point

ogn3rd5• 4 years ago

Amen. Worked for AWS for 6 years. 6 years I'll never get back, 6 years of abusive practices, corruption, lies, and bullshit. This is the bed they've made, let the sleep in it.

firstSpeaker4• 4 years ago

Is this just AWS that has such a broken culture or it is all other teams? Although AWS is big, but Amazon has other organisations and teams. (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search-teamcategory).

helen___keller3• 4 years ago

Current AWS employee of 1 year, opinions are my own

I largely agree that for me, working here feels "day 2", which just means it feels the same as working for any other mid to large sized corporation. Lots of meetings, building consensus, tasks that amount to overhead, and adjusting slowly moving pieces to advance whatever the corporate agenda is. Many of these things are directly contradictory to amazon's stated leadership principles (core values) but work happens at the scope of teams not at the scope of leadership principles.

Some of it is team-dependent (not unrelated, my team has really good work life balance. I slog through annoying corporate BS 9-5, but don't work much beyond that) and some of it is related to the builder tools as mentioned in the article.

ghostpepper• 4 years ago

Is it just the luck of the draw who ends up on the teams with good managers or can you dig your heels in if you end up on one of the bad teams and just refuse to stay late? Or can you easily switch teams until you find a good one?

helen___keller3• 4 years ago

can you dig your heels in if you end up on one of the bad teams and just refuse to stay late

I mean, literally anybody anywhere can do this. Whether you get fired depends on your performance evaluations. Like any organization, the biggest reasons to stay late is (a) too high expectations were set, (b) failures to re-adjust to new information (e.g. we had to pull you off your project for 2 weeks but still expect you to make your deadline), (c) paging / oncall. At AWS, I'd say (c) is the biggest risk, but (a) and (b) can also be present at any team of course.

Is it just the luck of the draw who ends up on the teams with good managers

Yeah, that's my impression. When you're already in Amazon though, you're empowered because you have a much greater ability to gather information about a team before deciding if you want to transfer. For example, message/meet with devs on the team, look at their ticket queue to see how often the oncall gets paged, and so on.

Or can you easily switch teams until you find a good one?

I don't know about "until you find a good one", but transferring is pretty normalized. If you've been here a year or two, it's normal to want to transfer, and even before that it's not impossible. You can't transfer if you're on a performance improvement plan, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward

ogn3rd5• 4 years ago

The real issue is the manager churn. You may have a great manager for a year, then 3 more then next year who aren't great. You can work hard to burrow your way into a perfect spot, but because of churn the chances are high that your spot won't be there long and you'll start the process over. It's absolutely exhausting and ultimately one of the reasons I left AWS after 6 years.

dev_tty01• 4 years ago

So their solution to management and process problems is to "manage harder." Yeah, this is going to go well.

user39393823• 4 years ago

Amazon's retail business is driven by the consumption of mass-produced garbage quality products from China that we destroy the environment producing, often abusing factory workers in the process, only to soon thereafter put them in a landfill.

They've repeatedly stolen the IP of top selling product companies, then you've got this stuff https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2019/04/12/amazon-c...

Not to mention all the heinous shit (unconstitutional wars, dragnet spying) they help our military and intelligence services do https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/defense/

Their abuse of their workers from warehouse to engineering is just one piece. As I tell their recruiters I'd rather eat a cactus than work for them.

des429• 4 years ago

As I tell their recruiters I'd rather eat a cactus than work for them.

wow, hardcore.

ugh123• 4 years ago

As I tell their recruiters I'd rather eat a cactus than work for them.

lol. whats their response?

d232• 4 years ago

Unless they turn around soon, I don't see how their goose isn't cooked in the long run. The site has become too filled with garbage products, hijacked listings and fake reviews. Once the people who think they've never received a counterfeit realize there's no way they can really know and start to question why the products they get from Amazon break earlier than usual or have questionable packaging, it will be hard to undo the loss of trust.

cvhashim3• 4 years ago

As long as they pay top dollar for engineers, I think some folks will happily (or unhappily) work there. AWS is a behemoth and it has its tentacles in almost every piece of internet based software we use today, it’s not going anywhere unfortunately.

d-trieu• 4 years ago

As I tell their recruiters I'd rather eat a cactus than work for them.

That's not much of a statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nopal

Justsignedup2• 4 years ago

Cactus tacos are very tasty!

silksowed2• 4 years ago

there's junk on every retail platform, but i disagree that amazon retail is all garbage. myself and peers have noticed an increase in quality of chinese import over the past 5 years. to the point that i would seriously questions buying a brand name domestic product over the chinese/asian import off amazon. i think the quality gap has been slowly closing.

cvhashim3• 4 years ago

I’ve stop buying name brand on Amazon (Nike, Apple products, Hanes etc) a few years ago due to poor quality assurance and potential for counterfeit — cue joke about how Nike and counterfeit Nike are made in the same sweatshop. I would happily buy counterfeit Nike but only if it’s heavily discounted. I don’t want to be tricked into buying second hand clothes, useless junk or counterfeit products. However you bring up a good point, some of products on Amazon from Asia are just fine if you’re looking for basics like T shirts and Athletic wear. But outside of that would highly suggest people buy electronics and brand name clothing elsewhere.

dang3• 4 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We have those rules because otherwise HN would basically all flamewar all the time. And not even fresh flamewars.

user39393823• 4 years ago

I don't think it's a "flamewar tangent". The article is talking about how Amazon has trouble attracting workers because of their engineering culture and my comment is saying that's just one cause of their problem. It's Amazon's behavior that's inflammatory, not my observation of it.

syntaxing• 4 years ago

Even their interview is kind of soul crushing. Felt like I was a story teller instead of an engineer trying to get a job. I can only imagine how it is working there.

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 years ago

From TFA:

In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson confirmed the existence of the team, saying it's part of an effort to maintain its Day 1 culture.

This terminology is bullshit. As someone who was actually there at Day 1 of amzn, it's completely clear that the term "Day 1 culture" is truly meaningless. It refers not to a point in time, but to some management-imposed aspiration in which things never actually settle down to a routine, but instead everyone feels "empowered" by running around constantly reinventing everything. Of course, this is sold as "you can still make a big difference here", when in reality, you almost certainly cannot.

Amazon's actual Day 1 culture meant bringing up a couple of SPARCstations and getting the T1 line functioning.

steveBK123• 4 years ago

I know a few senior engineers / manager types who left financial services tech to work at Amazon. Most of them left within two years, and the ones that stayed quickly got out of AWS org because it was too crushing.

In a way I kind of respect Amazon for treating their white collar tech staff as poorly as their blue collar warehouse staff.

ogn3rd5• 4 years ago

"In a way I kind of respect Amazon for treating their white collar tech staff as poorly as their blue collar warehouse staff."

This isn't always the case. Ask a TAM. With the right blend of customers I've known some to work about 10 hours a week.

coredog642• 4 years ago

JFC, that explains a lot.

d232• 4 years ago

Anybody got a non-paywalled link?

firstSpeaker4• 4 years ago

Oldest comment is the non-paywalled link; https://archive.ph/aRauw

ogn3rd5• 4 years ago

This is purely a PR stunt for the shareholders confidence in Andy's leadership. We've been screaming from the rooftops for years, then they hire someone even worse as HR head, Beth Galetti, who clearly shares distain for the companies talent.

Andy, you've known about the culture problems for years, the fact that you're just now acknowledging them is only because the business is hurting, and burning out all the talent. You're scared shareholders will get involved if this isn't fixed. Sadly, this won't fix anything, this is the culture YOU built.

angryasian• 4 years ago

Management at Amazon was the biggest problem. The don't index for soft skills. They want procedural robots that can memorize 100 stories to cover every LP.

Culture fit matters and you can't fix the culture when thats what they are hiring for.

Amazon built a new unit to fix its engineering culture

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