HN user

mr_beans

78 karma
Posts0
Comments31
View on HN
No posts found.

I loved that place, I spent an entire day there from open til close when I was contemplating changing jobs and it was really helpful to put my work as a developer into historical perspective. Running Unix commands on a PDP-11 and watching the output slowly scroll up the screen was awesome, and seeing the 17 step process to boot the PDP-7 taped on as stickies and then playing chess against it was cool. I always hope some other Seattle billionaire takes over the reins but at this stage my best hope is that my options are worth something in a few years and I can do it myself.

I got a lawyer to look over mine when I was leaving AWS, not for a direct competitor of the team I was on but for a company that does work in an area Amazon is involved in. Washington state.

His advice was thus: technically I am prohibited from working at this new company; Amazon would need to be aware of my new role to enforce it; courts have expressed criticism of over broad non competes so I could challenge it if it came to that. I was not L7+ so his added advice was basically keep your head down for the next 18 months.

It’s bullshit though, and from now on I will always engage an employment lawyer before signing on anywhere. He looked over my new company’s non competes and they are much more reasonable.

I wish wish wish Neeva was already good. I dig that they have a better aligned business model but their search quality still sucks. I was looking for a specific gun to buy and Neeva took me to a scam site as the first hit and I stupidly trusted it and completed the purchase through it (luckily was able to cancel it and get my money back). They also pushed an update which crashed their Beta iOS app and never fixed it. I’m rooting for them but I was not a happy customer so they will need to earn back my trust for me to subscribe.

Allow me to speculate that the guy’s manager is perhaps new at being a manager. Imagine going into being a manager from being an engineer not knowing you’re up against sociopaths in your own org who want to gut your team (other commenters have called it a bloodsport).

I’d love to see the data correlating PIPs of reports to manager tenure. I bet there is an inverse correlation. So to prospective hires, ask your hiring manager how long THEY have been a manager AT AMAZON before you waste time going through the whole interview process.

I had a manager who was one of those org-psychopaths you speak of and it was entertaining to watch him tear apart managers of other teams. Absolutely shred their OP1 docs and argue that their team was working on utter bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong there was a lot of good stuff about Amazon, their operations culture is second to none, but a lot of the ways I saw people being treated and bad behavior from managers being tolerated rubbed me the wrong way. I absolutely saw PIP being used reactively to block a transfer to my team, for instance.

After many years at Amazon I figured out that although managers were mostly engineers at one point and could still talk like engineers, they are first and foremost company bureaucrats playing a very different game to what you and I do.