Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that?
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
Most SDEs have grown up in a severe labor deficit. It's so interesting seeing the idealism smack in to reality.
1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention.
2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics.
3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
For 2: we still have a severe labor demand deficit. Software will continue to eat the world. What we are seeing here is corporation shortsightedness and greed.
You can make a killing in a quarter by firing all your workers. You won't be around for the next quarter.
A day of reckoning will come triggered by spectacular failures of big corporations that pawned their future + infusion of cash as the economy "recovers". At that point in time the pendulum will swing and hopefully people will not forget the absurd way they were treated.
Bingo. Cost-cutting only works in the short term, and by "working" I mean gaming the financial statements. Despite the oligarch's best efforts we still live in a fairly competitive market in therms of tech products. Competing means hiring people to make things.
I'm already seeing a significant uptick in demand for senior+ engineers. This is me talking to multiple companies and recruiters, headcounts are going up again and thankfully their for products that actually provide real value to customers. I haven't heard from a crypto/nft company (see: scam) in a looooong time.
> "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset?
The company with the largest market cap in the world, Apple. Steve Jobs believed in recruiting great people, and he entrusted in them and expected of them to create sustainably disruptive products. From Steve Wozniak all the way to Jony Ive. I don't know if I'd say Jobs was caring for all people working at Apple in my conception of things, but he did not look at the people working on an important Apple project as disposable cogs, and he didn't look at the products they were making as junk commodities to raise next quarter's revenue.
Whatever it boils down to, and whether it can continue creating things like the M2, there is a reason the company with the largest market cap in the world is Apple.
It’s interesting to me how important simply having that written down was to both the perception of the company from the outside and the products that it delivered. Since it was removed from writing both are similarly impacted negatively. Could it be a coincidence? Perhaps, but I suspect not.
Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
As far as I can remember, Amazon never had perks for employees. Except for free coffee and tea in the kitchens. That's it.
I remember back in 2002 (?) when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. My manager said he would find out how we could expense the pizza. It turns out that the pizza was merely theoretical: the team should be sized so that, if there were pizza, then 2 pizzas would be enough for the team. But that doesn't mean that pizza would ever be ordered or expensed.
Twitch did the free food and snacks thing. When acquired by Amazon, Twitch opened a Seattle office, on a floor of an existing Amazon building. We got to keep getting free food!
Every day around lunchtime, hungry Amazon workers from adjacent floors would quietly try to slip in to get a sandwich or a kebab or whatever, or would surreptitiously attempt to get a bag of chips.
Eventually the Twitch side started to complain: there was never enough food to go around at lunch time. If you were more than ten minutes late, all the food would be gone.
The Amazon management’s response? Lock off the Twitch floor so it required special badges for access. Let the Amazonians starve!
I remember the same thing with the door desks. I was impressed at the time (I was young): "Wow, this company not only uses Pine for email but they're smart enough to know that fancy desks aren't necessary." That was obviously a long time ago, but that attitude didn't last long, especially when I saw how absolutely venal the company was becoming.
I couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay, good colleagues, and good management.
Office amenities were the carrot, attendance policies are the stick. Both are aimed at increasing the share of time employees spend at the office/thinking about work/immersed physically and socially in work-based networks. Employees who interpreted these amenities as a spirit of generosity that would just change with the times into a full remote culture were badly mistaken. If anything, it's the companies that never put any thought or care into their office environments, teambuilding, etc. who would be most amenable to going remote.
Microsoft, Facebook, google, Apple, Amazon etc are all hugely profitable companies. If anyone can afford to ride out wall streets short term thinking, it is them.
Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies.
i.e. people stopped buying shares in non-profitable companies..
would you want stock in non-profitable companies in your retirement account? I wouldn't
Based on overwhelming evidence. Based on people I know and interact with all the time; based on thousands of years of history, philosophy, stories, religion that embody it and talk about it.
Based on our reality: We were born into a world built by it, free and prosperous and safe far beyond any of our ancestors. Generations before us actually built that (and what are we building for the next?). Look what King and Einstein and Keynes (and Friedman) and Steinum and all those people built - none profiting much from it.
Do you really doubt that humans have better angels and worse - inside every one of us, and that we have a choice? It's hardly a novel idea, though I can see that it's outre, it's disruptive and outside the pale, in this (uber-reactionary?) moment. Otherwise, who would want to deny that reality?
Can you list a few reasoned out examples of this 'overwhelming evidence'?
From what I understand of modern biology even newborn babies are not entirely blank slates, there's some amount of genetic and epigenetic influence so that many 'choices' are not really up to the individual to decide.
And certainly by adulthood, which is the vast majority of passing HN readers, many many permanent life altering choices have occurred.
For a real world example, the children and grandchildren of those who suffered severe starvation in the Netherlands during WW2 have noticeably worse characteristics on average, in terms of a shorter lifespan, less healthy, etc.., compared to families that didn't undergo that. Even their personalities and behaviours, on average, were affected.
> From what I understand of modern biology even newborn babies are not entirely blank slates, there's some amount of genetic and epigenetic influence so that many 'choices' are not really up to the individual to decide. ...
I think you are taking the influences we all have - emotional, physical, environmental, etc. - to an extreme. It's not blank slate or automaton. People still make lots of choices, even if there are drives and other influences one way or the other. You don't have to do bad things, and you can choose to deal with your natural drives, emotions, etc. in many ways.
Okay, so then it should be easy to find and list out 'overwhelming evidence'?
The Dutch example suggests the opposite, that to noticeably move the needle for large groups of people like that, in a positive direction, would take many lifetimes to occur.
Even to get them back to the population average would likely take at least a half dozen generations.
Ah, I didn't realize this is some racial/ethnic superiority rationalization. IMHO such arguments are transparently an attempt to rationalize people's biases (and in the current rhetoric, they like to assert them as if they they have novel, insightful, intellectual ideas, instead of just espousing old reactionary oppression).
Life is too short for such diversions, and those things have cause far, far to much harm to too many people, in ways we know very well. In fact, I might assert that nothing has caused more harm to humanity: stop acting on racial/ethnic/nationalistic biases, and we'd have a far more peaceful, free, prosperous world.
Lots of people have that bias, everyone to some degree. Everyone has anger too, but we don't all punch or neighbors or believe we are self-righteous. You could change how you deal with your biases right now - you don't need generations, and don't accept that excuse for yourself. We have a choice; we can do so much more - right now.
Considering this is the third deflection in a row, I'm going to have to insist on solid proof of this 'overwhelming evidence' going forwards, instead of hand-waving and easily seen through innuendos.
Again, people love to say it, like it sounds smart. Humans are earnest and deceitful, to varying degrees at varying times. We do acheive earnest goods; we have human rights, for example, democracy, and lots of peace (but not enough). We have a choice, free will, the moral choice of thousands of years of (much) religion and philosophy.
I never have at any age, but I also grew up extremely poor and watched my mother take a company to court over wage theft and win. She, as a matter of course, always kept detailed records of time worked every single day. The court decided that level of record keeping over years was enough.
I may have some level of loyalty to those around me but even that comes with a healthy bit of cynicism.
Your question makes me realize there's some ambiguity regarding "believing" in a company.
There have been teams, especially small ones, where I trusted everyone on the team to act like a true friend, and to strive to do good things for the company.
I don't recall ever working for an organization where I 100% cared about their goals, or believed 100% in the righteousness of their goals, or where I was 100% sure they'd succeed.
Agreed. It's never 100%. Life is more complex and nuanced than that. Nobody - the other people or myself - is 100% caring, righteous, etc. Real, adult ove is caring for, believing in, and sometimes committing to the flawed creatures, even as we're flawed ourselves.
If those people care about those things (and aren't in a system that pressurises them not to or selects for people who do) then the "company" will also care about those things.
If the company is controlled by distant, diffuse, anonymous investors indirectly, they are much more likely to demand instant profits and encourage rich leadership to screw the workers. Wealth invariably (but not always) makes people less humane and more arrogant.
The solution to avoid this Kafkaesque trap multitudes are willing to saddle around their necks is worker-owned co-ops.
I don't know what is surprising, it's just capitalism being capitalism. There were game rooms because they thought it would be useful for making money, they don't have game room anymore because they think its' useful for making money now
Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain.
Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
I have never been laid off or fired*. However, for most of my adult life, a layoff would have been traumatic. I have a specialized skillset, and it takes a while to find jobs. In the meantime, I have living expenses. It's doubly hard to find a job unemployed. I don't want to be in that position.
"Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it.").
If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no one else has to.
* I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like a layoff or firing, through.
> I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job.
That entirely depends on whether they give you those 3-6 months of severance they’re supposed to give. I’d rather have that money without the need to spend my days killing my motivation by writing pointless docs.
I've never had an employer who gave 3-6 months severance.
Part of it also depends on your employability.
A generalized, fungible skillset makes finding jobs relatively quick. If I were a SWE in SFO, I'd take the severance.
For me, good jobs come up once every 1-2 years. When they do, they're AWESOME, but if I were ever laid off, I could expect to either:
- Have no income for a long time;
- Take a job which made me miserable; or
- Perhaps do consulting or a startup
I have a very non-fungible skill set. That means there are very rarely people who want to hire me in an appropriate role, but when they come up, they're often very desperate to hire me.
> "We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it."
I’m an entrepreneur in France, and I had one employee I would have like to say that to, but it can so easily be turned against the employer… Unions and litigations have basically made honesty the worst choice in every situation. Only to discover afterwards that the person had been willing to go since 6 months already. The entire experience is stupid, stupid humans working (or not working) together.
I don't mean to come off as aggressive but shouldn't you have enough savings not to care about this? Generally specialized skillsets mean high enough pay to have a significant portion that is discretionary savings / spending. I've tried to use at least a portion of mine to create a freedom fund (often called "fuck you money") that has enough to cover our expenses for at least a year.
I will give a list of reasons for why this might not be the case:
1) Specialized skills often do not necessarily equate with high-pay. For example, a school social worker specializing in a specific disability, or a laboratory glassblower (makes custom instruments for chemistry and physics labs) are almost irreplaceable, but only command slightly higher pay (if at all)
2) Many sectors (such as non-profit) do not have high pay
3) Many people don't have savings for other reasons (e.g. recent immigrant from a low-income country, recent divorce, major medical issue, graduate still paying off school debt, etc.)
Etc.
I thought about providing more background about my specific situation, but I prefer to remain anonymous. As a footnote, if you have a 1-2 year F-U fund, being laid off (or quitting) and being unemployed that long means your life savings are gone.
That's not good.
Until and unless my fund is enough to retire on, I would still rather work than not work, even if that's writing documentation, handling IT tickets, or debugging someone else's code.
Not necessarily, you could have specialist skills in a market that is unfashionable, and consequently doesn't pay well. Telco for example, or IoT, or (soon) VMware. Particularly dangerous for mid career people who need to decide how to pivot.
I have one skill set which has been employable for the past 2000+ years. At least pre-AI and similar technology changes, it's not something which goes into fashion or out-of-fashion. Think doctor, construction, woodworking, teacher, lawyer, military, architecture, etc.
That combines with math+SWE to make a nice bundle, at least for what I enjoy.
That's a path I often advise. Intersect a skillset like that with SWE + math, and there's a very nice set of niches one can slot. For each of the above:
- Doctor + SWE + math = medical imaging, computational biology, etc.
- Construction/engineering + SWE = industrial robotics, CAD, etc.
- Teacher + SWE = edtech, e-learning, etc.
- Military + SWE = a ton of hard tech
However, the air gets very thin as you specialize, and especially as you move towards the top. If you intersect the above with director-level or C-suite level positions, there might be literally just a handful of jobs out there. Narrow that by geographic region is you have a family, and it becomes more and more of a problem.
What's interesting is that I've seen more than a 10x spread in compensation from jobs I've applied for (which is extreme, but not as extreme as it sounds; a research scientist at FAANG might earn $600k, and $60k at a university or a non-profit for the same qualifications). The higher-paying positions also weren't better, holistically.
> If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it.").
I'm not sure I quite following your argument. How is it harder to get a job when unemployed vs when being given shit work from 9-5? If it's financial anxiety, then severance is the best of both worlds: ex-employee gets paid and time to find a new job
I am not the original commenter, but the way I see it, this is mainly about two things;
1) Your lack of any sort of leverage. This means the potential employers will try to take advantage of your situation, and it will take some time to find an employer who does not.
The second of those is huge. Unfortunately, it's well-founded prejudice too; a lot of people who are jobless are jobless for a reason. Many "layoffs" are a euphemism for being fired, and interviews are imperfect to say the least. If I don't catch the reason you're unemployable, there are two possibilities:
(1) You don't have a reason, and you're perfectly employable
(2) You do, and it slipped past the interview process.
The longer you're jobless, the less employable you are. Employable people will snatch up new jobs very quickly. If you've sent 10,000 resumes and flunked 100 interviews, and pass mine, odds aren't that you've magically improved, but that you got lucky. If you've been unemployed for the past two years without good reason, you're very likely in that bin, so for most hiring managers, the longer you've been unemployed, the harder it is to pass an interview screen.
On the other hand, shit work 9-5 looks the same on a resume or in an interview as real work. A hiring manager won't know any better.
As a footnote, leverage is a real issue, but is easier to manage. Many companies will try to take advantage. However, at least as often:
- The hiring manager (personally) doesn't care about how much you cost. They want a good team, and it's not their money.
- The employer has fixed salary grades. There's little room to negotiate. If you do negotiate, the impact is generally transitory (if you're hired at the top of your salary grade, you can expect to have no raises for a few years without a promotion).
- The company compensates fairly, since they don't want a revolving door of people.
I'm not going to argue whether that's a majority or minority of companies, but it's manageable. At that kind of employer, you might get a few thousand extra with leverage than without, but it won't be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and nowhere near "being taken advantage of."
> Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management.
I've only tried this once. In the process of trying, something dawned upon me. If you think you can run a company better than your management does, go start one.
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you.
L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s.
If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture.
If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process.
If you don't like a process, kill it.
This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
In pretty much any big enough company with enough people, the issue is that you have a general sense of direction at higher levels, and if you go against the grain, it makes other people criticize you because they want to be seen as going with the grain for their career paths. If you want to see the biggest example of effect in action, go work for the US government.
So at certain point, you just stop caring to do anything because the paychecks are worth more to you.
Nah, I hired specialists and caught no end of trouble for doing so. All of them that are still in tech make $1M+ annually these days because they stand out among the lovable but mostly ineffective fungibles that are the cannon fodder for rounds of layoffs there.
But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy.
I'm not lecturing them for leaving. I'm lecturing them for complaining about things that it WAS IN THEIR CONTROL TO ADDRESS. More than that - it was their actual JOB to ensure.
And what makes you think one L8 against an entire hivemind of L8s and L10s whose high-end compensation depends on negating everything you're doing can move the needle? 80+% of my meetings, so very many meetings, were endless discussions of who the next "unregretted attrition" would be so as to appease the need to fire. Those are your leaders, and that's how they spend their time. Or maybe you're one of them and the truth hurts?
I chose to "disagree and commit" to "The Law of Two Feet" and left. One L8 claimed he would be blacklist me and my direct reports (who also left) from ever returning. He got a harassment claim later and I asked in return for my input that HR investigate that claim. Nope, not blacklisted, he was just a lying PoS.
In my 3 decades in tech, something happens around 10K employees and it's irreversible. Amazon was amazing in evading that for so long in exchange for a brutal cheapskate internal culture they slapped the label "FRUGALITY!" upon to make it seem legit. There's probably a doctoral thesis or two in analyzing how it was both broken and working at the same time.
My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc.
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts.
I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
Because they don't decide this on their own. A smart CEO gets board approval before going on a hiring spree, so afterwards, if the CFO shows a negative forecast, everyone can go, 'Oh, who could have seen this?'
CEOs get fired if the board loses trust in their abilities.
I also think some of those CEOs should be fired, but I don't even think there was over hiring... It's more that demand went up by a lot suddenly, and then down by a lot suddenly.
The weren’t able to integrate the hires in time to meet the demand spike before it went away. So it would have been optimal to not hire into it.
Was that very difficult to see at the time? Sure, but what are those astronomical comp packages buying? Making very difficult calls correctly is their jobs.
In the eyes of the CEO and the shareholders, was it the wrong call?
The CEO hires the employees assuming ZIRP continues. ZIRP ends. He fires all the extra employees, and gets to fire employees he doesn't need from other departments too along the way. Shareholders benefit either way, and the expendable ex-employees' well-being, visa status, healthcare, etc. is someone else's problem. Market is bad so the remaining employees can't really complain either.
Macroeconomic conditions changed or demand for the product they work on wasn’t what it was expected. Tech companies are encouraged by investors to take risks which is why risk taking isn’t punished.
> As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into.
Timing "we need this new team" with "We don't need this team" is a challenge. It is rare that both occur at the same time, or even the existing team's skill set matches with the new challenge.
Shifting SREs to do machine learning is set up for failure.
All tech companies I've been at have had this challenge of churn.
As an engineer, the deeper the experience in a field, the more business value you can create (all else being equal). So when you switch speciality, value creation is going to take a hit. Some skills carry across directly, others take months/years to acquire.
This is why companies can simultaneously be hiring teams and firing teams at the same time.
If the team is doing something critical for the business strategy, they need to be on-point straight off the bat. That normally is achieved by buying start-ups or doing deep partnerships. (MSFT + OpenAI comes to mind).
Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses (let’s exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than what’s needed to run those?
There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do.
This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it.
When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around.
Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
Amazon is two businesses in one. AWS is a high margin technology services business. The rest is a low margin box shifting distributor.
To be competitive in distribution you need to be ruthless about costs. I've consulted for a few of these sort of companies and it's insane what they will do to save a few pennies. They are utterly miserable places to work as their frugal attitude spills over into all their interactions. It starts with using doors as desks and progresses to making staff piss in a bottle.
I suspect this culture is what makes Amazon as a whole such a difficult employer.
If they were two independent businesses then it would never make sense for them to merge, just as you wouldn't expect Microsoft to buy Walmart. It would probably be better for both sides if they divorced.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements
Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year.
When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it.
The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error.
And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train.
Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
>Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs
This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally coming to an end
Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about is precisely what is happening now
Keep The Lights On effort was typically around 10% of total capacity. The rest of the effort was because the goal is not to maintain, it’s to drive improvements to the business.
I think Twitter provides a case study here. The site is still working fine despite being staffed by only 20% of the employees it had just over a year ago.
Yea, I think we still need to wait and see. Airplanes keep gliding when you turn the engine off. I think Twitter is still in the "Wile-E-Coyote ran off the cliff but hasn't started falling yet" phase.
I take a middle position on this having seen it all at Twitter since 2006. The site does still work, but not without outages. Of course, Twitter had major outages during the Williams/Costello/Dorsey period as well. What happened was that when Musk obtained control, the haters claimed that Twitter/X would burn down or get bricked. None of that ever happened, which leads some people to believe it "still works fine" with 20% of the former staff.
1. Because beliefs around WFH have changed.
2. Investors aren’t thinking about tactical stuff like office amenities, free lunches and WFH.
None of it makes a dent on the valuation in the way that better focus and execution do, and investors expect the managers to set up the culture to do that without having to make a determination about the specifics of WFH in Amazons particular circumstances.
That is exactly what Amazon thinks it’s doing. Yes, costs are getting cut, but by far the more significant impact would be 5 or 10% better execution on stuff that really moves the needle than a 2% cost reduction.
When margins are high the returns to growing revenue are much greater than cutting costs.
Beliefs around WFH didn't change. Economic circumstances did. If it reverts to difficulty hiring and retaining people, WFH will change back. Productivity is an excuse after the fact.
>When margins are high the returns to growing revenue are much greater than cutting costs.
Margins aren't necessarily high and growing revenue isn't always an option. Certain products/services just aren't in demand, no matter how well you execute.
AWS is high margin but retail isn't. For better or worse the two businesses are merged and considered together by Wall St. which means management also has to look at it that way.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses
Have you used AWS before? The complexity of the site alone should tell you this side of the business would need more than a "very few" people to run it. And that's just their web services side, never mind retail.
It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of ideas for how I could use the time…
I know someone who has been in this situation for _years_. But his true passion is an outside of work outdoors hobby, which is where he spends about 38 of his work hours each week.
Depends on what you do with the hours you actually work, as well as your previous history. There is a whole meta associated with this, but basically if you establish yourself as the person that people message first to get answers to questions, especially outside of your team, there is a very low chance you are getting fired.
There isn't a set guide to this. The idea is that you want people to view you as a loss in teams ability to get things done if you were ever to leave, but not in the sense of raw hours worked but the knowledge and decision making process.
What we're talking about is a sort if hybrid between a Tech Lead and Architect, but not quite like either. You have less direct responsibility, but people come to you independently with questions and review requests, because you can quickly generate detailed and accurate answers.
Go get a new job. You don’t have to tell prospective employers how much time you spent a week doing stuff for your previous company. They will just see that you worked for company X for years Y and that will probably be good enough.
How does it melt your brain. I can think of about 20 things I could be working in instead of writing code for my company. You want to pay me, but not give me work? Great, I’ll pick from my list of things and do that instead. Even if I’m not creating something, I can learn new things by reading books or watching tutorials.
A lot of the commenters are missing it: it's not that you have _nothing to do_: it's that you're being told to find a job ASAP, in the next 8-12 weeks. It's very easy to say "the first thing I'd do is take a 2 week vacation", but, the expectation is you're finding a position ASAP -- and there are none. So you need to start practicing your Leetcode for our absurd interview process as an industry. The last thing you're thinking is "I should pump out some graphics shaders and get permission to open source them!"
I my experience, you aren't actually doing nothing and having nothing asked of you.
You are more likely tasked with things that require spinning your wheels. Boring, pointless, and directionless work that doesn't challenge you. It just melts your brain.
I was stuck in one of these roles for a while. It's mind numbing.
While you can't work on many projects - due to IP rules - you can often improve your skills and learn. Do you have a personal improvement/education budget? Use it to take relevant courses, buy books, etc. Do you have an equipment budget? Use it to upgrade to the ergonomic keyboard.
The worst case is you still get laid off but now you have things you can take forward. A better case is that you find another role at the company with the new understanding.
Either way, follow the policy exactly. Don't screw around and give them grounds to fire you.
Keep in mind you are still likely bound by an expansive intellectual property clause in your employment contract that says the company owns all work you do, even outside normal business hours.
If I could be paid to browse HN and make my un-sellable software synths and path tracers all day I’d be as happy as can be. Even if I could theoretically work on something I could sell, I’d probably rather write something fun than something useful if food on the table was already secured.
Ignoring the creative work you mention, I do have some experience with browsing. Prior to my retirement, I read RSS feeds for maybe an hour a day and Hacker News for an additional 15 minutes. After 2 years of retirement, I probably still spend an hour a day on RSS feeds but Hacker News has expanded to an hour a day. I didn't expect to enjoy HN so much given the opportunity.
It's pretty obvious that your employer owns work you do for your employer, and things you do on company time or using company equipment. But this "they own everything you do forever even at 2AM at home using your own computer" meme gets repeated all the time and it's complete bullshit regardless of what's actually in your employment contract. And this ignores the fact that the vast majority of employees in the US don't have employment contracts at all and/or live in states that explicitly make these broad types of IP assignment clauses illegal or at least unenforceable.
non competes are not enforceable in california and a few other US states iirc, although if there were to ever be an IP lawsuit, it would be a war of attrition (with odds highly stacked against the engineer)
Interesting that they feel that they are “trailing in AI”. The second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.
I couldn’t help but smile. To be clear, its not just Amazon who does this but they are guilty of not investing seriously in developing new tech, only monetizing it. Out of all the BigTech, they are the only one that doesn’t even pretend to invest in some sort of industrial lab focused on basic research (Even IBM has a Research division, even today).
AI is still pretty much a bubble. We don't really even have anything that remotely resembles AI right now, just way better search engines, that Amazon was never in the business of. All they need to do to stay relevant in AI is to offer cost effective EC2 instances with accelerator hardware.
A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no impactful work and promises of impactful project work once headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-internal knowledge with them.
They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc.
There are multiple factors. Ofcourse from orgs perspective it is cost saving measure. But from another phenomenon that has happened is that graduates from lower tier colleges have gotten good in cracking leetcode, faang style interviews.
There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
Lower tier colleges have gotten much better in quality too.
I remember Indraprashta came to recruit Indian PhD students at my Ivy League tier college to become tenure track CS/ECE/EE professors.
Plenty of lower tier IIITs and regional engineering colleges are getting Western or Top Tier IIT trained faculty, and students are higher quality now as well.
As the child of a dad who attended one of these no name RECs who ended up becoming tech leadership here in the Bay, I'm glad that this democratization has occurred. The BITS Pilani and IITian uncles were very snobby and annoying.
Quality is a relative term. We have been hiring in India for past 2 years. I can tell you there is lot of noise and no substance. There is only handful of good candidates and they know they are good.
In India it's crazy because culturally they focus so much on the credential. It wasn't that long ago that if you were an Indian engineer and you weren't a graduate of IIT, you had no chance of working for these companies. The entire Indian hiring funnel is based on that system and it will be hard to change.
There is a a reason why people focussed on IITs. To be very clear, not every engineer graduating from IIT is good. But chances of finding a good engineer is probabilistically higher in IITs than other place. Also, when you are manager or startup, credential-led hire is medal of honour.
What you cite is one factor. Another factor is access for students. Once upon a time, curious students had two choices: buy books to learn on their own; or go to whatever low quality teachers they had. Cheap internet, YouTube, LibGen, other resources help students as long as the latter desire to learn.
I have encountered this during my time recruiting as well, where the same position I applied for was also listed for 1 day (then taken down) in Hyderabad. Likely stealthily collect applications. Ultimately, they said I passed the rounds, but the role was cut.
Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions.
When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
> They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new.
> expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it.
> Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly
3 days from office like all the other office.
> Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.
Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
I heard about that. A good buddy of mine who attended UT ended up moving to CDMX to work remotely for Reddit. He's earning around $70k which is honestly pretty great.
If he's single, $70k for CDMX (Mty or Gdl, the other two metro cities) it can work, if he wants to raise a middle-class family not so much.
Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like.
Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely.
I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.
Maybe ... but this is almost word for word what my college counselor told me in 2001 when encouraging me not to study computer science, and I've heard some variant of it again and again ever since. What I think is that supply and demand will continue to ebb and flow, as will compensation, but that the ability to create software is a useful skill that will continue to be compensated pretty well for the foreseeable future.
Saying that kids shouldn’t need to study computer science is like saying kids shouldn’t need to read and write because the market for literate people is saturated. Code is the toolset for the modern economy.
So, this is an easier case to make today (though to be honest I remain pretty skeptical of this), but in 2001 this was very far from being clear cut. The dot-com bubble had just burst and software looked like it might be a small niche or even just a fad in permanent decline.
This is more or less why I said the useful skill is the ability to "create software", not to "write code".
One end game may well be that a lot of people who are today "product managers" will use increasingly capable AI assistants to "create software" without writing much, if any, code. But in that world, I think a lot of people who are today "programmers" will also be very well suited to creating software in that way, and will have no trouble transitioning into those roles if that's where the opportunities are.
If you prevent talent from coming to the US, companies will follow the talent.
This is why American cybersecurity and networking has almost entirely been outsourced to Israel and India and chip manufacturing to Taiwan and South Korea.
I do not understand how we got to this point. India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence and has not even voted to condemn Russia.
It’s really a sign of how weak the U.S. government has become, which is heartbreaking. US has found it too expensive to invest in its own citizens. It’s almost a ticking time bomb.
India is assassinating people on US and Canadian soil. And more importantly, the US and Canadian governments are being very officially-public about it.
Let that sink in.
I'd be shocked if China isn't assassinating people too. They definitely have established "police stations" here and are conducting operations against dissidents and their families, but maybe it hasn't crossed into actual murder. If it has, the US and Canada aren't talking about it; they're barely talking about, or doing anything about, the secret police stations.
> India is assassinating people on US and Canadian soil.
I've clearly missed something here. Where can I learn more about what you're referencing here, or what Google search would point me in the right direction?
The Washington Post has written about this a fair bit, including an article from the editorial board. "washington post indian assassination" should give you some reading.
Is the issue not enough talent in the US, or not enough talent at a desired salary range? One of the guys here is talking about people making 30k USD. My guess is there is not much American talent at that pay range, even if there's plenty of talent available here generally.
Financing the Abraham Accords [0], using American engines in tanks [1], American fighter jet engines in Indian fighter jets [2], and being a part of 2 bilateral treaty organizations [3][4] absolutely puts India in the US Sphere of Influence.
> has not even voted to condemn Russia
India will never piss off Russia, because India doesn't want Russia to join the Chinese camp [5]. By keeping trade and defense ties with Russia, India minimizes the chances of Russia becoming pro-China instead of neutral during an India-China war (which almost happened in 2020) [6].
Mistreatment of Indian students in Ukraine during the war made a vote in favor of Ukraine politically untenable during election season [7]
In some ways it is a U.S. ally. But don’t tell me you are going to buy Russian oil and not side with the us in Ukraine and tell me you are under our influence.
Any development in a country that has not washed its hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.
In addition, the recent argument with Canada over the killing over a citizen on Canadian soil comes into play here. That is not what s country under western influence does.
I understand the need for the us to sacrifice somewhat in order to tame the bigger bad.
However, the us is operating from weakness here which is not okay and the situation should have never been allowed to develop to this point. Ironically it may be outsourcing and offshoring in the first place that led us here.
US critical infrastructure development should not be outsourced to countries who have any contact with countries that are we are in a proxy war with.
Russia has supported India in multiple occasions when US was against Indian interests. The neutrality policy of India has supported it better than taking sides and it'll continue for the foreseeable future.
No international relations expert, afaik, would say India is in the US sphere of influence; the US specifically says India is not (in what I've seen). India is an independent power that is growing its relationship with the US. It also has relationships with Russia and with others. China happens to be an adversary, which strengthens the US relationship for now.
India is nearly unassailable. Nobody can really conquer a country of 1 billion people anyway, economically they have the size (and therefore power) to be independent-minded, and geographically there is no neighbor that is now a serious threat: China can bicker and skirmish but would have to cross the Himalayas to fight a war, which is impossible. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, but those are useless other than to deter an existential attack by India - using them would be suicide. Bangladesh lacks economic, political, and military power. Others are too small.
India doesn't need to be in the US 'sphere' and serve US interests.
I think they are still mad about Ukraine supporting Pak on Kashmir in UN and selling them bunch of tanks 20+ years ago. What I don't get is why Pak FO didn't remind IK of that when he visited Russia. Maybe they were that hard up for oil.
Old story retold. The Claudian Roman government doubled down on the distinction between barbarian and Roman civilian and used shitty rhetorical tools to denigrate the barbarians. This all despite the fact that most Romans farms and undesirable jobs were still being done by "barbarians." It's almost like looking into a mirror of history. The end for Rome was not far beyond Claudius.
I would feel better if some of positions being outsourced required some sort of clearance . I really feel like certain development , like banking products / power grid / cyber security products for instance, should require a clearance to work on.
I never read Roman history beyond 6th and 7th grade history and AoE 1's campaigns, but I think Roman analogies would make it easier to drive my point to a couple people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudius_Gothicus who's reign was pretty late in the Empire phase, though good news for the U.S. it took another 150 years once they started crowning barbarians emperors before it all went to shit. Ironically, it was the emperors from barbarian territory who led the effort to keep second class and first class from mixing; which also rings a little true in our current U.S. political climate.
I feel like the correct compromise for our conversation would be requiring strict clearance control for products in certain sectors.
The reality is that if you work on a banking product for instance you might find an exploit you can use and keep secret and use to your countries benefit. That’s why these positions need clearance controls.
Even a benign program like a text editor could have a back door installed to spy on the us.
There is no solution. US, Israeli, and Indian cyber-infrastructure is completely intertwined.
There's no possible way to decouple without reversing 30 years of development.
The only solution is to justify to Israel and India why they should continue to align to the US, instead of hacking it on their own.
This justification comes from the carrot (FDI, IP Transfers) and the stick (bad press, cultivating alternative allies, tarriffs)
The era of Hyperpower is over. Regional Powers have returned.
The US Policy world has recognized this for a decade and is operating under those assumptions. The issue is the type of person who gets their news from CNN, Fox, Reddit, Zeihan, Telegram, etc isn't exactly the kind to read policy papers or watch C-SPAN
> Even a benign program like a text editor could have a back door installed to spy on the us.
It goes both ways. Meta is an American company with development done in the US. Everyone uses WhatsApp at the senior levels outside of North America. Everyone other than China uses Google as their primary search engine. Everyone uses MS or Apple as their primary OS
I don’t agree with the premise that it is impossible to reverse . Frankly , security concerns should be treated as a priority one and heaven and earth should be moved to rectify the situation. It’s definitely not impossible just difficult. Frankly, we should be focused on solving hard problems that have high impact like this.
I also think that in sourcing is an investment in the us citizen, something that all companies operating in the us should be obliged to do.
Our problem doesn't really seem like a lack of encouragement for immigration. We have plenty of people trying to come here, we either don't want the people attempting to come or don't want immigration at scale at all.
Social programs and entitlements are really all the encouragement needed for immigration, as long as you're legally allowed to immigrate and get a job at all. Is the question really how do we encourage the "right" kind of immigrants for the skills or roles we want to expand?
> how do we encourage the "right" kind of immigrants for the skills or roles we want to expand
Remove a decade long backlog for Indian nationals coming to work in Skilled fields (STEM, Accounting, Healthcare, Finance, Law) by speeding up processing times by hiring more bodies at USCIS Processing Centers.
And also maybe not forcing every Chinese national who studied STEM in China to go through enhanced background checks [0].
And also hiring more immigration judges (I knew a former Immigration Judge with the DHS - they de facto had a hiring freeze since the 2010s, leading to case backlogs).
Maybe we're thinking of different things, but isn't the backlog for Indian citizens caused by a fixed number of visas per year and per country caps? If you track the visa bulletin [0] they call out when a green card number is ready for your category, and India has its own set of dates because their country is so oversubscribed.
Agreed all of those can and should be done. IMO none of those are related to encouraging immigration though, only removing legal blockers.
The incentives exist, we just need to get out of peoples' way and let people immigrate here.
Alternatively, we could alter the statue of liberty and remove the poem if we collectively don't want to welcome immigrants of all skills and situations.
Skilled Immigration is already encouraged by the salary bump.
The issue is skilled immigration has been backlogged, as the existing system hasn't been reformed since the 2000s.
It's the backlog that pushed Chinese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and now Indian immigrants to consider staying put instead of spending 5-10 years living under the fact that you might be asked to leave in 60 days.
I wouldn't underestimate the tolerance our system has for paying people to do otherwise unnecessary jobs simply to keep employment high and people distracted.
Our system would indeed implode if many went unemployed. Companies would go down with it though, they need people employed so they can spend money and keep the gears of capitalism turning.
I know I sound very cynical here but I don't even mean it as a bad thing. Its just the way this works, for anyone looking to down vote a cynical sounding take I'd be really interested to hear what I might be misrepresenting.
This is nonsense. There is no "system". Individual companies don't hesitate to lay off employees if that improves profits. While a few worthless employees can slip through the cracks at large companies, there is zero chance that employers continue paying large numbers of employees to do unnecessary jobs. Boards have no loyalty to abstract concepts like capitalism.
With so many companies having layoffs in the last 12 months, were those all unnecessary jobs? If not, were revenue targets or company valuations lowered to match the loss of productivity with fewer necessary positions in the company?
Companies will absolutely continue paying large numbers of employees to do unnecessary jobs, they're incentivized to do so. A growing company is often seen as a good sign by shareholders and no one can really tell whether the new roles are any more or less productive. Existing employees and managers have the benefit of growing teams and getting promoted before anyone sees if the teams over-hired. Holding expendable positions also has the benefit of making for an easy layoff when investors get spooked.
Meaning the company and employees have good reason to hire and keep unnecessary jobs, don't have many short-term downsides as long as it doesn't directly cause a drop in key metrics, and have a built-in backup plan when things turn south and they can show good leadership by trimming the fat.
More jobs can always be invented/created in the name of safety. More regulators, more regulations, more psychological councilors, more child protection specialists, more DEI councilors, more lawyers for more lawsuits, more military divisions (to keep the country safe)... etc. Mainly supported with public funding.
Not saying those aren't real jobs (many certainly are), but I think the scope & number of those jobs can be expanded to fill the void left by more "productive" / "survival" jobs.
Now you're just making things up. Safety professionals make up a minimal fraction of the workforce which has barely increased in recent years. If anything, we should be spending more on workplace safety. Those are hardly useless jobs.
The military has been cutting personnel. The number of divisions has gone down. Higher military spending has been going towards procurement programs, not towards more uniformed jobs (although some defense contractors have expanded a bit).
I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here.
Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life.
I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
> a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India
Yep! My parents and I are the same. The QoL in even a 3rd tier cow town in the US will be better than an economically vibrant city in India or China. Having clean tap water is (imo) the pinnacle of a developed country.
> things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut
True, but most Indian villages aren't like that anymore. They have all fairly developed now with electricity, WiFi, decent schools, etc. Go use Google street view - Indian villages may seem messy by Western standards, but they've gotten much better now.
If you're someone who lived in small town or village India your whole life, and go to college to get a good job, if you have the option to earn a big city salary in your small town while being close to your family can be hard to beat.
It's the same reason you see plenty of Techies take remote jobs and live near their families in the Midwest.
Maybe it is just circumstance but I had been working with devs in Hyderabad since at least 2016 when I was at Amazon. I’m sure they are expanding the workforce there, though
They've been in HYD for some time, but HYD is fairly new in the Indian software scene.
Traditionally, Delhi NCR and Bangalore were the big 2 tech hubs since the 80s-90s, but politicians who were also massive landlords in Hyderabad [0][1][2] began giving tech companies tax incentives to move to Hyderabad in the early 2000s
It began as low tier Infosys type work, but began climbing up the value chain in the 2010s
They do, and plenty of Westerners (Indian origin and non-Indian origin) return to India to work for Indian companies, found their own companies, or manage American operations.
Though, IME, it tends to be Japanese, Israeli, Singaporean, and Korean expats who can hack it in India. Western European and Americans are too soft.
I doubt a visa for generic remote based web dev work would get approved. In fact, I believe the visa even states you have to have a skill that is not readily available in India.
The reality is your generic dev would probably not qualify especially if they are outside of a company.
But I'm not sure how well the history of the US in the Philippines is taught even in gen-ed college history classes, let alone, say, high school. One of those topics I think most folks learn about either through personal interest, or as part of a history or politics major in college, apart from maybe a passing mention when covering the tail end of 19th century US history, or maybe a low-context entry in coverage of WWII. I guess it's not as bad as mistaking Puerto Ricans for "foreigners", at least.
Ah. Plains state here. Maybe that’s to California as Native American history was to us. That, the “age of exploration”, western expansion, very bad revolutionary war history, and the “cradle of civilization” (Mesopotamia) must, collectively, have represented 95% of all our time spent on history, K-6.
We have to import medical professionals (or hire offshored ones, for telehealth or whatever) if we don't want our healthcare system to collapse. We're gonna need to do a lot more of it as the years go on, too.
Too bad we can't import doctors. That's the worst bottleneck.
We're all gonna spend our twilight years being cared for almost exclusively by people who speak English with a heavy accent. The ball's been rolling that way for some time and it's got enough momentum that making anything else happen will take many decades.
For all this talk about "importing" human beings, why not "export" them instead? As in sending the patients abroad to be treated. Or is it wrong to uproot them to save some money?
It's like a health care ponzi scheme, what happens when the imports get old? The solution again is more imports. What about the source countries, did they not need medical professionals?
Same thing that happens to most who aren't doing pretty damn financially well in the US, I guess? All their savings gets siphoned into the system, then they die younger than they might have, and less comfortably than they should, unless family takes very good care of them? Then debt collectors try to trick anyone connected to them into paying for medical & other debts they aren't responsible for? The usual.
Anyway, worker visas don't have to be a path to citizenship, so this may fall, for better or worse, under "not our problem", depending on how it's all structured.
Which visa is that for the US? The ones I looked at are dual intent. I'm more familiar with the UK (NHS) where imports are expected to stay. I'm also pretty sure that the dual intent is part of the ability to pay under market rates where the immigration potential is a fringe benefit captured by the employer.
Honestly when the current crop of adults from the 'healthy at any size' era get old it's going to be a medical shit show, I'm pretty sure governments will end up resorting to Canadian style MAID for the poor, sick, and old as no-one will have the money for proper care.
Oh yeah, it’s gonna be real bad when the “our ‘thin’ people would have been considered fairly chubby 40 years ago” millennial generation (mine) gets old.
Science might be about to rescue us from that with Ozempic and friends, assuming those don’t turn out to do horrific things to a person over time. Once some of those go generic and the prices plummet, anyway. But failing that, yeah, it’s gonna be a lot of skinny immigrants helping obese, diabetic 70-year-olds with shot knees & backs get to the bathroom. Or maybe we’ll get robots for that, by then, go full Wall-E, who knows.
Yeah it’s the millennials I’m currently worried about, they’re also quite relatively poor so I suspect not many will be able to afford to retire let alone a high level of medical care.
I’m actually quite hopeful that ozempic mainly works by helping reverses hormonal damage caused by bad diets. Ozempic causes low gut motility which can be very unpleasant and potentially dangerous, there are already conditions with the same effects so it’s possible to benchmark what long term effects will be like (It’s not great). I think there are safe ways to do it and that will be figured out. I think it has already changed the culture for the better. I’m hopeful this high BMI era turns out to just be a phase instead of a one way ratchet. Where I live there are few overweight people so it’s always a bit of a shock to me whenever I travel.
I know that if you have a PhD it's way easier to get permanent immigration status than it is with a MS or BS.
I'd be surprised if the same weren't true for MDs.
Edit: it's an O-1 visa. To get one you need to show "special skills" in your area. For an academic (and I presume for physicians) that would be things like good research publications and so on. You have to be above the norm in some way.
The advantage of this visa class is apparently that it feeds directly into the green card system.
All of society has that Ponzi scheme dynamic, due to the declining utility of a human being as they age, and the extended time that they remain a net loss as technology allows them to live longer.
My current two doctors appear to be native speakers of English, but the previous four or five were all clearly from the Subcontinent or East Asia.
Note that I'm not criticizing them in any way... they were all perfectly fine doctors. I'm just wondering where OP is from that there aren't tons of imported doctors on staff.
Not can’t at all but the licensing hurdles can be really difficult if they didn’t go to med school in the US, as I understand it. Even from other countries that are clearly pretty good at educating & licensing doctors.
In Canada, the “brain drain” of Canadian-trained doctors to the US is very well known. It’s comparatively easy for Canadian doctors to start practicing in the US (much easier than the opposite).
Candidates can promise many things, but they won't pass laws to ban outsourcing. Even if they do, they dilute it to an extent that these laws become impotent by creative loopholes.
As much as I would like labor laws to be improved Globally, I doubt governments will allow this.
That said, I am dying to see some country try something similar again. There is something beautiful when voters hold politicians up to their values, and politicans fail to explain the competitive realities to their voters.
Making outsourcing economically unviable is a magnicificent contender.
I don’t think outsourcing is the main problem with the American healthcare system. I encourage you to go a bit deeper and to not give your vote on a single bit of info. Try to expand to 1Kb.
I'm pretty sure there's something in HIPAA or SOC 2 that ought to be preventing people outside the US from having any access at all to US patient data, but Humana likely has more lawyers who know these things than I do....
Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
> we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook
I'm surprised to hear that! I was under the impression that often when people are fired, they get little to nothing, except perhaps a token payment in exchange for some agreement to waiving rights to pursue litigation, or a non-disparagement agreement.
PIP is a performance improvement plan, whereby they come up with documentation required to dismiss a person without running afoul of affirmative action and other wrongful termination suits.
Firing for cause is something else. Like, stealing from the company. Or punching a coworker, disclosing trade secrets to the press, failing a cocaine drug test, or deliberately violating workplace conduct rules. Poor performance is not a cause, and failing a PIP does not lead to firing for cause.
People really overestimate the scope of “wrongful termination” in the US where almost every state says you can fire someone for almost any reason or no reason as long as it isn’t a protected class.
And did you read my write up about how PIPs work at Amazon?
You’re heavily incentivized to press “Leave Amazon” button when they send you the link.
The chance of making it through a PIP is almost 0 - I read some of the internal Slack channels and I know from my own experience.
Nothing you've said in this comment contradicts my opinion that firing for cause is different than PIP. Not even the fact that PIPs are not designed to be survived. Or that you will be fired after failing one.
At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having to scrape by on $250K/yr...
OP: I was told the final date of my employment would be Dec 31st (turns out that date was made up). I asked to be let go in Oct with severance but it wasn’t approved. I’ve been checking messages and reviewing requests but not taking on any new work.
He explains in the post. "Our number one priority is to find another job." I believe it's implied "within the company."
This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles."
Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
This is actually funny in that it reminds me of a Big Dumb Bank that I worked for post-GFC that was so screwed they were in endless cut mode. One year they basically ran out of money to severance people out by Q3. How the accounting magic of this works is beyond me, but they continued to employ these people instead of laying them off.
There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3.
Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done.
It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
Amazon was never at "peak". They paid second lowest after Amazon, they never really did anything huge in terms of tech.
The stuff they are getting rid of now are things that they had money to spend on previously, but now don't. AWS is still raking in massive profit margins and the leader, retail is the largest source of revenue, and none of that is going away any time soon.
> I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else.
When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
I work in the core of AWS. Sure, we've lost head count, but I wouldn't expect more outages, at least in the core EC2/VPC space. All the really tenured folks we absolutely need are here in my and adjacent orgs--they're getting promotions, in fact. Really, what the loss in head count changes is what our teams can work on. Less new exciting stuff we can resource--just focus on security, ops, bug fixes, etc. Also, maybe more leverage for the engineers that are still here? :)
It would be nice if AWS finally stated that we can only count on EC2, but that Fargate and Cloudwatch are not supported any more and could be subject to outages.
> There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.
“The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience. The word comes from Latin decem, meaning "ten." Decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.”
> Pipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized. All components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team. It turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart.
I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?
Assuming that AWS (or any tech company) was/is better due to engineering doesn't align with reality.
The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities of their SaaS offering.
why silent sacking doesn't include severance package?! do you mean forcing people to quit which doesn't include severance. If there is no work, can't you start working elsewhere (or at least a side consulting job) until they fire and give severance?
Probably yes, but also probably the person who would check for this kind of thing was probably let go already :P
You can “help” your friend who is bootstrapping his startup. You can even book a room in the office and meet with your friend there. As long as you are available for work in the office, it can count as “training”. Just don’t be blatant about it. Like, reserve rooms on a different floor every day. Or I imagine that is how it would be done, I definitely didn’t do this when I was benched on this big company for months.
I think they mean making people's lives miserable enough that they quit. Presumably they can live with whatever Amazon throws at them, and keep taking a paycheck until fired.
> making people's lives miserable enough that they quit.
I am genuinely at awe at how out of touch people seem to be. We're talking about software engineers given nothing to do and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars...
Yes this is not ideal but let's not act that they're torturing these people or forcing them to clean bathrooms or something.
You seem to be unaware of the mental and physical health toll these environments can take on people. Make money but become a burnt out, desiccated shell of a person.
Pretty sure Amazon's employment agreement / policies forbid moonlighting without manager approval. Which you're very unlikely to get if they're trying to move you out.
It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year after year after year that they work in a shit engineering culture. No, nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter. The company was always like thus. If you are feeling the heat now it just means that your org is the latest to find itself in the line of fire.
And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue. There is a reason the company has among the lowest average tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.
It is true now, and has always been true, that parts of the company are healthy places to work and parts are not. Despite the 'all bad' narrative you see around here. Not to defend Amazon, I mean, they ought to just get it to all be good and of course they won't. But it's annoying having to argue about this all the time instead of everyone just understanding that it's a mixed bag and which org you end up in counts for everything.
Maybe this is true for many parts of Amazon culture, but the big factor recently is that the RTO mandate is company-wide. With very few exceptions, it doesn't matter what org you're in, RTO affects you, and can have a drastic change on the entire company's culture.
And it's also annoying to argue that "it's a mixed bag" is not an excuse for Amazon being in general or on average a huge step worse in terms of work life balance and pleasantness. You are much more likely to end up in a more excruciating role than the average software co.
I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and getting to see the sun.
Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
Oh, Amazon absolutely is cut throat and ruthless. But always within the law, never caught cheating. And it moves incredible fast at incredible scale, so you learn more in a year there than you do in 5 elsewhere.
Some people are repulsed by that, others drawn to it and some thrive under these conditions. Heck, I really enjoy my life and job after Amazon. And still I miss the speed, the fast feedback on decisions and actions, the laser focused pursuit of a common goal, ruthlessly focused on efficiency, risk and details. Thought about going back there myself, lucky I didn't. Propably wouod have been equally lucky if I did.
amazon seems to be the place where the worst leaders i've experienced who have been forced out of the organizations i've been a part of all inevitably wind up. based on this, i don't think i'd ever like to work there.
Usually, people quality follows a normally distributed curve at any place I worked that had enougj peoole in each grouo to make it mathematically work. Amazon transfromed tgat, IMHO, into a bathtub curve, really great (and ruthless, driven, qualified) folks at the top end, then nothing, finally those only checking one of the above mentioned boxes and offsetting the others with excelling at politics. S I said, a peculiar place.
Something else I learned the very hard way: what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective.
That being said, realizing Amazon is not a place for you before joining is the best thing you can do. I have seen my fair share of people that realized after being hired, and for them the place was hell. Careerwise, and I explicity talk about white collar folks, Amazon had no negative impact on them. But going through personell hell 50+ hours a week for months until ypu found something else or you are let go during probation is torture. I know, I had the same thing after Amazon once, it sucks and drains you dry.
> what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective.
for myself, and the organizations i worked for, it was about results. these leaders swooped in from other prestigeous organizations, introduced toxic politics to completely disrupt existing cultures and working processes, and in the end, for all that drama, they never delivered
The worst manager I’ve ever worked with had an Amazon background. Still remember how he was hyped up before starting as an amazing senior engineering manager that’s gonna bring some grown up experience (him being in his 40s, most of the team 20s/30s) to the team.
The pettiness, backstabbing, political games and kingdom building that ensued was a nightmare. I don’t think the team recovered even after he was eventually fired about a year later.
It’s hard to consider hiring any manager coming from Amazon after that disaster.
In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.
My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are good or great.
Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach.
Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university.
And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo.
Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.
Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.
I quit and went back. "Boomerangs" are extremely common. The golden handcuffs are hard to shed. Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.
> Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.
yep, working at Amazon (AWS specifically) is like playing for the 2000/10s Patriots. Belicheck will work you to the bone and indoctrinate you into the AWS Leadership Princip... er, I mean the "Patriot Way", and your SVP Tom Brady will chew you out in the "correction of error" process. But if you want to be at a place where people want to win at all costs--with all of the pros and cons that entails--there's no better place to be.
Amazon hate comes from people who don't see a problem with getting the Washington Commanders giving you a $100 million contract to put in the bare minimum effort. To some people that's a dream deal, but not for everyone. To each their own.
Given the average tenure of an NFL player is relatively short, wouldn't it make more sense to go for what would offer the highest reward with lowest CTE risk?
A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars. Washington doesn't even have income tax.
That's what I mean, it depends on what the "highest reward" means for each person. $100m is $100m, but what's Tom Brady remembered for, and what's Albert Haynesworth remembered for? One is near-unanimously considered the greatest of all time, and the other is known for being one of the worst free agent acquisitions of all time. They both have more money than they know what to do with, but one probably feels a bit better about his career.
This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine too! There's room on the planet for both types of companies, thankfully.
That average is dragged down by certain positions and also the great number of practice squad players that get pulled up for a game or two. I think to the "average" "good" nfl player, 20 vs 30 million lifetime doesn't make as much difference as being a champion. Probably a great many players would trade some lifetime earnings for a ring. I imagine most nfl players also don't manage their own money, so they are even more inured to the idea of making a couple million more over 3 or 4 years.
Looking at the author's resume, they've only been at AWS since 2020. It's unlikely they have a very good understanding of how the culture has changed over time.
It’s true, I’ve only been here since COVID and from what I understand 2020-2021 were exceptionally good years. Lots of growth, fully remote, and plenty of new people and ideas.
Well, another option is it’s true and it’s monotonically getting worse. From my time at aws, it appears to be that’s the case. It was better X years ago, and it will be worse at X+n years for all values of n and X.
Same at Google - was there from 2016 to 2023. And i strongly believe everyone at BigCo underwent a step-change in 2023.
I do give the VP in TFA some credit for trying to give shelter and time. Google went rancid, you'd go to work one morning, get an unannounced event on your calendar, and be informed as a group you were locked out of everything except the internal job posting site and had 8 weeks to find a job. Meanwhile everyone had negative headcount. I've heard at least two dozen stories like that personally.
Another effect is best communicated by a quote: "there's a fuck you got mine attitude." The internal peer support group i was a location lead for was overwhelmed by people with just bonkers stories of aggression and antisocial behavior from middle management punching down. I heard so many stories that wouldn't have gone down at even the strangest and most inexperienced startups I worked at. (Hiring friends with 0 experience, outright lying, pushing out people)
The bullwhip effect of management not really needing to learn to capital-M manage and now being asked to really exposed a lot of issues. Breaks my heart. (I left because of this)
It is true. Amazon was always brutal, but two-pizza team six-pager culture was a great place to rule in hell as opposed to serving in Heaven as a generalist at Google. Two-pizza team six-pager culture died sometime during the last decade. At a guess, when they imported so many AI academics and they brought all the toxic worst practices of academia to bear on it.
The Applied Scientist title at Amazon is the single worst thing they ever created: 15% higher comp and stock if any L10 or up decides you are one, a 100% political position that set everyone against each other just like separating the bonus for the success of Google+ from the rest of Google did in 2011 (was there for that idiocy myself).
I've been working there for 6 years and the scale at which layoffs have been happening since 2022 is unparalleled to what has happened in the past.
There may have been some rare team closures here and there before, but people could easily join another team and it was a rare event anyway.
Now, since 2022 it has been massive team shutdowns with hundreds of people laid off every time, while there is a hiring freeze in the whole company. And this will continue in 2024.
Amazon always had a cutthroat culture but at least if you were good (aka not PIPed) you knew you'd fine another team and weren't worried about not having a job the next day. This is not the case anymore.
Google has been doing the same thing. The fact is that these companies simply have too many employees and they aren't able to properly utilize everyone.
Even more funny to see a Developer still employed at Amazon publicly bashing his Company and Manager on a public blog. The Next one-on-one will be embarrassiiiiiing...
It's not his manager, VP might as well be on the moon. They're people who were in early enough or have enough experience to have their job be arguing about other creatures of their species re: things like headcount.
That's why blogs completely fine blasting him, the whole overarching point is the VP's sociopathic nonsense (firing-not-firing-but-you-better-get-a-job is so VP can keep headcount) is in the way of OP's goal. (getting on paper "you're fired" so he can get severance). The more awkward the next 1:1 is with the VP (which will never happen, people are by and large cowards), the more likely it is reality has asserted itself and the VP can't keep lying to his employees to avoid getting in trouble with HR.
I hate to say this, but I genuinely think customers are going to find AWS become more unreliable as time goes on.
It seems to me that you can have high levels of reliability, a great working culture and high levels of staffing, but if you mess with any one of these elements you will find the wheels start falling off the train.
It’s already happening… it’s a total mess of weird microservices that make no sense to reason about and the hidden costs on things like free tier etc… not good
I think I may disagree about the causes. Amazon A/B tests just about everything, the implication being hidden costs would have been found in A/B testing to net increase revenue. That is just profit motive and business ethics coming into play.
The scattering of weird microservices I think is the same reason the Amazon detail & home page never get a full ground-up update. It's hard to do large scale data experiments to demonstrate the benefit, and it's too many teams with too much at stake (too many cooks)
My fault for a milquetoast response. I disagree. My thoughts are informed here by insider experience at Amazon. I believe I observed these problems over a decade ago (hidden fees, high attrition, poor culture, scattered & non-consolidated service offerings). EG: There were a number of places that could have had a better customer experience, but A/B testing showed there was more money to be made than customers lost. Second example, seeing what was required to get 2 to 4 teams to cooperate was impressive.. The detail and home page touches the bread and butter for entire orgs, thousands of people, ramifications for dozens of teams and then dozens of backend teams behind them.
I believe it was an Amazon VP that I was talking who pointed out that the homepage and detail page had not changed very much over time at all (lots of evolution, but never revolution, never fully redone, never will be fully redone).
This was pertinent because we were in an org that ran offshoot sites, similar in a lot of ways, but less hands in the pot & we did have liberty to do a full rewrite of our detail pages & homepages. In the conversation, the VP of that org was highlighting that flexibility and went into small detail why that was not the case for the big mother-ship retail pages.
AWS does have differences for sure - but the "everything is only decided based on numbers unless you are Jeff Bezos" is universally true.
Being that rigorous about data-driven-decisions is really quite powerful. The S-team are 1000% of this mind-set. I'm paraphrasing, the saying at Amazon that they tell new recruits and pride themselves over is that there are only three correct answers: "(1) Yes, and here is the data why. (2) No, and here is the data why. (3) I don't know, and I'll have the data shortly"
A priori, data-driven decision making is very powerful. One nice thing about working with former Amazon engineers, is they do bring that mindset. No premature optimization, no belief in facts without data. I think when you get burned a few many times to realize you believe things that are wrong and data shows you to be wrong, you tend to think more about why you know things and what data you have. It's powerful.
By way of clarification, I rarely observed the same feature being shipped twice. It's generally more the 'A' test was the existing functionality and 'B' was whatever change you wanted to make.
The A/B testing platform at Amazon received a lot of investment - it's powerful and so it's used for a lot more than mere A/B testing. It's also a feature toggle platform, lots of things are shipped under that framework so they can be "turned on & off". The metrics collection was powerful and highly integrated. Even if there is no actual comparison in parallel, the metrics that are generated were worth a lot (and often needed, as everyone's goals are all data based, so you want data to show you are hitting those goals. Can't just say we launched 5 features, and can't say we are just still here, it's data or nothing at Amazon)
Most importantly, the "great decisions" is interesting. The power of gathering data very quickly and often is you see when decisions were not great. Amazon was excellent at this, things that made more money were given support, things that lost money were quickly terminated and re-organized. The data provides light on the decisions, it's virtually a BizDev super-power to be able to pivot away from losers so quickly like that.
In a way actually! The things that are hard to A/B test get neglected. If you need A/B testing (ie: data) to make any decision, then places where data is purely qualitative - there will be no data to be had and therefore no decision can be made.
The Expedia example really comes to mind too of micro-optimizations and everyone working towards their own org's goal can all make sense individually, but really fail when taken as a whole: https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/upstream-thinking-saved-exped...
Expedia had an example of this:
- the sales team wanted sales
- the phone support team wanted to turn over calls quickly
-
If there were a way to measure confusion, it would be improved and
Can I A/B test whether there will be a 10% increase in sales if I lower prices on Ec2 instances by 5% - YES! Can I A/B test that the presence of 30 service options is the tipping point of spending 1 hour to get something done vs wanting to hire an "AWS"
I think this is true of any company. As things get larger, red tape increases, and the mess of spaghetti code and complexity/inter-dependencies of systems means it gets harder and harder for any one person or team to fully understand the environment and avoid/recover from issues.
I actually think that the "pizza team" model in Amazon can help mitigate this, as each individual team operates as its own entity that is discouraged from relying on other teams for uptime... but this is only effective to a point.
As the article points out, this is a very expensive way of operating and requires very high headcount. They don’t want mass layoffs because of the cost of doing so, thus they employ the unethical tactic of making life miserable for the ones they would have tried to lay off.
What it also means is that they can use younger and cheaper workers. They can also outsource their work. Thus my concerns about reliability.
It seems like a house of cards. I truly wonder for how long they can keep this up. Given our reliance on cloud computing and their prominent position within it, it may become a very rocky ride at some point for businesses who have transitioned their operational infrastructure to AWS. I think a lot of people treat AWS as an infinite resource that will never run out and will be completely reliable forever. I think, sadly, many organisations may get a shock some time into the near future.
Here is maybe an uncomfortable truth for software engineers: it’s more efficient from a cost perspective to just something out there that is good enough, even if it makes no logical sense and is a mess.
Maintainability and readability are best solved through brute force hiring instead of better practices.
Do you really think that engineers must commit code on a weekly basis to prevent infrastructure from crashing down because of some sort of "decay" that happens in the software naturally?
Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last several years to now not allowing it.
Company culture can change over time but that does not mean it will change for the better over time. The problems I mentioned - cutthroat culture, stack ranking, PIPs, forced cuts, high attrition - have all been a thing at Amazon for at least the last 15 years.
I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in context of this article. The article doesn't mention most of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.
The mass layoffs were 1.7% of the company, and the author himself says they didn't have much of an impact. It's no different than what every other big tech company did, and their numbers were a lot worse. The rest of what he talks about ("Making them miserable and silently sacking them.") is what I'm referencing. RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift. Amazon has never been an employee friendly company. Forcing people to quit when a department's salary gets too much or when they are nearing their 3rd or 4th year vesting periods is basically part of the manager handbook over there.
From personal experience: yes. But I don't really see what that has to do with anything, because even just looking at during the pandemic (remote work culture) to now (in-office culture) is a demonstrably different culture, so I still have no idea what you're arguing.
Culture is how people in the organisation think about work. Are they desperate to take credit? (Individual or team) Assign blame? (Individual or team) Overwork? Do they care about developing the employees' skills? Is the pay fair, are increases given to retain talent?
Amazon's long had a culture of high pay, work people very hard, accept the high churn.
This is just arguing semantics over the word "culture", but I'll bite.
The culture of Amazon during 2019-2022 was that people throughout the organization "thought about work" as something that could be done remotely (yes, even before 2020 there was remote work at Amazon), but required different working styles. There was more focus on employee engagement, encouraging things like taking online training or organizing team meetings that were focused on team connectedness. Teams were less overworked because there were always new people being hired to pick up the extra slack.Pay was constantly increasing, and especially so during the pandemic (Amazon famously removed its salary cap in 2022, and readjusted its entire pay scale to be higher).
Post-pandemic, but pre-layoffs, Amazon encouraged work travel to go and see coworkers in-person. You didn't even need a reason to do so, but book the travel and your expenses would be auto-approved. Expense budgets were large, and planning team events or happy hours were encouraged. Pay increases continued. Rapid hiring and team growth only got more rapid.
After layoffs happened, that all changed. Work travel began to be actively disallowed, pay increases slowed (or stopped). Team training became restricted unless it was free (and even then, only a certain amount of days were allowed). Hiring slowed to a crawl, so teams were more overworked, and overall mindset was more negative because you knew no help was coming.
All of the things I'm describing are vast culture changes that I personally saw happen between 2019-2022. You can go ahead and call these "policies", but policies are an important factor that shapes culture.
If there was a cloud equivalent to the iPhone I feel like I would have heard about it. It could have been Kubernetes, but it hasn’t been.
Maybe it’s them being behind on GenAI. Of course all of the OpenAI competition is trained on commodity cloud services that are basically lift and ship to any cloud with GPU capacity - so Amazon is at worst in the middle of the pack.
This is a really ignorant comment. Of course this number one because the big money gets in early and gets out early. All the suckers are left behind. Financial capitalism doesn’t care about companies, It cares about profit.
People don't appreciate what a total mindfuck it is to go through this.
- You aren't told you're being targeted to be managed out when it starts. Managers often do not tell you that you're beginning phase 1 of getting managed out, whatever it's called.
- You've always known this could happen to you or anyone else, so you are always guessing if that email from your boss is just a normal email or was it the beginning of a paper trail? You sense something different, but is that just in your head?
- You might think you'd realize you're being managed out, reading the room, but that assumes there's a rational foreseeable reason to PIP you. Often there is not. Management gets PIP targets and someone has to get PIPed. It can be you for political reasons above your head that you are oblivious to.
- You are subtlely being setup to fail, and even if you don't explicitly fail, finding a reason to frame your performance as deficient is always possible.
- There is always something you could have done better, and nothing ever goes 100% perfectly. Those things will be magnified 100x. Are they being over magnified? Or were you delusional to minimize them?
- To be on the receiving end of this is totally disorienting. It's basically gas lighting. Suddenly everything you do is somehow deficient in some way, even when you thought you were doing well. How could you have not realized this? Is this proof you can't trust your own judgment? That you're incompetent?
- Your paper trails are useless. You can always be criticized for subjective reasons, like your style of communication, some 20/20 hindsight way you arguably could have done things even better, you're "not showing enough leadership", yes you're doing your core job but at your level we also expect XYZ, etc.
- This can go on for months, working 60-80 hour weeks, on little sleep, with constant stress. You start to question your ability to assess reality. What else are you missing if you didnt realize you were screwing up so badly? Are you doing this outside of work too?
- You think, wait, this has never happened to me before, but maybe it was just luck until now. Was imposter syndrome not a syndrome this whole time? Was I actually an imposter and this is what it feels like to be found out?
At the end of this gas lighting psychological manipulation marathon, you have a hard time knowing up from down and you're fired.
Who do you talk to about this to get your bearings back? You are ashamed this happened, and yet you're also not because bullshit PIPing is famous. It's not your fault. Or is it? Anyway you probably should find a way to process this right? Or maybe it's best to shove it deep into your subconscious and move on.
Isn't this what therapists are for? Sure, go explain that your mind is vaguely screwed up from getting fired from a $300k/year job for...reasons? Did you screw up? Well no, but technically yes, but in reality no? Maybe? How the hell do you even articulate this without sounding like an incoherent spoiled brat?
Your entire post is simply countered with one statement:
$175k/year starting salary for new grads, which is INSANE. Keep in mind that for the first year, at Amazon, you also get this in cash.
If you took a young, competent, blue collar worker that makes $65k a year with honest work, and said, hey would you like to do your job at 3 times the salary, but there may be some stressful weeks, and you may have to deal with some managerial bullshit that may get you laid off, he would be head over heels excited. He would take the job, save every extra penny he could get, ride it out for as long as he can, and if shit got too rough, he would just walk away with a nice downpayment for a house and a smile on his face.
But modern software engineers seem to think that they not only MUST make that money, but continue making it, all for being able to write some extremely simple OOP code, pass some leetcode questions that one can memorize, and know the difference between relational and non relational database.
Bottom line is, if you can't manage your money/expenses to the point where you have enough runway to walk away at your job at any time because of stress, or you can't figure out what is going on with your role and manager and be able to navigate around that, then you simply don't deserve these high salaries. Plenty of lower paying jobs around.
Never talk about the psychological toll any job takes on you, because there are people in worse circumstances somewhere, and everyone should always be able to foresee and "navigate" contrived reasons for deficient performance.
First, you conveniently ignore COL which matters a lot. Doesn't matter how much money you make if you spend most of it on rent and food.
Second, I don't think you really appreciate the cognitive toll software engineering takes on you. It's not simple OOP and leetcode that is complicated. It's understanding and enhancing legacy code, it's dealing with unrealistic expectations, it's having to continuously pretend that the emperor has clothes and brag about bullshit things like productivity.
Third, I am going to let you in on a secret: if blue collar workers could do what sw engineers do they would go for it. Who wouldn't want to be paid more? Writing code is hard. Try explaining basic shit to someone who is not a software developer and let me know how it goes.
>First, you conveniently ignore COL which matters a lot. Doesn't matter how much money you make if you spend most of it on rent and food.
In every single place, there are people that live stably at much lower salaries than what SDEs make. Nobody is entitled to a nice high rise 2 bedroom apt for themselves and eating out all the time. My first software job I made 80k a year in Northern Virginia which has a very high COL including state income tax, and still managed to have enough money left over for some recreation as well as a safety net.
>Second, I don't think you really appreciate the cognitive toll software engineering takes on you. It's not simple OOP and leetcode that is complicated. It's understanding and enhancing legacy code, it's dealing with unrealistic expectations, it's having to continuously pretend that the emperor has clothes and brag about bullshit things like productivity.
I absolutely do. My point is that if you are stressed, quit. Simple as that. And again, if you can't quit because you spend too much money or don't want to quit because you don't want to give up that lifestyle, then don't complain. There are people who have more stressfull jobs that make half as much and don't have the luxury to just quit.
>if blue collar workers could do what sw engineers do they would go for it.
Completely missed the point.
For the actual work that majority of CS people do, especially new grads, it is not that hard. There are plenty of lower paying CS jobs compared to FAANG where the bar to get in may be much lower, but you pretty much do the same basic tasks day to day. The reason FAANG pays that much is because they have (or realistically had) the funds to recruit talent en masse in expectation that statistically something profitable would come out of it, whereas other smaller companies that are ran much more conservatively tend to pay closer to market value.
If FAANG jobs came with a explicit disclaimer on which every single new hire had to sign off: "Hey, we are going to pay you way more above market rate, but you accept the risk of being overworked, potentially being piped out due to quota, and layoffs in cases of economic recession", I don't think people would be complaining about mental health in regards to jobs. But people shouldn't need that disclaimer to understand this.
You can't just make generalizing statements like solely off your anti-capitalist sentiment. The only argument that you can somewhat make in regards to working conditions in us is poor pay/COL and benefits for those making median or below wages (which software engineers are not a part of).
Software engineers have comparatively VERY cushy lives if you go by any real metric. I understand that some people find the job hard, but again, they are compensated well for it. Asking 175k/year and also your job being easy is entitlement to its core.
You claim that I cannot make generalizations based solely on "sentiment" and you go ahead and do yoyr own generalizations.
Back on Earth, if there is a reduced set a people that can do a job and the demand for that job greatly outweighs the supply, the wages will grow. It's economics 101. It applies in the US, it applies everywhere (look it up, software engineers are paid better no matter what the geography).
Fundamentally we disagree on the job being easy part. It is not easy. We are paying for the "cushy" living with our mental health.
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.