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>After 2 day delivery became 5 day delivery

Where do you live? I hear this repeated on HN a lot, but every person I know IRL doesn't have this problem (ie family spread across multiple states). Hell, in the last ~2 years, other than high-demand stuff in the pandemic like Clorox wipes, most of my orders have been _next_ day delivery, nevermind 5 days.


Amazon Basics are cheap and low quality, but they're at least curated. Amazon doesn't just slap their brand on any random shit, so you at least know that your phone charger will meet safety standards, for example.

I don't often intentionally look for cheap, low quality stuff to buy, but when I do, I'd buy an Amazon Basics item over a UEVYUF (or another <insert fake dropshipping brand here>) item every time.


>back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace.

Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.


Despite the impression that Amazon is a hellplace, it remains one of the most desired places in the world for software engineers to work, so being "worse than Amazon" isn't saying much.

Walmart's tech side of things is very highly regarded both for the work, as well for the pay. They pay $200-300k for people from 5-10/yrs experience, which despite being below FAANG level, still puts it squarely among the top paying companies for software development.


> it remains one of the most desired places in the world for software engineers to work

The word desired here feels weird to me. I just wouldn’t describe it as people desiring to work there. People desire to work at Apple. People desire to work at Meta even.

Amazon to me seems kinda like a pit stop FAANG wise? Maybe it’s the PIP culture there that taints my view


They are also a great place to cut your teeth on the FAANG type problems because, as it turns out, they face similar scale issues.

There's a lot of "second tier" tech companies that have some really cool problems at massive scales that also pay really well. Not as obviously sexy as FAANGs though.


Nobody said anything about waterfall. A good agile process can and should have all of the things the parent commenter listed. If you eschew those things by using the "well we're agile, that means we don't plan ahead!" excuse, that's a sign of incompetence.


> A good agile process can and should have all of the things the parent commenter listed.

A good agile process will not have an ironclad upfront definition of what is to be delivered in a large project. A process with that may not be waterfall, but it's definitely non-Agile Big Upfront Design.

OTOH, Agile is largely about managing risk and incrementally delivering value without overcommitting forward, so the contracting process with Agile should reflect that and shouldn't commit to a giant project in a lump contract.


>A good agile process will not have an ironclad upfront definition of what is to be delivered in a large project.

"what is to be delivered" does not have to be a rigid definition of "5,000 lines of code program with features 1, 2, and 3". A good agile contract will allow the possibility for changing project requirements but also still define how those changing requirements affect expectations and responsibilities of the consulting company.

The agile process itself can actually be a deliverable that you define in a contract, and it should spell out, for example, how new requirements are prioritized and the criteria you use for determining if it's something that the consulting company is responsible for. In my experience if you can't write out your agile requirements in a contract, then you don't have a good enough internal understanding of your own agile processes and should probably work on that, too.

Far too many people use "we're Agile" as an excuse for "we don't plan or document anything" and extend that to contracts, but that's absolutely not what good Agile actually is.


It's implicit. Not only software needs iteration.

Design documents also need iteration, because there's always something that was overlook, something that just escaped common sense, and so on.

In other words: Code can have bugs. Design documents also can have bugs, and the latter are almost never fixed.

Why is that? Because fixing a design document involves negotiations and changing budgets.


Some numbers to put this into perspective:

A $500 bonus for one month of full time 40/hr/week work comes out to ~$3.20/hr "raise" for the month of June. Amazon minimum pay is $15/hr, so this bonus is effectively a ~20% raise for one month.

Amazon Q1 profits were $2.5 billion, or ~$620 million averaged per month. Spending $500 million on this bonus is ~80% of "monthly" profits.

This is a situation where I suppose I do have to give props to Amazon for giving a bonus that's well above the status quo (a 20% raise and spending 80% of profits on pay raises is nothing to sneeze at), but at the same time, $500 still seems paltry.


An NDA is practically unenforceable in this situation, which is the entire point a noncompete is a thing. Who is going to snitch on them for revealing AWS secrets to Google and violating the NDA? Another Google exec?


don't need a snitch. they can just assume that it happens and sue anyways. the difficult part is coming up with proof that it actually happened


So you think it's a good idea to take legal action against someone with no proof and hope it just materializes over time?

I mean, I can sue you for stealing US nuclear secrets. Now if only I had some evidence...


> I mean, I can sue you for stealing US nuclear secrets. Now if only I had some evidence...

#1 - No you can't, because only government officials can prosecute "crimes", as opposed to civil causes of action. (I think this distinction is stupid; it is not part of anyone's view of the world and it doesn't have any useful effects. But it will definitely stop you from prosecuting someone for espionage.)

#2 - No, you can't, because you don't suffer any injury if em-bee steals US nuclear secrets.


> So you think it's a good idea to take legal action against someone with no proof and hope it just materializes over time?

Fishing expeditions are common and sometimes...legendary cough SCO-Linux dispute


i am not saying that doing that is always a good idea, but we are talking about amazon vs google, to competitors who have more resources than sense, so yes, absolutely.


They aren’t suing someone random. Google would surely back the legal fees for the person if Google themselves aren’t somehow sued. What would be the point of this then?


of course not random, but the person switching jobs.

clearly (from amazon's perspective) you can't switch to google without revealing secrets and violating your NDA, therefore we sue you.


> An NDA is practically unenforceable in this situation

As we shall see, the non-compete is also unenforceable in this situation, it just costs more to show that it's not. Non-competes are for the "small" people.

The bigger question is, why are you carrying water for them? Enforceability of this BS is not in your interest unless you're a major shareholder, and even then non-competes are ethically dubious at best. If what's in his head is so valuable (which I'm almost certain it's not), Amazon should offer to pay him his previous comp for the duration of his non-compete, at the very least, so that he sits it out for a year. What are his options? To not ever work anywhere else again? To radically switch careers upon departure?


Agreed. I'm generally uncomfortable with noncompetes and especially with Amazon's practice of making every employee sign one. Unless it's a really special case where a team is working on something truly groundbreaking and secret, I don't see what Amazon is really afraid of if some random developer leaves and goes to a competitor.

However, I do have to say that their argument as stated in this article does seem like a valid case for a noncompete. From the article:

>“Virtually every day, Hall worked with Amazon’s most senior cloud executives to create and execute those plans. As a result, he was entrusted with an unusually broad view into Amazon’s cloud product plans; its priorities; and its competitive strategy.”


I'd be OK with non-competes if the departing company had to pay 150% of salary during the non-compete duration if they elected to invoke the non-compete.

In contract law, this is known as "consideration". California has decided that "sign this or you won't get hired", isn't a valid form of consideration because it inhibits future earning potential, it's not (normally) mutually negotiated, nor is it negotiated on equal terms.

If companies really want it, they should pay for it.

Alternatively, if Amazon wanted to protect its market strategy, it should have made sure there was no ambiguity in this term. For example, if they had a narrow non-compete that says, you can't do cloud marketing or marketing strategy for Microsoft, IBM, or Google, it would hold much more standing because it's not overly broad.

As its written, where could he have gone and known for sure that that business wasn't a competitor? You can argue nearly every business is a competitor of Amazon. That's what makes it invalid.


I think cases like this can largely be dealt with by allowing non-competes, but only as long compensation continues. Without that the power imbalances are just too extreme.

EDIT: rephrased to make clear I wasn't just referring to base salary.


A large part of compensation is probably not in base salary, that'd be asking for like a 50% compensation cut.


Even just base salary, if that's not something they'll stop paying the second you land a job somewhere else that could be completely reasonable. That'd be an extra 50% on top of whatever other job just to avoid direct competitors for the next year or so. I'd take that deal, and not just because an offer was contingent on it.


I was assuming the person meant what you take home. Not just base salary.


Correct. Edited comment to clarify.

I think there's some possibly quibbling around the edges around what exact would be included, or not. E.g. a rule that bonus / commissions don't have to be included, as long as that doesn't lead to < 75% of previous year's comp would still be ok with me.


>I don't see what Amazon is really afraid of if some random developer leaves and goes to a competitor

I don't see what's not to see. Preventing someone from going to a competitor is generally not so much the goal as the means of discouraging someone from leaving at all.


If that stuff is so important and unique, why don't they just patent it? Didn't they get a one-click purchase button patented?


Because you can't patent "product plans, priorities, and competitive strategy", yet it is still extremely valuable.


If you’re working on something truely secret, you don’t need a non-compete. Corporate secrets are a thing.


I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to have caused him undue stress.

I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation. I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you get to keep the other $10k.


I'm surprised at how many people in this thread are misunderstanding this. Every tech company I've seen has had a stipulation saying you have to pay back signing bonus or relocation if you leave within 1 year.


Yea, that's something else I forgot to mention. I chalk it up to OP possibly being inexperienced/naive (I think this was his first job out of college), but I have worked with a lot of companies and all of them require you to pay back at least part of your signing bonus if you quit within a year.

When I graduated college, all of my friend group discussed it and we all took out a small chunk of the bonus to go on a small group vacation, but the rest of the bonus got put into an investment account and not touched for at least a year. That way if we did decide to leave, the money was easily accessible to be paid back. I know not everyone has that flexibility, but it's probably the best way to approach signing bonuses if you're not 100% sure you will be at the company long term.


I can't really comment on your interview experiences except to say: that sucks. I know firsthand (unemployed for a long time and had a really long personal struggle similar to yours) how shitty it can be. The unfortunate reality is that, no matter how much these companies say otherwise, a huge part of hiring comes down to luck. Luck of who you interview with, luck of what mood they are in before beginning the interview, luck of having technical problems, luck of a lot of things. To a certain point, you are in control of how you respond to unlucky, non-ideal situations, but you may still not come out ahead versus someone who didn't get so unlucky. Luck sucks. But one day, you might get lucky too, so keep your head up.

The main thing I want to say to you as this: I work for a FAANG, I know many people that work for FAANGs, and I know many people that have left FAANGs. It is not all it is cracked up to be. I would even venture to say that, in most cases, it isn't worth the hassle. You should not in any way feel like you are setting your sights "lower" by targeting non-FAANG companies, because you absolutely are not.

The FAANG hiring process measures whether or not you pass the FAANG hiring process. That sounds tautological, I know, but it's a not-very-well-kept-secret within my FAANG that the hiring process does not at all measure proficiency for the job, but it's something we keep doing because at this point the process itself is ingrained in the culture. It is not a measurement of how smart you are, how good at programming you are, or even how likable you are. The "hiring bar" is entirely built around whether or not you will be a good worker for that specific team's needs, which are not necessarily the characteristics of "smart, good at programming, likable". Sometimes it could be a specific niche skillset, or how well you will adapt to a weird or chaotic internal culture, or how well you will kiss ass. Sometimes people dumber than you will be hired because it just so happens that they applied at the right time when the company was in dire need of bodies.

I too know how much it sucks when your personal confidence starts to take a hit. It makes it so hard to apply to jobs when you already feel like you will fail before you even hit submit on the applications. But keep in mind all of the things that make you smart and all of the things that got you those FAANG interviews in the first place. If you failed out of FAANG hiring, it just means you aren't good at FAANG hiring. That's it. Period. It does not mean you are not good at your job, or that you are not smart, or that you can't pass hiring at another company. It doesn't even mean that you wouldn't succeed working at FAANG! It only means you didn't succeed at FAANG hiring.

If you really want a FAANG job, then keep at it. You are smart enough to get it, you just have to use those smarts to mold yourself to the very specific way that the FAANG hiring process looks for. If molding yourself in that way isn't something you want to do, that isn't a bad thing, and there are definitely other, just-as-good-if-not-better, companies that will value you.


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