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The New York Times put out a pretty scathing article about Amazon's work practices, which is well worth a read if you work in the Tech sector. It highlights how far a large company can go trying to achieve the highest possible quality and productivity from its employees. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html Couple this with some other recent articles about how badly some famous tech companies treat employees (Tesla) and how competition for tech workers is pretty high, and it brings up an interesting point for discussion. Is what Amazon's doing the new normal for the tech sector? Is it correct to do that? What would be the antithesis of that, and how well does that work? There's been a response from an Amazonian: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu And it's started to go recursive! There's been a response to the response: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ex-amazonians-reply-all-those-amazonian-replies-times-mehal-shah turn it up TURN ME ON fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 16:41
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:03 |
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Kassad posted:It was almost funny, considering the part earlier in the article that talked about Amazon wanting to avoid "office politics". And then they add a system to vote out people like in a reality TV show. Consistent! I thought the same exact thing. Office politics is when people try to cut each other's throats and generally do things that distract from actually getting things done. It seems to me like the anytime feedback tool is pretty much going to guarantee you have an increase in politics. I think Amazon basically just wants to get insanely "engaged" employees through a brute force methodology, right? They hire thousands of people and weed out anyone who isn't willing to dedicate 100% of their life to working there, and they motivate those people... somehow? Do they just pay a shitload more than other companies in the area? Meanwhile, real sustainable engagement is difficult to do. If you ask talented tech people why they stay at a company, you'll find that it's hard to really define.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:57
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Klaus88 posted:Reading articles like this, it amazes me that tech companies don't get firebombed every other week. It's surprised me just how vehemently against unionization tech workers are. Compared to the value a good developer or engineer can bring to the company (literally millions of dollars in some cases) they generally put up with terrible work conditions. Long hours are generally the norm, especially at companies in growth mode. A lot of engineers just see this as normal though, and management has gotten really great at manipulating their sense of worth to encourage long hours. For example, they'll give someone a problem that's intellectually interesting to their field (we need a better search algorithm, this one isn't fast enough!) and watch as they burn away their entire life trying to solve the problem. EDIT: Interesting, I didn't know they had such a bad reputation. I know about 5 of our engineers (from SC) have left to go work for them, so the recruiting efforts make sense. I wonder if they're going to realize they can't just keep doing that eternally? I wonder how much time and money is wasted having to ramp up new developers.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:12
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When I brought up Unionization to my friends, they didn't object to it because they felt like they could achieve more on their own. They mostly objected to it because they didn't feel like they were underpaid or overworked. Meanwhile one of them works most weekends, and another is on call just about every other week.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:46
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:This job posting is infamous in the IT industry: Holy poo poo that's awful. "Yeah we'll work you super hard and you won't have a life at all because you need to be there NOW but we have banned buzzwords." Not for CORPORATE.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:51
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Cicero posted:The experience is pretty variable for devs at Amazon. I worked there for two and a half years and was definitely not overworked, nor did anyone on my team or related teams at Seattle seem to be overworked. Occasionally there'd be some crunch prior to launch, maybe a couple times a year, but an average week I'd work 8 hours a day including lunch. Part of that may have been being a device team (Android stuff) because that means there aren't any servers to constantly manage, if there's a big problem the best you can do is push out a fix with the next patch. Quoting this so it gets attention on this page. This is really interesting, and I wonder how different peoples' experiences will be. It may come down to division by division leadership, I know that a culture is really based on the leader of the organization you report to. Some managers and mid-managers may be really strongly in favor of a work-life balance, since it's the only way to sustain employees with high morale.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:32
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Chrungka posted:Oi, mates! Haven't you heard? Working for Amazon is wonderful. I guess if you're high enough in the food chain. That's an interesting article. It just kind of supports my view that things are very different depending on who is in your management chain. I hear that Microsoft was very much the same way, that some divisions were absolute hell to work for and others were better. It also looks like there's been a response to the responses: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ex-amazonians-reply-all-those-amazonian-replies-times-mehal-shah turn it up TURN ME ON fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 19:48
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Cicero posted:It's definitely team specific, but I think on average developers tend to have it easier than people on the more businessy side, because developers have become very difficult to replace. Amazon does pay quite well*...to start. And then they stiff you on raises as hard as possible if the raise isn't part of a promotion. Every single time I see what leading software companies pay new grads, it makes me want to start drinking. I'm an engineer in a really hard to recruit for field and I make about half that with bonuses. It's insane. I generally justify it by having more vacation than most Europeans get, as well as lucrative benefits and great work-life balance and prospects for advancement (although I don't think I'll get to six figures anytime soon). The response to the response I just read seems to get it right - a lot of the people referenced as having terrible times of it were on the business side of things. A lot of the people I see defending Amazon or reporting good experiences are developers. Since developers are really hard to recruit for and retain, they're going to be catered to.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:24
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Radbot posted:Well considering that "more vacation than most Europeans get" puts you at somewhere between 3x-10x the amount of vacation that Americans take on average (probably more than that when compared to "rockstar" devs), sounds like you're being compensated well, just non-monetarily. Right, which is how I view it. That, and I am encouraged to use all of my vacation. If I were to look for an antithesis of that Amazon experience it might actually be me. Not trying to brag or anything, it's just utterly fascinating to me how differently companies choose to try to retain talent.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:34
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ntan1 posted:You know as well as I do that 120k post salary + signing bonus is pretty low for total compensation for a tech salary at one of the giants, after 1-2 years. I hear that Amazon also tends to skimp on raises, causing people who have been at the company for a long time to receive less in total comp than somebody who was just hired to that level. Golden handcuffs. Gotta pay that back if you leave before 2 years.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:01
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ntan1 posted:1 Year is industry standard for relocation/hiring bonus. 2 Years is really pushing it. I've been reading that 2 years for Amazon is common. I agree that 1 year is normal. It's not necessarily a bad thing, golden handcuffs are a pretty normal way to retain talent.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:10
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I have to wonder if this is going to be continuing or if there's going to be some sort of influence to depress wages again. Maybe the push to get more people in on visas will make competition for devs less?
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Aug 17, 2015 21:15
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Cicero posted:Starting a few years ago I think you started seeing more and more college students picking CS, at least partially because of the big salaries you hear about. So there may just be a time lag here before a big flood of new CS grads get on the market. I've only ever been through the hiring process for principal engineers and senior engineers, so I only know it's super hard to find candidates that are good. A glut of recent CS grads won't solve that, because it takes time and experience to be a good engineer.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:38
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Cicero posted:We were talking about how salaries even for brand new engineers seem unreasonably high, though. Even if high cost of living areas, there are very few professional careers that will pay well into six figures for new college grads, I think. Those are fair points. I'm pretty pro-union, but I'd have a hard time articulating how it would help me (except in setting standards for pay/hours/benefits, which I personally wouldn't benefit from). H.P. Hovercraft posted:Also a minimum of two years experience under a PE before you're allowed to sit for the PE exam in California. There's an exam for software engineers?
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Aug 17, 2015 23:05
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Cicero posted:There is but AFAIK almost nobody cares, mostly I hear about it when real engineers complain that software engineers are not, in fact, real engineers. Ah, that one. I've read through that before. Yeah I doubt that anyone will be taking that seriously anytime soon.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:25
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Eskaton posted:If you're taking the PE and aren't a civil, what are you doing? Principal engineer is a title we use to denote a high-level software engineer. So generally doing things like software architecture. I'm not doing anything like that, I'm just involved in the hiring process.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:28
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Zachack posted:PE stands for professional engineer, it's a license or title depending on branch. As a chemical it has almost no value to me except I work for gubmint so I have to have it for promotion/$. Oh, I'm not taking that exam at all. Not sure where that confusion came from.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:32
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:In actual engineering, the Principal is the licensed engineer who has ownership of the firm. Hah! Gotta love how titles are just meaningless when you go to tech sector. Like "Technology Evangelist".
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Aug 17, 2015 23:37
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Job Truniht posted:For context of this thread. is this discussion specifically going to be an attack on Amazon or an attack on the tech industry in general? Amazon is definitely not the only "tech" company that does this poo poo. It seems like that's very much true. The NYT article just sparked discussion about it the most recently, but I remember there being other articles about shady practices at Google/Apple/etc. I'd be interested to know what other companies have been accused of doing and what they did to combat that (fire the people complaining, changing policies, etc.). I'm not necessarily interested in the unionizing discussion because, as was brought up earlier, most people working these hours in tech seem to want to rather than being forced to.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:12
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Cicero posted:I basically agree with you, I think you're just missing the original context for this sub-thread, which was a non-programming engineer expressing dismay at how much more new software engineers (at some companies) make than him. That then turned into a discussion around "why do even very junior programmers at these companies make so much money?" I actually am a programming engineer. Even though I understand it, it still amazes me that some new grads make that much.
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Aug 19, 2015 03:12
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So this article has continued to spur discussion at the mid-size software company I work as a software engineer in. For reference, we don't pay like Google, etc. Our engineers (myself included) make a good living but are not in the six figures range regularly. That being said, the discussions have been about the culture of software development and the overall and how our company's culture fits in on the continuum (from being completely overworked to barely putting in 40 hours a week). I know that the Amazon article was pretty much showcasing how badly the business side of the business is treated (most Engineers at Amazon I've talked to report a completely different culture), but there is a push out there to get developers to write code for 12 hours a day seven days a week. You can see it in the idea of startup culture being enshrined, you can see it in the celebration of the "rock star" coder who stays up all night to churn out a deliverable, you can see it in the questions that HR managers and CEOs are asking (How do I emulate the culture Google has?) and you can see it in the types of benefits offered (dinner to stay late, laptops becoming the norm so people can work from home, video games and such so that people spend more free time at work). There's a natural tendency for a software engineer working on an interesting or complex problem to get in "the zone" too, which can legitimately cause us to lose track of time. I clocked a 60 work week once because I kept getting sucked into interesting problems, and they just took a lot of time to test and solve. I suffered for it, my health was bad and I gained a pound just in that week from eating crap. I think the interesting thing is that our company has tried to strike the balance in the opposite way from Amazon. We offer very high levels of vacation, managers constantly reinforce the need for us to use the vacation, and there is a culture of "work hard during the day but stop when you go home" in Engineering. This seems to be caused by a few things: 1. The ramp up time for a new engineer in our division is measured in years, thus making long tenure really important. 2. Competition for developers in our area is fierce, especially for mature developers. Mature developers (who may have a family and such) seem to appreciate work-life balance more than a go-fast burn-quick mentality. 3. There have been a few studies that show fatigue sets in after about 8-9 hours during a mentally taxing job, so the longer you work the more mistakes you make
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Aug 20, 2015 15:01
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