You have a team of X engineers and you want to grow. You hire a couple more. The current engineers have 0 incentives to help the new ones. Most people don’t have the chops (technical or emotional) to go up against a whole team.
Come review time, what do you think is going to happen? As a boss will you let go someone who’s been there for 5 years and knows the service inside out or the new guy who seems to be struggling.
Not all people are jerks, and there are good pockets (but mostly the deck is stacked against you when you join).
Also, IMHO Amazon is going to have a really hard time hiring people with the reputation they created for themselves.
The majority cares about money and convenience. If people really cared about reputation then Riot Games, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, that big ride sharing company whose name slipped my mind, Shell, and lots of other companies, would be struggling to hire.
For the majority of people in their career (the Seniors and Principals/Staffs) MS pays significantly worse than other FAANG-type companies, often being well under half in terms of stock compensation for example.
The company is well aware of this as it's constantly brought up in all-hands (both within individual departments as well as at the all-company level), and they always respond with "we've done research and we believe we actually do pay comparatively in this market segment".
Sounds like market fixing and likely illegal, however I can imagine poorly paid employee wouldn't be able to afford a lawsuit.
also, most stories I've heard is that the sub-optimal comp comes bundled with pretty good WLB. So maybe if you were to double the number of hours worked and double the comp M$ would blow other BigTech out of the water. Maybe this is the play (half the money for half the effort) and everyone knows it.
The fact that one can change job shouldn't enable companies to continue like this.
to play devil’s advocate (from a top lawyer firm): how can one force a private entity to pay a certain wage that is way over what the minimum wage is?
The minimum wage should be tied to company revenue to reflect the value workers generate. I mean revenue, not profit, because those companies are masters at hiding profits to avoid tax.
Had a friend who worked at Mercedes Benz corporate and he could pretty much pick any non-AMG car in rotating 6-month leases. The monthly lease payment for him to lease a SL550 (a six figure convertible) was about the same as leasing a Honda Civic.
Seems other car companies do similar programs for their employees.
This is why companies want to hire rockstars who can be productive in a couple of months without being helped by colleagues. One can't get such rockstars just by leetcode. Maybe, these companies should pay $1M per annum for such rockstars.
Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones".
Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of the company has been at Amazon for 3 years or less. Do you think that if the normal/average organization/team was a great place to be, that there would be so much attrition?
I think asking for the name of someone's former manager on a public forum without giving any details in return is pretty suspect.
For those who aren't already aware, Amazon has a history of covertly paying its employees to "represent" the company in social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636021
"I have soft power". Suspicious indeed.
Would you truly ask that? And have someone's personal name be searchable forever? What is the impetus?
What's really needed here is a way to maintain super-scale in a way that is, shall we say, "eventually morally consistent". Applying selection theory, if you create a pocket of badness wrapped in a function that reliably extracts all the good out of it... well all you'll be left with is a local maximum of even more suffering. Yeow.
Of course, designing and maintaining such social structures seems close to P=NP in complexity...
Um, shouldn't we fix the org instead!!!
Very glad that I've been denied from Amazon final round twice now. It was great interview practice and nothing more
While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations within the company, that I am pretty confident that this experience isn't universal.
It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience.