Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by VRay on Monday June 21, 2021 @05:30PM (#27584781)

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too

My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work.

I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.

Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by kapp_in_life on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:02PM (#27585119)

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by VRay on Monday June 21, 2021 @07:23PM (#27585860)

haha, this was at Microsoft, and the dash button was a glowing success compared to the project I'm talking about

I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA..

What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering, though, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect us grunts to pull it off..

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by YZF on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @02:11AM (#27588538)

Just ask why they like working there. Ask for specifics. Ask for things they don't like. Ask for specifics.

Best idea is not to go somewhere without having friends on the inside who you trust and can tell you what it's like.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by dhbanes on Monday June 21, 2021 @08:14PM (#27586302)

was it a talking staple?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by sokoloff on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:07PM (#27585164)

It sounded like that story was at Microsoft to me, but now that I know you thought it was Amazon, I can see that it’s ambiguous and could be read either way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by kapp_in_life on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:27PM (#27585350)

Ah you're probably right that it was at Microsoft. My brain must have forgotten the first line by the end of reading the comment, among all the other Amazon specific stories in this thread.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @10:12PM (#27600000)

It has to be the microsoft mood bra, right?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by subsaharancoder on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @12:56AM (#27588131)

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

Zune music player?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company press... by sgerenser on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @01:08PM (#27594259)

Zune was actually pretty popular and had its fans for its time, despite getting completely outsold and outshone by the iPod. I think it didn’t get cancelled until smartphones were clearly starting to replace dedicated music players.

If I had to guess it would be the Kin devices that evolved from the purchase of Danger, those things clearly fit the OP’s description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

[ Parent | on HN ]