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Amazon's Silent Sacking

alephnerd
91 replies
22h8m

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.

pylua
38 replies
21h21m

The U.S. government should be concerned. The U.S. tax base could very well implode with outsourcing, ai, and offshoring in the next 10 years.

alephnerd
29 replies
21h15m

This is why you encourage immigration.

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.

pylua
12 replies
21h8m

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.

alephnerd
5 replies
20h55m

India is not in the U.S. sphere of influence

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]

[0] - https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-...

[1] - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/ameri...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-pl...

[3] - https://www.state.gov/i2u2/

[4] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[5] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-w...

[6] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav...

[7] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stra...

pylua
3 replies
20h46m

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.

alephnerd
1 replies
20h27m

you

I'm American.

are going to buy Russian oil and not side with the us (sic) in Ukraine

Well,

1. That oil goes to the EU. If there's a buyer, there's going to be a seller [0]

2. It's at margins barely above the cost to extract, which is as big a financial hit you make make [1]

3. As pointed above, China is the bigger bad to India instead of Russia. It's better to keep countries neutral in a future India-China war

Any development in a country that has not washed its hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.

Thank god you don't work at the State Department. That's how you alienate every country that isn't in North America and Europe.

China would have the pick of the litter.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-27/europe-is...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/revenues-russias...

pylua
0 replies
20h18m

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.

one-another-dev
0 replies
18h58m

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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1751o2e/comment/k4dr... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/xssv8o/c...

wolverine876
0 replies
20h11m

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.

KennyBlanken
4 replies
20h24m

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.

_heimdall
2 replies
19h51m

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?

swalberg
0 replies
19h35m

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.

chasd00
0 replies
19h27m

Basically India made plans to assassinate someone on US soil, got found out and then carried it out on Canadian soil.

Here’s the first hit for “India assassinate Canada” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/canada/india-assass...

senderista
0 replies
19h25m

Maybe Modi took a hint when Trump practically laughed off the Khashoggi assassination.

cool_dude85
0 replies
17h47m

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.

secstate
7 replies
20h18m

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.

alephnerd
5 replies
20h7m

Which Claudius?

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.

pylua
2 replies
19h51m

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.

I am curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

alephnerd
1 replies
19h33m

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

pylua
0 replies
19h11m

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.

secstate
1 replies
19h4m

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.

alephnerd
0 replies
18h59m

I thought it was Gothicus!

pylua
0 replies
19h55m

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.

_heimdall
7 replies
19h52m

This is why you encourage immigration.

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?

alephnerd
6 replies
19h41m

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).

Tl;dr - stop defunding the DHS and USCIS

[0] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/06/04/2020-12...

_heimdall
2 replies
19h23m

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.

alephnerd
1 replies
19h10m

encouraging immigration though

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
16h19m

Sure, but that was my point. We need to remove barriers, we don't need to further encourage immigration.

pc86
1 replies
19h22m

There are plenty of federal agencies that are underfunded or being tacitly defunded, DHS is absolutely not one of them.

alephnerd
0 replies
19h13m
swalberg
0 replies
18h50m

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.

0 - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

_heimdall
4 replies
19h55m

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.

nradov
3 replies
19h27m

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.

medvezhenok
1 replies
19h15m

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.

nradov
0 replies
15h45m

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.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

Companies have been quick to cut DEI jobs as soon as the outside political pressure died down.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/tech/google-meta-other-tech-gi...

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).

_heimdall
0 replies
16h7m

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.

sanderjd
2 replies
21h10m

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.

pylua
1 replies
21h3m

It will need to be tied in with a real abet engineering discipline the future , at least domestically.

sanderjd
0 replies
5h12m

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.

jimbob45
24 replies
21h57m

Humana is starting to hire nurses in the Philippines. One would think that’s a national security hole but what do I know.

The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets my vote.

wharvle
11 replies
21h46m

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.

cjbgkagh
6 replies
21h37m

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?

wharvle
4 replies
21h33m

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.

cjbgkagh
2 replies
21h25m

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.

wharvle
1 replies
21h18m

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.

cjbgkagh
0 replies
21h0m

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.

Turing_Machine
0 replies
21h6m

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.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
21h27m

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.

Turing_Machine
2 replies
21h8m

Too bad we can't import doctors.

?

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.

wharvle
1 replies
20h57m

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.

anon7725
0 replies
18h51m

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).

carlosjobim
0 replies
20h4m

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?

alephnerd
3 replies
21h48m

Nursing was always dependent on Pinoy labor.

Because PH used to an American territory until 1946, the education system is largely the same [0].

PH is to the US Medical system as India/Pakistan/Bangladesh are to the UK NHS

[0] - https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-ameri...

wharvle
2 replies
21h37m

Indeed, Filipinos are a big part of the US military, and someone's worried about Filipino nurses being a security threat? Hahaha.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/philippines-us-military-alliance-0...

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.

alephnerd
1 replies
21h28m

history of the US in the Philippines is taught even in gen-ed college history classes, let alone, say, high school

Depends on the state. I grew up in California, so Asian American history is extremely prominent since 1st grade.

wharvle
0 replies
21h24m

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.

zdragnar
1 replies
21h45m

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....

ceejayoz
0 replies
21h32m
toomuchtodo
1 replies
21h52m

You don’t have to outlaw it, just make it so economically painful as to be outlawed.

intended
0 replies
21h35m

Oh, yes please!

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.

raincom
1 replies
21h45m

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.

pylua
0 replies
21h6m

They might if the tax base decreases substantially and unemployment shoots up to unsustainable levels.

The government definitely cannot afford , with the national debt, to lose tax dollars or to subsidize high levels of unemployment.

pc86
0 replies
19h17m

What do you think nurses do that having Filippino nurses would be a national security hole?

otikik
0 replies
20h38m

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.

debarshri
7 replies
22h1m

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.

alephnerd
4 replies
21h44m

graduates from lower tier colleges

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.

debarshri
2 replies
20h17m

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.

wyclif
1 replies
13h20m

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.

debarshri
0 replies
4h48m

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.

raincom
0 replies
21h29m

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.

ahiknsr
1 replies
20h34m

I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc

Facebook doesn't have a Engineering office in India.

alephnerd
0 replies
20h24m

Doesn't Infra have a presence in Bangalore?

https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/634858362137026/

pylua
4 replies
20h57m

The only issue I have with that is that they will not allow us citizens to live there and take on jobs.

If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there and accept a lesser salary.

Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.

paxys
3 replies
20h53m

Who says you can't do that? They would be thrilled to have silicon valley (or equivalent) talent working for India salaries.

pylua
2 replies
20h50m

I doubt India government would grant a business visa for that.

They don’t want other countries citizens competing for jobs in their own country, which is effectively what is happening in the us now.

alephnerd
1 replies
20h46m

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.

pylua
0 replies
20h42m

I have not seen it happen in a permanent way.

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.

timeagain
3 replies
22h6m

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

alephnerd
2 replies
22h0m

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

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy

justin66
1 replies
21h52m

I mean, I don't know what they do there, but haven't Microsoft had an office in Hyderabad for over 20 years?

alephnerd
0 replies
21h42m

Delhi NCR and Bangalore were tech hubs since the 1980s, hence why I'm calling Hyderabad (and Pune) new as they began sprouting in the early 2000s

Indore is becoming the next Hyderabad now as well. It's in the same position that Hyderabad was in the early 2000s.

kburman
3 replies
21h29m

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

Covid time is long gone.

alephnerd
2 replies
21h27m

hyd low CoL

Lower than Bangalore or Gurgaon. It's easier to operate a tech company from HYD financially than in Haryana or Karnataka.

Covid time is long gone

Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.

kburman
1 replies
21h21m

Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.

What I can say is that there is no special treatment for SDEs working from India, especially regarding the WFH policy.

alephnerd
0 replies
21h15m

Oh, you're talking solely about Amazon. Ok fair.

drubio
2 replies
16h50m

Same hiring dynamic in Mexico.

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.

alephnerd
1 replies
13h34m

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.

drubio
0 replies
3h56m

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.

citizenpaul
1 replies
21h37m

living in their ancestral towns and villages

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.

alephnerd
0 replies
21h30m

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.

hackernewds
0 replies
21h59m

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.

paxys
75 replies
21h57m

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.

vinnymac
20 replies
21h48m

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.

throwaway8877
14 replies
21h37m

Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not fair.

laidoffamazon
6 replies
21h31m

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.

shermantanktop
3 replies
20h58m

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.

laidoffamazon
1 replies
20h55m

This sounds like a Google experience - not something that happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor joined Amazon again after complaining.

shermantanktop
0 replies
19h56m

I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened there as well.

analognoise
0 replies
4h45m

e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”

Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.

khazhoux
1 replies
20h59m

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.

laidoffamazon
0 replies
20h56m

Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get offers and thus have many choices.

goostavos
5 replies
21h28m

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.

mjr00
4 replies
21h8m

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.

caslon
3 replies
21h1m

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.

mjr00
0 replies
20h4m

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.

finnh
0 replies
20h39m

The "Washington" in "Washington Commanders" is Washington, DC. Not Washington State (which has no income tax).

ambicapter
0 replies
35m

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.

ambicapter
0 replies
21h30m

Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not fair.

hef19898
4 replies
21h26m

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 is a peculiar place.

milkshakes
3 replies
21h20m

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.

hef19898
1 replies
21h5m

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.

milkshakes
0 replies
18h9m

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

Zanfa
0 replies
9h50m

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.

chris_wot
14 replies
21h47m

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.

brunooliv
7 replies
21h34m

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

seadan83
6 replies
21h23m

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)

simonw
2 replies
20h28m

A/B testing is an Amazon thing, but is it also an AWS thing? I thought AWS engineering culture was pretty different.

seadan83
1 replies
20h11m

Here is a page from AWS executives with insights on how your organization can also be data-driven too!

https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you...

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"

simonw
0 replies
18h42m

I see A/B testing as just one small component of data-driven decision making.

You can make still great decisions based on your data without doing the thing where you ship the same feature twice and see which one works better.

jocaal
1 replies
20h42m

Amazon A/B tests just about everything

Are they testing for the UI's that confuse customers the most? \s

seadan83
0 replies
19h59m

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"

seadan83
0 replies
20h37m

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.

arrakeenrevived
5 replies
21h41m

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.

chris_wot
4 replies
21h26m

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.

pylua
3 replies
21h12m

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.

chris_wot
2 replies
21h8m

In what world does maintainability and reliability increase through brute force hiring of low skilled and experienced staff?

pylua
1 replies
20h59m

The world where good enough / more cpu resources and just works is easier to get to than design the system in a logical way.

chris_wot
0 replies
19h9m

In other words, it doesn’t exist.

arrakeenrevived
9 replies
21h45m

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.

paxys
6 replies
21h39m

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.

arrakeenrevived
5 replies
21h35m

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.

paxys
4 replies
21h28m

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.

arrakeenrevived
2 replies
21h27m

RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift.

Again, this is just demonstrably false. But if you want to continue to have some personal vendetta against Amazon's culture, you do you.

paxys
1 replies
21h21m

Are you implying that amazon allowed remote work prior to the pandemic?

arrakeenrevived
0 replies
21h18m

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.

scarface_74
0 replies
20h56m

That’s a specious argument. It includes all of the warehouse workers, delivery drivers and other non blue badge employees.

lozenge
1 replies
21h14m

That's not really a culture, rather a policy.

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.

arrakeenrevived
0 replies
21h4m

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.

laidoffamazon
8 replies
21h32m

And yet… it’s one of the most highly valued companies on the planet, and a clear #1 in cloud services.

scarface_74
3 replies
20h55m

Blackberry was at its most valuable 2 years after the iPhone came out and a year before Android was released.

cdibona
1 replies
19h32m

But the iPhone came out in 2007 and the for g1, 2008..... so, uh.....

JustExAWS
0 replies
18h46m

Android was basically nothing until Verizon started selling them. The G1 was only on T-Mobile - at the time a distant 4th in the mobile space.

It was so bad that not even Google’s CEO at the time used it and he still used his BlackBerry.

For comparison, Steve Jobs felt the same way about Macs before OS X, the first two years he was back at Apple he used a PC running Next

laidoffamazon
0 replies
20h53m

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.

Podgajski
3 replies
21h21m

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.

laidoffamazon
2 replies
21h15m

There’s no evidence of a big money exodus. The only potential company to leave for is Azure.

randerson
0 replies
20h29m

Or more companies can realize that they can be almost as productive on their own hardware as they can in The Cloud but at a fraction of the cost.

Podgajski
0 replies
21h14m

There’s no evidence of a big money exodus….YET.

lbrito
7 replies
21h21m

"it wasn't like this X years ago. It is a shame you joined at this time."

Heard that multiple times during my short tenure. Always smelled like bs to me.

fnordpiglet
3 replies
21h8m

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.

refulgentis
1 replies
20h58m

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)

LargeTomato
0 replies
20h10m

Many managers don't know how to handle firings/layoffs and there's little incentive to because you're gone after the event anyway.

belter
0 replies
20h31m

"This year was worst than last year...But it will be better than next Year..."

mjr00
1 replies
21h6m

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.

JustinGarrison
0 replies
11h49m

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.

BeefDinnerPurge
0 replies
20h19m

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).

ajkjk
6 replies
21h8m

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.

snotrockets
0 replies
20h32m

Every big enough company, is, for those not on the c-suite, a collection of 1000s of different companies with a single HR department.

scarface_74
0 replies
21h0m

Amazon will always eventually Amazon.

reducesuffering
0 replies
20h13m

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.

pas
0 replies
20h44m

which org you end up in counts for everything

maybe... then maybe it's time to name those orgs instead of just weaving their legendarium web...

gdiamos
0 replies
21h4m

It’s great to win, until you lose.

arrakeenrevived
0 replies
20h51m

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.

belter
2 replies
20h24m

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...

refulgentis
0 replies
13h4m

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.

lambdasquirrel
0 replies
19h28m

He knows he’s been laid off. His managers through the VP level know they’re done for as well.

iLoveOncall
1 replies
21h40m

That's not true though.

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.

Kephael
0 replies
19h58m

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.

wolverine876
45 replies
20h23m

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.

ejb999
15 replies
19h49m

and for anyone that actually believed companies cared about those things when they said them, I have a bridge in NY I'd like to sell you.

wolverine876
8 replies
19h37m

That's exactly the 'zeitgeist' I'm talking about:

Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed.

We all have better angels and worse; there's nothing special about the our worse ones that means they are somehow more fundamental or necessary.

We actually can do much better - not perfectly, of course, that is a strawperson; but we can do much better.

MichaelZuo
5 replies
15h4m

Based on what reasoning...?

You sound really confident so I'm assuming there is some substance here.

wolverine876
4 replies
13h52m

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?

MichaelZuo
3 replies
12h53m

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.

wolverine876
2 replies
12h10m

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.

MichaelZuo
1 replies
2h31m

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.

wolverine876
0 replies
45m

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.

bradleyjg
1 replies
14h33m

That was always bizarre rhetoric from billionaires. You don’t trip and accidentally stand up one of the richest people in the world.

Those men knew exactly what they wanted and spent every waking moment working towards it. Money.

SV earnestness has always been a con.

wolverine876
0 replies
13h58m

SV earnestness has always been a con.

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.

CoastalCoder
3 replies
18h16m

I wonder if that level of skepticism largely tracks with age?

I don't recall "believing" in an employer since maybe my early 30's.

wolverine876
0 replies
13h50m

Interesting - maybe with the average age of SV? Has that increased?

I don't recall "believing" in an employer since maybe my early 30's.

Not even a small one? Where everyone knows everyone?

warkdarrior
0 replies
16h10m

"A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." —Benjamin Disraeli

Plug in your own appropriate interpretation of the Liberal/Conservative labels.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
0 replies
10h34m

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.

concordDance
1 replies
19h40m

A company is controlled by people.

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.

1letterunixname
0 replies
17h49m

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.

asylteltine
15 replies
19h58m

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.

chihuahua
9 replies
19h21m

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.

spenczar5
6 replies
18h59m

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!

chihuahua
3 replies
17h19m

That is exactly what I expected to happen.

Rebelgecko
2 replies
14h21m

TBH I expected that everyone would lose the free food

chihuahua
1 replies
14h18m

That will happen a bit later

wyclif
0 replies
13h34m

True. The badness is almost always incremental.

nradov
1 replies
14h41m

The last thing most tech workers need is more chips.

tonyedgecombe
0 replies
4h50m

Yeah, free food looks like a negative to me.

wyclif
0 replies
13h39m

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.

axpy906
0 replies
2h24m

Amazon gives out free bananas.

senderista
2 replies
19h32m

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.

asylteltine
1 replies
18h37m

Well in big tech I have good news for you, you get both!

wyclif
0 replies
13h33m

More like, "Congratulations, pick two!"

closeparen
0 replies
17h36m

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.

belter
0 replies
19h35m

The managerial way to say it...The company is frugal

losteric
6 replies
19h17m

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.

x86x87
1 replies
39m

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.

el-dude-arino
0 replies
1m

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.

bornfreddy
1 replies
19h6m

Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset?

"Don't do evil" comes to mind, though the company ethos changed a lot since then.

SlightlyLeftPad
0 replies
18h23m

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.

wolverine876
0 replies
14h1m

Every industry disrupted by SV, at least up to a point? How about all the FOSS projects?

StopTheWorld
0 replies
1h45m

"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.

alberth
4 replies
15h7m

”Note the subtle shift”

It’s not subtle. It’s overt & being externally communicated.

Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies.

The pendulum has swung back from the years where growth was all that mattered.

It’s now back to focus on profitability.

The pendulum will swing back again at some point as well.

It’s cyclical.

nova22033
1 replies
2h11m

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

x86x87
0 replies
34m

Do you want stocks in companies that are profitable but do so at the expense of their own future?

isignal
1 replies
12h48m

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.

throwup238
0 replies
8m

The executives running the companies can't afford it. Their bonuses depend on meeting certain expectations.

poulpy123
0 replies
7h57m

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

burlesona
21 replies
21h59m

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…

mooreds
11 replies
21h52m

Have been in this situation before. Sounds like fun, actually melts your brain.

dharmab
5 replies
21h48m

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.

mooreds
3 replies
19h42m

Wow, I guess that is good for him. What would he do if he needed to find a new job?

irrational
1 replies
19h24m

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.

mooreds
0 replies
11h24m

I guess? If I were in his position and worked in technology (he doesn't, see sibling comment), I'd be worried about skill degradation.

I've never been hired because of my resume, though that definitely helps with an interview. There was always a skills test.

I suppose you could grind leetcode or otherwise cram for a skills test, though. You definitely have enough time during the week.

dharmab
0 replies
19h23m

He doesn't work in technology, so he'd just go find another job and go back to working like everyone else.

thih9
0 replies
9h26m

Sounds like this wouldn't fly at amazon, where they would be just happy to have grounds to actually fire you.

irrational
3 replies
19h26m

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.

refulgentis
2 replies
16h51m

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!"

irrational
1 replies
9h19m

Or, don’t try to get a job at a FAANG company. I work for a Fortune 100 company and we never do anything like leetcode stuff in our interviews.

refulgentis
0 replies
2h58m

Thank you, sounds silly, but I had lost perspective and thought BigCo always would do this.

mark_cuban_takes_notes.gif (https://giphy.com/gifs/shark-tank-VFYJXIuuFl6pO)

glimshe
0 replies
21h35m

Worst job I've ever had was one where I had nothing to do and yet I was forced to go to the office every day.

caesil
6 replies
20h59m

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.

alkonaut
1 replies
20h21m

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.

aworks
0 replies
18h15m

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.

I don't miss my Silicon Valley job, though...

pc86
0 replies
19h32m

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.

delfinom
0 replies
20h2m

NY just made such invention assignment clauses retroactively illegal and void as of November, wooo for anyone living in NY

applecrazy
0 replies
20h40m

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)

_heimdall
0 replies
20h0m

Is that clause going to hold up in court if the work is done outside work hours and done without use of any work hardware or software?

My understanding has always been that the line is simply to do my own projects on my time with my hardware.

thih9
0 replies
21h50m

It wouldn’t be literally nothing - in practice it would be meetings, reviews, reports, interviews, etc.

caseysoftware
0 replies
19h36m

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.

dougweltman
18 replies
21h23m

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.

iot_devs
8 replies
19h51m

Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses

This is currently false, or at least very up to debate.

rsanek
7 replies
17h5m

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.

wyclif
1 replies
13h25m

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.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
0 replies
10h31m

you'll have to define what "it still works fine" means then, because your description certainly would meet my definition of the phrase.

hermanradtke
1 replies
14h22m

site is still working fine

Twitter has had a lot of issues and generally failing as a company at the moment.

ryandrake
0 replies
13h6m

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.

minkiebun
0 replies
10h18m

Keeping the lights on is typically around 10% of effort at Amazon. But there’s value in the ongoing development, which is why it’s done.

local_crmdgeon
0 replies
14h58m

Twitter and Amazon are not similar companies and cannot be compared in terms of scale.

No one has Amazons scale.

VirusNewbie
0 replies
13h47m

It has had major outages and is losing a ton of money.

w10-1
1 replies
21h10m

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.

dougweltman
0 replies
20h4m

Did you stop reading the comment after the first line?

mixdup
1 replies
19h38m

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

dougweltman
0 replies
6h16m

At some margin, this is right of course, and rising rates move us closer to that margin.

My point is this behavior is better explained by the actor’s belief in something like the following proposition:

“The present value of the opex avoidance is dwarfed by the present value of a leaner org’s ability to focus, ship and execute.”

htss2013
1 replies
9h41m

and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.

If WFH destroys long term value creation, then why didn't the stock market punish every tech company when they all announced permanent WFH?

dougweltman
0 replies
6h2m

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.

tonyedgecombe
0 replies
4h38m

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.

minkiebun
0 replies
10h21m

I worked at Amazon.

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.

Ancalagon
0 replies
14h43m

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.

hornban
12 replies
21h37m

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.

alephnerd
8 replies
21h35m

I've been on the other side of these decisions.

It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just aren't enough positions to fill.

Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other stakeholders to ensure financial viability.

It sucks, but it is what it is.

bradleyjg
5 replies
20h33m

Which tech CEOs were fired for making the wrong call and overhiring?

I don’t mind eye popping executive pay for exceptional performance, I mind that those positions have zero accountability.

underdeserver
1 replies
2h37m

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.

bradleyjg
0 replies
1h18m

Meanwhile he spent a bunch of money on unnecessary employees. Foreseeing the end of zirp and how it will impact the business is part of the job.

okaram
1 replies
19h26m

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.

bradleyjg
0 replies
16h2m

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.

spdy
0 replies
20h21m

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.

drewcoo
1 replies
17h1m

If someone has been "viable" for years and is suddenly not "viable" any longer, what happened?

And why is some manager not being publicly flogged for letting that happen?

HDThoreaun
0 replies
14h21m

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.

itake
2 replies
21h31m

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.

magicloop
0 replies
20h6m

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).

applecrazy
0 replies
20h43m

minor nit: there are no dedicated SREs at amazon. but your point stands otherwise

crtified
12 replies
21h24m

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.

blagie
10 replies
20h2m

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.

rsanek
3 replies
17h10m

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.

kjellsbells
1 replies
16h51m

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.

blagie
0 replies
5h46m

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.

blagie
0 replies
5h58m

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.

sangnoir
2 replies
16h47m

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

entropi
1 replies
16h26m

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.

2) Prejudice against those who were laid-off.

blagie
0 replies
2h16m

Exactly.

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."

Aeolun
1 replies
18h15m

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.

blagie
0 replies
17h21m

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.

eastbound
0 replies
19h50m

"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.

scarface_74
0 replies
20h53m
abeppu
9 replies
22h3m

Amazon won’t fire me

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?

malcolmgreaves
8 replies
22h1m

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

Isn't this the author's goal though?

abeppu
7 replies
21h56m

If the author is going for severance, isn't that less likely if they're being fired for cause, vs part of a layoff?

scarface_74
6 replies
20h52m

Nope, you get severance either way.

jldugger
3 replies
20h24m

In what planet does Amazon offer severence to a person they are firing for cause?

JustExAWS
2 replies
20h4m

This planet?

I happen to have first hand experience with Amazon’s PIP process…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988

(I seem to have done something to anger the HN gods)

jldugger
1 replies
10h1m

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.

scarface_74
0 replies
9h4m

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.

abeppu
1 replies
16h16m

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.

scarface_74
0 replies
16h7m

I just went through the process at Amazon less that four months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423

stickfigure
5 replies
22h0m

I'm confused. Author's team has been eliminated but he is still employed by Amazon? What's he doing now?

jzb
1 replies
21h36m

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.

smarmgoblin
0 replies
21h18m

In addition the roles are all RTO-enforced (implying his current one is not), so it may be impossible for him to take those roles.

timeagain
0 replies
21h57m

Historically Amazon gives devs some number of weeks to find new work internally if they cut a department. Sales and admin aren’t normally so lucky…

burlesona
0 replies
21h58m

Resting and vesting.

JustinGarrison
0 replies
11h58m

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.

earth2mars
5 replies
21h45m

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?

shrimpx
1 replies
20h16m

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.

curiousgal
0 replies
2h24m

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.

jzb
1 replies
21h41m

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.

insomniacity
0 replies
20h28m

What are they going to do - fire you?

otikik
0 replies
20h22m

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.

Podgajski
2 replies
21h22m

Can’t wait for the AWS outages. Good times ahead!

yolovoe
1 replies
17h29m

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? :)

ragall
0 replies
2h30m

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.

rdl
1 replies
16h51m

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)?

JustinGarrison
0 replies
11h57m

Yes, I vested my final payment from my original RSUs in October.

padthai
1 replies
21h57m

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.

pm90
0 replies
6h25m

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).

nixass
1 replies
20h55m

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.

Last sentence is pure bullshit

caesil
0 replies
20h53m

What do you think accounts for the increase?

chank
1 replies
21h41m

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.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
21h24m

How can Amazon be guilty of incentivizing short term profit when their profit margin history looks like this?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...

Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta’s 20%+ profit margins.

BeefDinnerPurge
1 replies
20h20m

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.

amzn-throw
0 replies
25m

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".

yborg
0 replies
21h25m

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...

steveBK123
0 replies
19h15m

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.

snotrockets
0 replies
20h27m

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.

nine_zeros
0 replies
20h19m

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.

nameoda
0 replies
21h32m

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.

lulznews
0 replies
20h18m

Dude your VP rocks. Amazon sucks, RTO sucks, but none of that bad stuff will happen. The machine will keep chugging, and no one cares.

htss2013
0 replies
10h15m

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?