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0 pointsthrowaway738514y ago0 comments

I was nearly put on a PIP when I was at Amazon. I noped out of there and went to greener pastures before that could happen.

I was severely jaded by my experience there. When I started, I immediately initiated conversations with my manager about what I could do to make sure I succeeded. I asked the more senior engineers on my team if we could whiteboard about the services we owned and who interacted with them as well as what upstream teams we depended on. The SDE3 told me "I don't know." To this day, I'm still pissed off that an SDE3 who had been on the team for 4+ years "didn't know" who used their services or how the services interacted. And it wasn't that he didn't know - he just didn't give a shit about onboarding newbies.

That same engineer, when I asked him for help in debugging an alert that I had put into a system, threw out some bogus answer and took one step back. I told him I had tried his suggestion. He then gave another bogus answer and took another step back. He literally backed away slowly and after three or four steps, just sat down at his desk and ignored me.

I recognize I'm an N=1, and I have friends that more or less enjoyed their time there, but I saw far too many bullshit patterns from engineers and managers for me to think of Amazon's approach as anything but intentionally malicious.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

ipaddr4y ago· 2 in thread

You don't survive 4 years without doing that. Remember someone gets voted out each year. Your goal is not be that person so you can't help a newbie. Someone new has to come in and screw someone else over to stay.

andrekandre4y ago

i may be way off base, so appoligies if so, but isnt that a form of sociopathy?

raincom4y ago

Yes and no. Here, the sociopathy is generated by the dynamics of the organization that Amazon is, but not by the upbringing or the genetics of the individual.

babesh4y ago

I think that he was trying to sabotage competitors. I saw this behavior at UC Berkeley. An ultra competitive, almost 4.00 student intentionally gave the wrong approach to another team in our graduate level computer architecture course. My understanding is that the pre-med students at Berkeley engaged in this behavior much more extensively.

This unethical behavior is rewarded in zero sum games and systems graded on a curve like most tech companies and UC Berkeley will exhibit this behavior.

The student went on to a masters at Berkeley.

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