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Comment by jamdamu | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has taken steps to prevent abusive behavior from occurring, such as creating a process for engineers to challenge managerial pips and allowing engineers to transfer while on development plans. In my opinion, these steps seem more like treating the symptom than the cause. The overall culture remains the same. Engineers are still treated by management as resources to be allocated, and for me, this is the hardest pill to swallow. Even though my manager, my skip, and my peers tell me I do good work, at the end of the day, I feel that all I am is X capacity points per sprint. The feeling of being disposable in the huge machine that is Amazon is quite depressing.

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Some of those steps are not really genuine in practice though. Getting a transfer while on a dev list requires you to get something like VP approval from the receiving team. The result in a lot of orgs is that they just won't look at the candidate.

Amazon's also re-instituted bell curve attrition goals with little warning to managers (1-2 weeks before annual reviews in my org, and percentages only in the meeting itself). The last few months have been a special breed of stress that I hadn't seen at amazon in my 7 years prior.

I left earlier this year to a much less stressful position.

Tbh I don’t agree that this is amazon specific, generally at any big tech co you will feel this way unless you find your way into something more specialized. For instance, I have a friend at G who was on a front-end team for maps for a while but recently switched to work at google brain after collaborating on side projects. He said the difference is night and day for him in terms of self direction and responsibility.

Other commenters: just because employees _are_ resources doesn't mean that managers should make them _feel_ like they are. There are companies that do a good job of making employees feel more of a sense of being valued, and so at least on that dimension Amazon seems to be doing a poor job.

What gave it away? The fact that there’s a department called Human Resources? The only way to not feel like a cog in a wheel is to be your own boss.

> a department called Human Resources

And in that phrase, "Human" is the adjective...

The alternative seems to be something like “people operations”. I don’t find that any more encouraging, really...

Back in the Dark Ages when people still had pensions and unions, this department was called "Personnel," which was perfectly descriptive and non-humiliating. This is obviously the reason it had to change to something orwellian that lumps in a company's employees with its inventory of pig iron and staple removers.

Yikes, I had totally forgotten that term (which perhaps reinforces your point..)

It’s human not humane. We are cattle not puppies.

Yep, that’s why I ran away fast and got my mba as soon as possible. As despised as the degree is here on HN, it’s a decent route to getting out of the now commoditized swe role.

Working in the role has taught me so much about how shitty it feels to be treated like a commodity, if I ever make a transition to management, one of my top priorities will be treating human beings like.. human beings.. just make sure the sprint gets done on time.

You are.

The software engineer profession is becoming like traditional factory workers, only this time they have ping pong tables and free snacks. Also the salary is very high. But the downside is that you are still at the bottom of the pyramid.

That would be the warehouse workers not tech

Warehouse workers are treated like equipment. And will eventually be replaced with real equipment.

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