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Comment by ladyattis | Hacker News Reader

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of constant churn on what seems like baseless theories. If it's your immediate boss that's tired of one particular slacker that's one thing but it's a wholly different situation when HR comes down on your boss demanding they fire 6% of their team whether or not they're doing great. It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.

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I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.

Because they can continually fill the trenches with H1Bs willing to run the gauntlet.

Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors.

True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.

If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.

If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.

>If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.

I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is).

A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.

Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.

Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies.

So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.

> Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.

I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.

In microeconomics, it’s a pretty foundational tenet that wages normalize to marginal worker productivity.

I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro), but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and has nothing to do with particularly efficient single firms.

Simple thought experiment. Firms will continue to hire until wage = marginal productivity .. otherwise, you leave money on the table. Usual BS assumptions on perfect information/competition, cetrus paribus, and all that stuff.

In your simple thought experiment, why are wages going up for that one firm? You're hiring more people, not raising the wages of the existing people. And I'm not sure why you think unit economics apply to software with it's almost 100% fixed costs.

Personally, I'd work for Amazon and already be looking elsewhere the moment I signed up, given how random it seems in terms of being fired. They're going to fire you anyway.

I actually did that, kept interviewing about every 8-12 months until last September or so. The problem is none of my offers were as high as Google new grad offers (all less than $200k, though one had a $175k base) so I didn’t take any. This was from 4 startups and Citadel. Seems like being inferior has its own severe monetary costs….

If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period.

Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.

How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs?

I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong.

The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.

Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.

Damn dude, I've seen you talk like this a few times over the last few months.

You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.

I'll second what ZephyrBlue said:

- you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so

At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that.

Stay safe my friend.

Getting into the FANG interview process doesn't seem that complicated, recruiters reach out to most developers / graduates on LinkedIn. Passing it requires learning a specific set of skills.

I would say the bar is pretty much the same for all FANGs. If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple. I see people that apply to multiple FANGS tend to pass some of them. Once you put in the work to learn those exercises (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), failing them or passing them becomes a matter of luck (the right set of exercises, the right interviewer).

As to how this translates to intelligence - I personally don't care if a candidate is able to pass a FANG interview or not (I've seen plenty of bad employees who were FANGs or ex-FANGs and plenty of geniuses as well), but I definitely will think of them as being driven individuals who achieved what they set up to do.

Incidentally the best employees who made a difference in the companies I've worked at were, incidentally, never ex-FANGs, just talented individuals who decided to put in the work.

> If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple

I don't know, I failed Facebook several times and never got an interview at Apple. Getting an interview at most companies isn't that hard, but with Amazon on the resume I'm out of the game for companies like top trading firms and Stripe, Airbnb etc. I think I simply don't have the intelligence to do so. I'm sure some people have the ability to get offers after doing thousands of leetcode problems but I've never met them - everyone I know that's successful has only done a handful and passed their interviews without any trouble.

I've put in the work, but I've gotten nothing out of it. It's hard not to be discouraged by that.

Curious as to why you think having Amazon on your resume is a dealbreaker to some companies? Is this something that is known?

Amazon is probably a better name to have on your resume than the vast majority of other companies out there. I'd imagine you'd instantly be considered higher at first glance than someone with say, JP Morgan, or Lockheed Martin, or IBM, or any number of no-name startups on their resume.

I failed Amazon like three times in a row (along with other smaller companies). This last year I expanded my search and got into Facebook and Google, despite failing Amazon again.

Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?

If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.

Amazon's culture is nothing compared to the stories I've heard about Microsoft's Mac software teams. I can't repeat them all but supposedly they weren't allowed to read any sample code including Stack Overflow questions.

I find that really hard to believe. What would be the motivation behind that policy, and how would it be enforced?

I'd rank Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, etc. at least on par with Amazon in terms of resume brand name recognition/prestige. They're also probably at least as difficult to get into.

But "random startups" that no one knows about? Probably preferable to have Amazon.

I am not sure why but I always assumed Amazon was easier to get into than Google, Facebook and Netflix. Microsoft/LinkedIn is probably same difficulty as Amazon. Just anecdotes and people I know I guess.

"the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies"

I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.

I mean, as someone who has yet to crack one FAANG (or similar level company) offer, a FAANG engineer is someone that I look up to. But my friends and ex-colleagues who did crack FAANG did so with difficulty, and they got rejected from all but the one company that did extend an offer. They all say if they were to re-interview at their companies (or another FAANG), odds are they'd be rejected.

So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.

I'd argue FAANG offers are like college admissions, probably a good 40% of the applicant pool likely qualifies for the role and can succeed in it, but only 3-4% of the pool gets the offer

You can argue the numbers and there's probably a top tier of people who are no brainers. But, yeah, in general at least for elite university admissions, they could probably toss most or all of the admitted pile in the trash, figure out who to admit from the rest of the pile, and the world would keep on turning just fine.

If you work at a top-tier company, you'll meet lots of people who can get multiple offers from top-tier companies. They are bright, but usually not geniuses. And they are often a bit obsessed with puzzles :)

FAANG interviewing has nothing to do with your skill as an engineer. FAANG interviews only evaluate how good you are at jumping through the specific hoops they require for their special interview process. For Amazon, it's all about how well you can bullshit your way around the LPs.

It's the professional equivalent of "being good at taking multiple choice exams". But just because someone got 100s on every biology exam in high school doesn't mean they are an expert in biology, just that they are a good test taker.

If you want to look up to someone because they are actually a good engineer, then that's great. But don't look up to someone just because they are a good test taker. And don't look down on yourself just because you are a bad test taker. Taking tests has so little relevance to how good you actually are as an engineer. Amazon is chock-full of completely mediocre engineers, and also rejects plenty of actual engineering wizards.

All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair = letting employees know months in advance that they are underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent severance package based on tenure, etc)

It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6% of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various under-handed ways.

The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.

No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?

I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. It's not at all obvious to me that the success rate at Amazon should be expected to be significantly over 85% of hire-to-performing employee. Given that, what should they do with the 15% who don't turn out to be performing employees (for whatever reason that isn't itself protected class membership)?

> I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings.

If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.

Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews, which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly noisy signal even for the best interviewers and management chain.

I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups.

In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.

I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.

Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.

There’s a lot of jobs in the vast excluded middle between ‘Amazon’ and ‘startups’.

Comparing an 800,000 employee company with 1,000 employee companies doesn't really match up. This comment feels a little like gaslighting.

A couple of things come to mind. (I work for Amazon, but I don't speak for the company.)

1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing.

2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.

> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.

Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.

Which ones for example?

No one publication is exhaustively tracking exec exits, but this businessinsider article gives you an idea of what's perhaps going on and why: https://archive.is/RwUZ9

> On top of that, Amazon typically doesn’t provide additional stock rewards, even when an employee is eligible for a raise, if the stock price grows to push total compensation past a position’s pay range.

Wow what??!

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed.

*Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

By what measure of productivity?

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample:

Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees.

Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

As a current Amazon employee I have to say that is pretty ludicrous. If you actually think Amazon could scale back to 10% of it's current employees without losing massive forward momentum and capacity to deliver results then I don't know what to say. All those metrics would suffer greatly in both the short and long term.

In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.

If a company makes a lot of money, does that mean every employee is responsible for generating the money they made? Is it possible to make a lot of money with not a lot of employees? Does Amazon make less money when employees take a lot of PTO?

I'll add 90% was hyperbole.

Just to be clear, I am using the word "productivity" in a very general sense: output over input.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90% workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.

If Amazon downsized by 90% then they couldnt drive by my house two to three times a day so I can quickly get my prime widgets.

Those aren't employees, so it's ok as long as they keep the capital assets. (I think.)

By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality. For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.

Top of market quality is obviously not IKEAs goal. There is no one in IKEA corporate who would argue differently.

IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it.

Disclaimer: I work for AMZN

Ikea has more similarities with Apple than Amazon. Amazon is a mishmash of stuff being sold, like Dollarstore or whatever. Ikea is more like the Apple store. Ikea is a streamlined and well thought out experience.

> Ikea is a streamlined and well thought out experience.

It's so fascinating how diverse people's viewpoints are! My first experience of IKEA was that it was a confusing, frustrating, poorly laid out and inefficient labyrinth designed to get you lost, and also funnel you to the "hot dog" items that make them the majority of their profit. I've taken many of my parents and observed similarly people's parents and grandparents of friends get just as frustrated and confused at the layout. For god sakes, I just want to be able to walk in, go to the "kitchen decor" get what I need, and walk out. I don't want an "experience", but I digress.

What cloud provider is better than AWS?

If you ask me, digital ocean: top notch UX, good performance, good offering of services (k8s, load balancing, managed databases). A reasonable and nice service.

I use it for some small businesses of mine but I wouldn't use it for a medium company. I would just get some servers from smaller provider in different data centers and deploy whatever I need.

AWS, was definitely the service that convinced everyone they needed the cloud. Most of the companies I've seen move to aws are just wasting money, don't need the scalability and are massively over-provisioned.

A few unicorns needs the cloud's powers to scale massively now - and, given how much it costs, they'll end up rewriting it anyway to save hundreds of millions a few years down the line.

Better than AWS at what? Many are better than AWS in parts of their business - Google's Kubernetes offerings are far better than AWS's overall, Azure beats the pants of AWS in Windows hosting, Active Directory hosting, Confluent provides a better Kafka offering, Snowflake shits all over Redshift and Aurora (at least for OLAP) etc.

That said, AWS is solid and best in class in many areas, and to paraphrase the old saying: "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS"

By price? All of them

I think a better measure of IKEA would be "value"–the intersection of price, quality, and problem-solution fit.

IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted with resounding "yes".

IKEA produces excellent quality for the price. People who think it's low quality usually don't glue it together or attach it to the wall when appropriate.

The particleboard on the back of Billy is not that high quality, but maybe it's fine against a wall.

On the other hand, I have all Ikea furniture and it's survived 3-4 moves and only gotten stronger - my last mover's hobby was repairing furniture and he fixed everything with his pile of spare parts.

and then you divide it by # of employees and get something kind of low.

Doubt it

Customer lifetime value for non-prime members is under $1,000, $2300 for prime. Not exactly the leader.

Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.

End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest.

Employee headcount, is more or less better?

Things always seem rosier.

>> Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.

Sorry but Amazon has far, far more than 12M SKUs.

https://www.nchannel.com/blog/amazon-statistics/?_ga=2.21216...

And Amazon is very successful because it has dominated one of the main reasons we use the internet: online shopping.

Comparing online shopping revenue to social media revenue kind of feels like comparing apples to oranges to me.

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

How does AWS advance the state of the art with undocumented services that frequently fail? I'm not a big fan of Azure, but at least they document their services.

Which services in specific are undocumented services that frequently fail?

The size and growth of AWS' customer base and financial success is a very strong counterargument to your claims. Is it possible you are confusing your personal preferences for the goals of the AWS business? AWS may seek to advance the state of the art, but this is not the end goal, per se, but rather one factor that may or may not achieve the end goal. The end goal is more customers and greater revenue and profit.

> someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team

Customers don't care all that much why AWS "works". They care that it "works". And, again, it "working" is not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another means to an end.

The reason why industrialization took off in Britain and not in India or China is unclear, but a regard for science, an undersupply of labour and internal stability all play a role.

You don't have any of that at Amazon, there is firefighting instead of research, they aren't running out people willing to work for them yet, and personnel turnover is stratospheric.

Yes, they do make money, but you can't buy advancement.

I've always wondered about this. I'd expect this to catch up with Amazon and not work out in the long term.

But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up new markets.

> Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed.

Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."

Indeed, you are correct! *blushing face emoji*. Edit made. Thank you!

Worker productivity is measured as "amount of goods" over number of employees. If you say "revenue" is the same as "amount of goods" then Amazon gives you:

386.1b dollars / 798k workers = $483,834.58 / worker

That's impressive, but... Alibaba: $717.3b / 251k workers = $2.8m / worker FlipKart: $436.2b / 30k workers = $14.5m / worker Texas Instruments: $14.38b / 30k workers = $468k / worker G.E.: $75b / 174k workers = $431k / worker

I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to fire them later.

And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.

436B$ for flipkart? Something is wrong!

Maybe it was 436B INR cause USD is definitely wrong.

They will fail in multiple ways and this will be a factor in what eats them out like a cancer. But it will take decades so really is it an issue for them? Unlikely. They'll still be profitable. It won't necessarily kill them either.

Its the equivalent of the corporation being a person smoking cigarettes. It imparts some benefits and doesn't kill right away but given enough time it still causes disease. They'll start to miss opportunities. They'll run slower.

The metaphor vanishes in a lot of ways though because the corporation can pivot and simply say "we were wrong". Microsoft is a perfect example. It regularly threw away people and this caused damage and various big failures but not enough to scuttle them. They are still successful. Still growing.

Students of history know that Microsoft's story of success hides a lot of messy details including behavior where plenty of law had to get involved. Amazon will go down a similar path. Or has likely already begun.

Amazon can be one of the most productive companies ever, and still be doing self-sabotaging things that will erode their long term success.

Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.

Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.

So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.

I would go so far as to argue our assumption about Amazon even wanting to "maximize" productivity may not be correct.

It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system goes for the former.

If you backload RSUs this process saves you a ton of money actually.

Not really because they pay the same amount in cash in the first two years. They’re just backloading any potential upside.

thats not guaranteed for every new hire, its upto you to negotiate that upfront.

I don't think it matter much, for many people few years in Amazon is worth it, in term of financial benefit/future job.

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