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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, this isn't a rare attitude among managers at Amazon. A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates. Word has gotten out about it, mostly on the blind app, which forced Amazon to raise pay bands for engineers 50-100k. This is costing the company a lot of money.

The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant, and so employees are no longer putting up with miserable harsh working conditions, the financial incentives are no longer there.

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The reality is that the SDMs are cogs in the machine as well.

If a director asks the SDM why an employee isn't performing, and the SDM responds with any reason that doesn't support the organisation's goals, the director / VP is going to ask the SDM to get rid of the employee to meet Amazon's infamous URA quota[1]. If the SDM refuses, they are going to find another SDM who will do the job.

At the same time, the following is also true

> A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates.

> The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant, and so employees are no longer putting up with miserable harsh working conditions, the financial incentives are no longer there.

This is why Amazon is now importing a lot of international engineers, especially from Amazon India. Employees on L1 visa can't refuse the harsh working conditions, unless they are willing to take a huge pay cut and move back.

[1]: https://archive.is/44DyG

In my ~15 year career I've met a lot of people that have gone on and worked at almost every big company imaginable. For some reason an outsized amount of people that I hated working with ended up as SDMs at Amazon. The list of people I hate is very, very small too, so it seems like more than a coincidence.

For me the high correlation seems to be with Facebook.

Yeah me too. All the assholes went to Facebook. Only one person I like went there, and he quit.

Interesting. My (small, n=3) list of supreme assholes who I never want to work with again also ended up at Facebook.

I told Facebook recruiters to stop contacting me because I will never work for them due to my personal ethics. Maybe others have also done this and Facebook's talent pool is the remaining assholes.

I know a few people who've gone there and left within 1-2 years. I know exactly 1 person who is a very nice and competent engineer who was miserable there for their first year but they eventually found a team that they were happy with and they are still there today, probably 3-4 years later. But, yes, it seems to me that, especially given that last anecdote, the place is awash with egotistical assholes.

Culture flows down from the top.

While what you say may be true, I urge everyone reading this thread not to make personal opinions solely on stuff posted online that does not have hard evidence associated with it.

I think there is some selection bias in this. And I say this as someone who has recently quit working at Amazon (after many years there).

People who get fired are far more likely to leave reviews on blind. And the whole performance improvement plan process that proceeds being fired takes place between the employee and the SDM.

It may be the case that their org leadership told the SDM to cut their lowest ranked person to make the org's "Unregretted Rate of Attrition" quota for the year. From the employees point of view, this was purely some kind of malicious move by a terrible SDM. In reality, it's an SDM who wants to keep their job in a sociopathic system that enforces minimum rates of firing people to "keep the bar high".

Salaries are rising for engineers across the industry, in part because of the 'great resignation' going on. Make no mistake: Amazon would not raise salaries because of angry reviews on Blind. They would only raise wages if they saw too many people choosing to quit or not accept job offers in favour of other companies. Probably entirely based on a formula that used those numbers as inputs.

> People who get fired are far more likely to leave reviews on blind.

It is said that the average tenure at Amazon is two years. By your measuring stick, a company that is a revolving door does have the nasty tendency to leave a lot of its employees with plenty of reasons to complain.

There's nothing extraordinary about Amazon having a 2 year tenure average. Here's a somewhat dated (I'd guess it's gotten even shorter since) article from 2018 listing many more company tenures:

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tech-companies-employee...

There are many known companies with ~2 years give or take.

Amazonian blue badge here. Throwaway for the obvious reasons.

Last year my two pizza team saw close to half our team members leaving, some with what I call mob-style coerced goodbyes during a daily and some because they were fed up with the absurd working conditions caused largely by the senior manager's career-building goals and his "wins are due to me and losses are due to my stupid minions who need to be fired" mentality.

An internal tool that tracks tenure says I'm already in here longer than 60 or 70% of the whole company, and I've just been here for about 2 years. I came up with a little game I play with the source code repo that I call Monte Carlo phonebook, where I check if a commit was made by anyone still within the company, and more often than not the answer is no

No other tech company I've been in worked like this. At all.

Don't doubt it. It sounds horrific, and I hope you land elsewhere. Your tenure of ~2 years give or take is very close to Facebook's ~2.5 years average. I'll only compare Amazon to Facebook in this case because both are known to have engineering teams / cultures that can be very results driven all else be damned.

Those lists tend to compute how long has the current employee worked here, instead of how many years of work do leaving employees have?

The list shows that older companies have significantly longer tenure numbers.

What is the blind app?

It's a forum for people at tech companies to anonymously talk to other people at their companies in a private forum, or with people at other companies publicly to all members. They validate employment using your email address. As could be expected many of the topics devolve into toxic messes, but there is some useful discussion.

Yep. It sucks in many, many ways, but it also is full of info on negotiation, interview processes at many companies, and salary/offer sharing.

I had no idea how much more money I could be making until I signed up there. Deleted the app as soon as I signed an offer sheet.

Only available to people in the US and South Korea at the moment, apparently.

A pity, but I guess they need lawyers in every country they do business in.

This isn't true, there's plenty of non-US people on Blind including me.

Currently to register in the app you have to select US or South Korea. They are setting a strong expectation that you should only do so from one of those countries, which makes it seem unlikely to me that I will find any colleagues -most of move would not think to fake their location. They also won't let you leave a review without a location in the US or South Korea. Makes it all a bit pointless if your company is not in those countries.

Maybe they changed this since you registered?

No, just select US. There's plenty of foreigners still.

One of the most toxic environments on the internet, filled with people who define themselves by their employment at big tech, and how large their salaries are. Think WallStreetBets meets tech but with less self-deprecation and emotional maturity, if you can imagine it.

It's 3rd party app that you can join your company's forum if you have an email address with the company domain.

It's like Nextdoor but for employees of a particular company where people can vent, spread rumors, and at times share useful information.

teamblind.com

One of the things I do to get Amazon recruiters to leave me the hell alone is to respond to their emails with a link to the most recent public AMZN snafu and urge them to quit - it's funny/sad how each time I respond I can quickly find 3-5 new links no more than a few months old.

A thought: be nice to recruiters. They're generally nice people who are underpaid for the work they do (usually). They're in a really tough business.

And if you want a selfish take: Maybe today they're working for Amazon, but tomorrow they may be doing the same job at your dream company. They have too many people to try reaching out to, and they may remember your name.

For years I asked them to put me on their do not contact list. I eventually asked someone with authority. Whenever I am still contacted by managers, I simply forward that email with a polite note to that stakeholder. I get apologies and they get a lesson in their responsibilities from someone to which they are liable.

"Hey, thanks for reaching out, I'm not interested in new opportunities right now"

There. Copy. Paste. Done

Thoughts on responding at all? Does anyone expect it? It's not some humble brag but simple fact that I feel inundated and incapable of responding to all the messages I get. I leave every recruiter on read until I'm looking for a new job. Bad etiquette?

It'll be fine now, but when the next downturn hits you'll probably regret it.

I've gotten a bunch of interesting opportunities over the years by virtue of being nice to recruiters, even when I'm not looking.

I just tell them how much it would cost to get me to up and move to Canada or the US to work for them, just to be equal to my situation here in Europe.

That usually stops them pretty quickly :)

Haha, this is the way.

Over the last 2 years I started to receive a lot of unwanted recruit spam both in my email and through Linkedin. I used to ignore them and get angry. Now my response is quite straightforward: Sure, I am happy to talk if you can offer me $250,000 USD, Work from Home (I live in Mexico) and X, Y, Z benefits that I currently have.

This also applies for the ones that want to have a call to you for a "mysterious client" ( particularly for exec positions), usually just wasting your time. You are the one that contacted me, if you want to get my time better be for something good. It usually isn't.

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