I Got Fired from Amazon as a Software Development Engineer
primitivehacker.medium.com
primitivehacker.medium.com
absolutely. and document all conversations. Staying calm is an acquired skill that I've tried to mentor in to my hires, and it is even more important to maintain if you are being set up to fail instead of supported to succeed.
I can see how he snapped over his moron manager bringing gender into things.
I’ve worked in similar environments where an SVP ignored all communications about a project until it was useful for them to be interested and gaslight everything that had happened and had been communicated before. In fact, the stink wasn’t on anyone involved, but the project itself. There’s a way to come out of these things unscathed, but righteous indignation usually is never particularly effective.
If this is an accurate description of what went down, including verb tenses, it’s bad for multiple reasons: leave gender out, don’t refer to oneself in the 3rd person and watch what you say as nobody should willingly be an asshole.
Perhaps the lesson is also that we have to aggressively cya. With records of the no answers and the like, it reduces the who said what bs. And maybe, we have to train people to act professionally vs. putting up with bs.
There’s another aspect I always get - they knew what they were getting into or it became clear pretty quick and they went in or continued just for the money.
What never gets mentioned is “best and brightest” minds rhetoric that I see in posts and comments online. They say it’s so fast paced, toxic, burn outs causing the revolving door of attrition to move constantly that there’s no time to meaningfully do this “interacting with those proverbial super minds”
For example a US company will be different to work at if you are in an office in a country with strong labour laws.
I am a SDE at Amazon and I can tell you for a fact that so far the majority of the projects I've been involved roll out exactly like this. The excuses vary, and fortunately I haven't seen the inclusion card in play yet, but all the gaslighting and sacrificial lamb elements and shifting responsibilities and career tactics are ever present.
> if you were hired for a specific team, and you feel is a bad match, you can talk to your recruiter/hiring manager and they will find you another team.
I have to call bullshit on this. Either you play that out in stealth mode until you are sure the other team picks you, or you are in a world of pain. As soon as you click on the recruiter button, your SDM and senior SDM are notified immediately, and if you are not in the best terms with them they can and more often than not do screw up with your plans and even your job. There's a horror story around my corner of the org of someone who wanted out of his team and simply did what you said should be done, but long story short his transfer was sabotaged by the SDM who afterwards placed him in a performance improvement plan with no return.
> But for them to fire you like that you have to be doing pretty bad, or maybe your manager felt you were a bad person.
No, not at all, at least from what I see on a daily basis. All it takes is that you get in the way of your manager's career goals. They have attrition metrics and goals and you have your yearly Forte to cull the herd and keep the average tenure below 3 years.
Never hang up on a colleague. Ever. As far as social phone etiquette goes that’s probably one of the most egregious things you can do.
Instead, humble yourself, politely disagree and document over email, copying another colleague who witnessed, or if unavailable the manager (in this case the skip).
If a conversation is getting too heated, excusing yourself and taking a beat isn't the worst thing in the world.
Definitely could be wrong tho
If someone is hell bent on that, you must minimize your vulnerability surface.
So just distance yourself emotionally, act professional and document stuff.
Note: if YTA this may work against you. Either way the NTA has the documented proof they need.
At a previous job I had a product manager that was trying to get me fired because I was refusing to work on some "high priority" projects where we were being dictated the scope and timeline. My team, for some reason, was absolutely craven. They just let me take the heat and then in private conversations thank me for speaking up.
Our PM was new and it was easier to put pressure on us than tell some VP their pet project wasn't getting done. The relationship between both of us went extremely south.
When my PM complained, both of our bosses got sucked into a meeting about me. I was able to respond with plenty of documentation as well as coworker testimony that cleared me of doing anything wrong. Even though I had actual resentment of this person, it was never displayed.
It's clear to me that my PM looked bad by badmouthing me to coworkers, and communicating to me in emotionally aggressive ways. I think OP is making a political mistake by showing emotional outbursts. It makes it too easy to discredit the substance of their argument as simply being a personal issue.
This isn't any judgement on the developer. Management can get a lot of stupid ideas about why they need to get rid of someone. Maybe the developer picked a bad time to use the restroom and his manager didn't see him immediately available whenever the manager walked around the room to find a target to micromanage. A toxic project can tend to taint anyone involved on it, even if the person working on it is doing a stellar job, given the circumstance.
In big corporations, there really is no "working your way up" or "working from behind". If you get stuck in a shit project, it really doesn't matter what you do. Either the company will attrit through developers until the project is no longer a hot potato and then the next developer to get it will get to stick around for a while, or (more likely, due to the lack of continuity) eventually the project gets canned. No apologies will be issued.
I'm going to guess there's more to "gave my manager a piece of my mind" than described that led to firing
If you're a good engineer who wants to make a real difference in the world, then I ask why not work at different company with less technical aptitude? You can make a far greater impact solving their problems instead of trying to stand out in a technocratic cult that gaslights you and suppresses your creativity.
I think it is the opposite.
No one is going to fire you over shipping a kludge or low quality software, especially when you document why it is the case. People get themselves into trouble by getting emotionally invested in their work and avoiding the task at hand. If someone gives you an idiotic task at Amazon, give them an idiotic solution. You are right though, if you want purpose and real meaning behind your work seek it out elsewhere.
That stuff is from comedy, not reality. You can't make the world a better place from your computer. You can make money, you can build nice programs, but not make the world a better place.
I think there are some serious problems in this world that we can help solve from our computers, and in addition to the company making some profit, the world as a whole can also benefit.
We will see.
And I’m not even interested in intergalactic salaries but yes very good pay.
Amazon usually takes 3 months or so to fire people for real or imagined “poor performance”, so this engineer must have said something pretty bad on the call.
Amazon certainly won't "fire you on the spot" in most cases; that gets them all sorts of trouble. However, if something got screwed up and your name is on it, I'm sorry to say it's just a matter of time before it comes up in a review cycle.
There are good folks at Amazon. Really. But as a whole, I don't see evidence of a company that even attempts to see the long-term value of people.
If you ever get slotted for a PIP (such a cute name...), it's probably better to look for new employment as soon as possible.
I mean that’s like literally the dictionary meaning of PIP :)
In my last firm we called it Period of Interview Preparation.
If no one can bring production down this is also a problem. If only one person can, better hope they don't get hit by a bus, or take a vacation, or rage quit.
Was that code merged without any review? If so, that is a recipe for disaster. Why no unit tests, integration tests, QA? What was the speed at which the outage was resolved? If a sane deployment strategy is in place, I'd hope that no big damage was actually done; if the error budget was burning fast, there should be some manual/automatic rollback.
tl;dr they may have been a key factor in the outage, but it seems like it is a symptom of a deeper hole in the process.
"What an imbalance of power and being an engineer who feels a strong desire to empower other engineers, I reached my limits and wanted out. A few weeks later, a developer on a neighboring team who reported to the same management resigned."
At least at Netflix they pay more cash and if I get fired after a year I have it in my bank.
This is what kept me out of Amazon. The over-emphasis on RSUs for compensation was clearly a half-scam designed to avoid paying full salary out to people and to try to squeeze anyone who was on the fence about leaving.
Sometimes it can be some real money. At AOL in 1996, I cleared more than $80k from stock options, which was more than my base salary for the year. But I ended up walking away from stock options at AOL that would have been as much as $16m, if I had managed to find a way to stay there. But the place has just become too toxic.
I’ve also been at places where I theoretically had stock or stock options, and they wound up being literally worthless.
Stock and stock options for employees are meant to be a form of golden handcuffs.
That’s why I don’t include them in my consideration of what I would be compensated for at a job. If I get some extra money that year, great! If not, then I’m not too dejected.
You can think about it this way. When you join, Amazon takes part of the money they need to pay you in year 3 & 4 and buy with it Amazon stock which you can sell only in year 3 & 4. (one difference is that you pay income tax on it when you receive it and not capital gain tax)
Say after 10 months you have a medical issue, that means you quit to focus on healing and lose your bonus.
Wot? Really? What on earth makes the author think that is true for all software engineers? It certainly isn’t for me.
Is it, though? Personally I prefer to be a big cog in a small machine.
At least, I think so. Sometimes the world changes while I’m looking the other way.