Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

I also left Amazon after ~10mo. I've written about this elsewhere, but the short version is:

* New manager who was a nice guy but didn't help me or other folks onboard

* A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire.

* SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, and he said he "didn't know" what we owned. I asked him for help configuring a monitor for a service, and he said he couldn't figure it out while literally backing away from my desk slowly.

* A culture within our team in which no one was willing or able to help others out. It was very much every man for himself.

I GTFO of there and have been happy across the lake since. Paying back my signing bonus was well worth the significant reduction in stress and quality of life.

Friend is a recruiter at that company across the lake and says she reaches out to Amazon folks when they hit the 1 and 2 year marks a lot - says she gets relatively higher response rates than industry standards when she does that.

What's the company across the lake - Microsoft?

Almost surely

Assuming the lake is Lake Washington, it looks like it.

was the sde3 just faking ignorance so he didn't have to help you out?

Possibly making sure that GP was at the bottom of the stack rank and looking out for his own neck.

That's what I assume his motives were.

Oof that sounds super devious.

Not really. It's just a human responding to the incentives they're given. When management creates poor incentive structures, they get poor behavior, which drives poor outcomes.

As they say - the problem with incentives is that they work.

Or to say a different way - don't hate the player, hate the game.

more like you get a system where only sociopaths will remain because everyone else will just get a new job

What do you do when that system successfully creates a $2 trillion empire that seems to only be getting stronger and more established?

The larger meta game of civilization obviously rewards this kind of subsystem, so again...

Don't hate the player (Amazon's toxic corporate culture), hate the game (the civilization that rewards them with dominance).

Isn't this just Capitalism gaslighting us into being shitty people, and allowing shitty behavior?

Like we say "well that's the incentive" like that makes it ok?

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