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The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one:

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1...

and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.

How does me, a single person and a simple SDE, being defensive (was I being defensive just because I wanted to clear up misconceptions?), says anything about an entire company's culture and image?

You called him a liar. That's pretty defensive.

Personally, I have no trouble buying a lot of what he's selling, not least because I've seen his posts around here for a good while and he seems like a decent sort, but it also dovetails with my own experience. YMMV, but I'm not calling you a liar.

Not to butt in, but if someone says something untrue, they are a liar. If I accused Amazon of killing babies, that would be a lie (I hope?), and you wouldn't be being defensive by calling me out for it.

Strictly speaking, it has to be knowingly untrue for it to be a lie. It is possible to just be wrong.

For the record, everything I said was true, and after calling me a liar, he effectively admitted it!

It seems fair to call someone a liar if you know they've said something factually untrue. (I'm no weighing in on the debate itself, but it's possible for someone to be factually wrong and it's appropriate to highlight that when it happens.)

You can be correct in the face of untruth and still be shitty and defensive about something; remember that Reddit storm when the CEO beefed with a fired employee?

I'm somewhat doubting that MCRed is lying, because he has some credibility to me through a history of good and productive posting, but it's possible.

The he-said/she-said of these comments makes me think that nobody is actively distorting, but that it's just such a big company that different people can have wildly differing experiences.

There are people who are low level enough to maybe not have seen this stuff.

But I also saw stuff that, like that letter, I consider to be wrong. The latter refers to criminal actions-- I am not a lawyer so I can't say whether what the company did was illegal or not, but I certainly thought it was wrong.

One thing about that letter that rang true in my experience was that the company does not follow its own internal policies or handbook.

Amazon HR was dishonest to me, deceptive and engaged in what I consider to be fraud.

This. I don't know any other major tech company that generates these horror stories with such a reliable regularity.

Could you expand a little on how Amazon does stack ranking in a more palatable way? As a consumer, I love Amazon, but I have heard a lot of horror stories first-hand from an Amazon employee about this very thing.

You won't get fired for no reason, but you do get compared with your colleagues.

But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better leader and influencing more people. There are people who spend 10 years as SDE II and are happy with it, because they don't care about leading others, they just care about doing their job, and this is fine.

Thank you for your response. I haven't actually heard any complaints about promotion. Most of the noise I've heard has to do with firing, namely that less-tenured managers feel pressure to get rid of a higher percentage of their team members than managers that have a lot of years and political capital built-up in the company.

However I suppose that it stands to reason that perhaps that phenomena is due to the fact that greener managers may have greener engineers working under them who are perhaps more prone to mistakes or may not be a good fit.

So if you make a mistake at Amazon your job is on the line? Wouldn't that incentive developers to be extremely risk adverse and play politics? Is it a "mistake" to get assigned to a project that is doomed? And what about the whole learning from your mistakes or the idea of mentoring?

Yes, although it has to be a little more complicated than 1 mistake => in trouble, I think this is essentially the complaint of a lot of stack ranking dissenters.

Not true, if you are in the lower %20 you will get fired. That's the pressure to "get rid". Of course they will let you "resign" instead of get fired, and if you refuse they will give you a financial incentive to resign. This keeps the "stats" better, and probably where boredoso gets his nonsense.

But here's the real kicker that makes the company so stupid- if you're on the lower half of the rank, you're blocked from moving to another team.

Even though the HR policy is that your manager can't block you from an internal transfer, that's not reality. Which means when you're wrongly assigned to a team with a bad manager or a bad fit, you better bounce quick, or you're stuck there until you leave the company.

Can you imagine what they (Amazon) are trying to achieve with the "can't transfer if you're in the bottom 50%" policy? I can understand your frustration but at its core there has to be some sort of quasi-reasonable objective for the policy.

I'd assume it's literally because their management philosophy holds that half of all employees are not good enough to deserve being rewarded with a transfer. Or perhaps they're trying to protect managers running poorer-performing teams from getting hit with so many outgoing transfer requests.

"barely stack ranking" means stack ranking, which speaks a lot to the type of organization that would employ it against software engineers. It may be effective for certain types of workers--sales people, for example--but it's disastrously inappropriate for creative professionals.

> As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE.

This is not strictly true. I was at Amazon for 4 years (2004 - 2008 in Supply Chain and Retail), I had 3 managers. Only 1 of them was a former SDE.

Hum, interesting, but SDMs still need to know how to code, it's even part of the interview process, do you know if this is true 100% of the time?

Don't get me wrong. My managers were (are) extremely smart. They did know how to "code" for the most likely definition of the word code. But that doesn't mean I would trust them to write a feature or to review what I wrote. They just didn't have the day-to-day knowledge to know what did and didn't work in the code base I was in.

And do I know if what is true 100% of the time? Asking coding questions in a SDM loop? I have no idea. While I was there, I was only on TPM and SDE loops.

In my experience, similar time there, three managers, none of them knew how to code, and their managers varied- one was decent, one was a DMV reject.

But when I say they couldn't code, I mean that literally-- for one example degree in criminal justice, no knowledge of software practices, etc. This isn't another way of saying they were "bad programmers". No bad programmers can make great managers.

Bederoso, I really liked your balanced comment, versus MCRed's derogatory one. I have worked at AWS for 6+ years and left a little over a year ago, and I pretty much agree with all the corrections you made.

I think Amazon is not an easy company to work at, mostly because engineers are squeezed like lemons but they don't benefit much from it. However, this can also happen at "cool" startups, or other large companies such as Apple.

Also, a couple of things are lies (but every company has its own set of lies); AWS was never based on Amazon's extra capacity, but that's something that came out and stayed there for years. And also, the "large volume, low margins" is not true in the case of AWS.

Other than that, I think that I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to have worked there; I've learned a ton and thanks to that I got a job I couldn't dream of ten years ago.

There is a significant difference between "stack ranking" and "forced distribution rating scale." Most companies use the latter, the former is much more rare.

The practice at Amazon was like Microsoft in function. %20 were "underperforming" no matter how well they did. It was rolled up from team, to group, level, etc.

Politics was a huge factor. If a team worked really hard during the quarter and got a lot done, but hadn't shipped their feature yet, they risked all bering in the "underperforming" category, simply to allow a peer team to have more "over performers" to reward them-- for actually delivering or for sufficiently sucking off the appropriate boss (or not getting knives in your back.)

There were a lot of (metaphorical) blowjobs and knives in the back in that organization.

Which is what you have to have when ALL of the management is non-technical.

You can't have a meritocracy when the people assigning ratings are incapable of judging merit.

If I was lying, may Amazon's lawyers strike me down and take me to court! I would love to reveal my experiences there, and of course, the truth is an unbeatable defense. I certainly have more salacious tidbits than the Ellen Pao trial revealed. Including personal experiences with Jeff Bozo.

>Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.

Telling a lie about me to attempt to impeach my point is what's known as ad hominem.

>As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE.

FALSE. During my time there I had multiple managers (due to re-orgs.) and NOT ONE of them was a former SDE.

Not one of them was competent enough to manage programmers. None of them knew what a service oriented architecture was, or how version control worked (they thought of it as a backup), or how to write a simple program in ANY language. And this was true all the way between me and Bezos.

>The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon

FALSE. It is exactly the same, with managers having to lobby, and whole teams of people who are "out of favor" with an upper manager getting lower salary because of the higher level stack.

>I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid

You impeach yourself by admitting that Amazon uses stack ranking which directly contradicts this claim.

Amazon is a terrible place to work at-- in an extensive career, it was, by far, the worst job.

Not only because of the problems, but because the management doesn't give a damn, and is actually hostile to employees-- that's what makes it really bad.

All companies have problems. Amazon has fundamental disrespect for engineers.

>> If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types.

> As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.

Totally untrue. I spent many years at Amazon, with most of my managers being managers by trade and half of them being openly non-technical.

>> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back

> The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).

If you are not a manager, you do not have direct visibility into this process and cannot make this claim. If you are a manager, then you're aware that every department is run very differently and should also be aware that some of them are very political.

I'm curious on what you think separates Amazon's interpretation of stack ranking from the "bad" versions, or how it is "barely" stack ranking at all.