Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Imagine getting paid to do it.
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn’t fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn’t need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn’t like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn’t feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it’s employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.
Sounds like whoever decides these things knows nothing about IT.
they don’t. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are “well it’s 1am and I just got a call…I’m going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I’m doing” annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering “what’s the point?”
I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.
Its not an initiation, it’s hazing
I wonder if you’re actually right. I’ve held positions I had no business holding. Ended up having to escalate half across the world anyway. But sure got my feet wet. Don’t know how much the company lost. Sorry, companies.
“You are saying you are superfluous to the organization, gotcha.”
Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.
deleted by creator
As long as I fuck over more people than fuck me over, I’m ahead.
deleted by creator
Zero Sum Party 4 Lyfe.
Not untrue. I don’t understand or give a fuck about the business side. Same goes for my business colleagues about software.
How do “real” engineers handle this shit? I feel like IT shouldn’t have to reinvent it
I fought for getting a 4/5 rating at an old job and gave lots of examples. Their argument was that I didn’t deserve it because those were just expected. I pointed out my work compared to others in my team and was told that it compares across the company, not the team. I kept causing a fuss about it because I was so angry about it and finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less. I was confused because I didn’t want more money, I was just offended they said I was performing on average when I was going above and beyond every day. It was also really embarrassing to me. If they’d just said the rating doesn’t affect anything except your bonus I wouldn’t have even cared.
The whole thing is all BS.
finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less
That’s because they have a fixed budget and the proportions are tied to evaluated performance tiers, increasing your rating would contractually require them to compensate you more from the same pool of money
You’re falling for the “we’ve constructed this machine to tell you no so you can’t argue with us” ploy
No, as I said to another, upper management has every opportunity to fix the budget. Your direct manager however can not
I’ve found that laughing in their faces and putting in 2 weeks is fairly effective at breaking that wall. Amazing what money they can find when faced with the alternative. Otherwise, the correct move is to actually leave. All of you cowards that submit to the machine make it worse for everyone.
And I have in fact left that kind of jobs myself. Not trivial in a job market like this one though.
Need to make unions stronger again.
Yeah, no shit, thank you for repeating what I said. The point being I never cared about the money and didn’t even understand it was only about the money. I only wanted recognition.
That fixed budget is what they always say. The budget for the company is their problem, not yours.
Upper management can certainly increase the budget. Your line manager probably can’t
Yeah exactly. So it keeps everyone in their place, powerless to change anything within the structure that exist. Exactly as intended.
Haha, the same. Was doing great, supported customer calls, onboarding new engineers, along with ongoing incoming tickets and got 3/5, wrote a few good and a dozen bad RFCs.
Then the manager had the audacity to ask why I am changing the company with a 40% raise. I could’ve asked for promotion, he said.
You will soon become just as jaded as the rest of us, and stop expecting your company to appreciate you. It wont feel good but you can change jobs often and get your salary up without any feelings of illusional loyalty.
Is that why they are gradually replacing the bad AWS Console UI with something 10x worse?
Apart from being slow, having discoverability issues, not being able combine filters and actions so that you frequently need to fall back to shell scripts for basic functionality, it being a complete PITA to compare things between accounts / regions, advanced functionality requiring you to directly edit JSON files, things randomly failing and the error message being carefully hidden away, the poor audit trail functionality to see who-changed-what, and the fact that putting anything complex together means spinning so many plates that Terraform’ing all your infrastructure looks like the easy way; I’ll have you know there’s nothing wrong with the AWS Console UI.
Funnily enough I joke all the time that the new UI is a subtle ploy to get us to terraform everything. Still PITA when you want see what is fucked up in an API Gateway route… So… Much… Wasted… Space
You get the behavior your incentives encourage, whether you realize what those behaviors are or not.
Yep, this is the culture I keep running head first into as I try to level up my career.
Man, it’s so frustrating. I just can’t turn off my own qualms with shitty corporate culture and it means I will be less successful by the metrics we’ve set ourselves.
It’s ironic how so many of us find ourselves being extremely valuable for the exact reasons they can’t stand us. As IT, I’m used to being seen as nothing more than red marks on a budget to the folks making decisions. The only thing they hate more than listening to us, is when they have to.
Kinda got a chip on my shoulder today it seems.
This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.
It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.
I worked in a heavily regulated industry. Everything required a manual test. Let’s say you have an employee ID that is 10 digits long which they use to log in. You had to have some else (couldn’t be the developer) to write a series of tests, get those tests approved by 5 people(with specific titles) then a third person to execute the test, then the second person had to write a report saying it all passed, then that report had to be approved by the same 5 people.
That typically wasn’t the delay. The delay was to execute the tests we needed to stop production. That typically was a 6 week wait(unless urgent for “reasons”) and changes like “I will drop scrap by 83%” was typically told wait till July 4th or Christmas breaks. Why? Because production would be down for 3-4 days typically. Someone had to start the system, ok no entry produces error, executor and developer have to sign a physical paper, restart the whole system, now an entry of 1 digit produces an error, sign the form, repeat for all digit quantities up to 9, repeat for all digit quantities up to the choosen value(based on severity if an issue occurred), 2 people sign for each one, system restarted between each. If you had say an enter button and a cancel button each had to be checked for each quantities of digits. Oh but wait what if someone just types there name… Now repeat everything for alphabet values… What if someone does combination, more tests, more restarts, more signing.
Reports easily surpassed 1000 pages, no one really had time to check all that so I saw so many missed signatures and missed tests. I asked the “senior validation expert” can I just automate a lot of these tests using unit tests and attach a computer generated report of all tests passing and the source code of the tests? " the response I got was" what’s a unit test? "they still don’t use any of them to my knowledge.
Similar boat, it’s kinda frustrating that it takes 6 months to approve 30 minutes of work, but at least the job is boring.
Sounds about right. There is no longer any incentive to focus on maintenance and incremental improvement (the stuff that actually keeps the lights on and the revenue flowing). It’s all about the new and shiny–even when it results in regression.
Which is why AI and vibe coding will survive. Besides the part where it’s not my code, the company owns it. The fuck do I care how good it is. If it works and gets me a promoted or moved to a new spot in a different company. Heck yeah. Issues down the road are not my problem.
Personal project: page load takes under 10kB and any button or link loads in millisecond.
Work project: Fuck it 26MB page load. It’s not like the pages load in under 5s before anyway.
I’m in business operations, downstream from you guys. Reading posts like these are helping me understand better what you all are going through.
We had several of our systems “upgraded” and broke a lot of our tools. The dev team vanished off to work on the next shiny bullshit “upgrade” and turned my 15 minute tickets into 3-4 hour tickets.
My manager was telling me to ping someone and let them know. After nothing happened there, I started opening tickets. After about 140 in 2 weeks, I finally got someone’s attention and we’re grudgingly getting a couple devs assigned to start repairing the automation that broke.
I am sorry to have to do that, but our entire team was drowning and pinging someone on teams with API errors wasn’t getting anything done.
It’s a terrible working arrangement in most companies–particularly between dev and infrastructure teams. “Legacy” sysadmins that were previously celebrated for maintaining rock-solid environments with high uptime are now denigrated (and eliminated) when they can’t make up a new shiny for MBA managers (who are not real leaders)–to peddle the same bullshit to senior executives.
It’s all fucked.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If he did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
Removed by mod
Fire the manager too.
This is directly caused by squeezing promos down to making your skip level manager horny for the sound of your work instead of having any actual impact on what you are doing.
Its all such stupid horse shit.
“Why does X feature in Y app/game/device take so long??”
This is why
Flawless victory.
All of you who can’t understand the concept of feature complete (see syncthing drama for example) find something useful to do. I promise it’s out there.
So that’s why we suffer enshitification.
Those who succumb to the Socio-Economic and climb it so.
“Upwards mobility”.
