I want to preface this comment with a statement that in no way am I trying to blame the victim here, only to point out what can be learned from this situation.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of Amazon being a shitty place to work at, and I don't see much reason to doubt the story of a vindictive boss doing everything they can to make an employee miserable after learning that the employee submitted bad feedback against them.
The two lessons I can extract from this post for myself are.
1. Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work, especially against a particular person, especially your boss.
It's been covered on HN before how these things are never really anonymous and confidential, and it should be kind of obvious to figure out if you think about it.
2. If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
Re: Number 2: This is a common pattern in all big American companies. Hire an H1B, make the employee an indentured slave forever. H1B employées born in India and China have to wait 10+ years for a green card to break free from indentured servitude. While you can switch jobs on an H1B, it's risky and if it screws up, your queue position gets reset.
Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
This is true, I left my previous company because they said I had to wait 1 year to apply for my green card. According to the HR lady this was the policy (there was no policy) and it was always better from an immigration point of view to wait more. Of course this is all bullshit. This was just a dirty strategy to keep people one extra year.
> Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
I have some experience with how LMIA is not perfect, but I was excited when the administration was openly considering copying it ~18 months ago, because it's hard to imagine anything between H1B and LMIA which is worse than H1B (whether from the perspective of a protectionist, a progressive, or a common liberal).
LMIA seems like a balance. In LMIA, the employer is made to test the local labour market before applying for a visa, rather than an LCA in which the USCIS trusts the employer's word.
The LCA process also forces the employer to test the labor market first. It's all theater, and based on 20 year-old business practices (you have to publish your job ad in a major newspaper and some other places, of which one option is to have it be read out loud by a local radio station!), but it's not like you can skip through that process. How does LMIA compare here?
However an lmia supported work permit it's the employee's and not employer's, meaning that if you get fired you can still stay in the country and find another job. You do need to apply for the Visa again for the next job but being in Canada already makes it much simpler. Essentially you aren't at your employer mercy.
Also if you work for one year you usually already have enough points for PR, once you apply for a pr you gain the right for a BOWP visa, which is essentially an open work permit that allows you to work for any employer until a final decision in your PR is made.
IANAL but went through all of above and am now a pr
Slight exception in Quebec though. Quebec has its own immigration rules & policies. Quebec do not follow rest of Canada's Express Entry or provincial nomination. In regards to obtaining a skilled work permit in Quebec, its a longer process with Federal + Provincial involvement. ie: LMIA (Federal) + CAQ (Quebec).
In Quebec there are no BOWP. So if you lost your job, you have to move out of Quebec province and get another LMIA work permit. Getting a permanent residency while working and residing in Quebec is not easy as Quebec's immigration system and policies are archaic and downright broken with more importance given to French language than any other employable skills. Recently 18,000 Quebec applications were downright rejected by Quebec in the name of bringing in a new skill based immigration system.
I would suggest anyone looking to move to Quebec in a skilled work permit or applying for residency while residing in Quebec to refrain from it as it will take at least 4 years (CSQ - 2 years + Federal - 2 years ) instead of 6 months in comparison with the rest of Canada. This applies to foreign students who come to study in Quebec too.
I have been through LCA some years back before I called bullshit on H1B and immigrated to Canada for good. For LCA, the advertisement was done on a local newspaper which no one reads and the job was posted on the company pantry notice board with a broad confusing salary range 65K - 130K. It was also posted on the company's career page where no one could find it easily. The employer that I worked for was a top 10. They were just playing the system to bring in cheap H1B workers on chains.
LMIA on the other hand, has advertisement requirements like LCA and a transition plan as well. They are particularly strict on the transition plan including one of which is assisting the worker for permanent residence !
I've left some scathing feedback in reviews. Frequently spelled out in a way that they could figure out it was me even if it was anonymous. The trick is to not complain about your treatment, but explain why management is taking actions detrimental to the company.
Don't say "boss made me work late and I want to quit". Say "management is overextending the team and it's eroding morale and will likely cause retention issues".
Re #1: I realize this is the safest option for your own self-preservation, if you don't give negative feedback, how do you expect your work environment to change?
The way I see it, if you're in a bad situation at work, you have two options: try to change it, or leave. If you're going to leave anyway, why not at least try to improve your situation first so you give yourself the best chance of success? And that way, the company has the opportunity to remove or remediate a bad manager.
Basically, my reaction to your #1 is that it helps you avoid getting hurt by the worst possible scenario. But personally, I think it's a better strategy to maximize your chance at a good scenario.
Pro-tip: never expect your work environment to change. The chances of a report overcoming the whims of a shitty manager are very, very small especially in the context of a company that tolerates the shitty manager in the first place.
Generally speaking, the best thing to do is to smile, appear to do reasonably decent work, and begin looking elsewhere.
I second this. You'll almost never convince upper management the smooth-talking buddies they promoted could ever possibly be terrible to their employees.
Well, you could. It sometimes works. The problem is when the manager who manages your shitty manager moves away, and you get a new one. Good managers always get promoted or move away, only the terrible ones stay. The shitty manager will start afresh to get onto you.
Trying to change things might be an acceptable strategy in other industries, but I don't think it works in technology because the accepted method of achieving worker/workplace fit is to change jobs. This goes not only for bad management but also for raises (even if you like your current job).
Easiest way to improve your situation in software engineering is to just get a better job and move laterally or up.
For that exact reason, cultural changes in the workplace come from the top down, always.
Believing you can change it will virtually never yield any positive results to yourself. Even if you don't get fired, you will be labeled as the one who complains.
If I'm being honest^Wcynical, all you should care about at work is how great people think you are. It helps if you are at least half as good as people think, but it's sadly not a requirement.
You need to understand how your boss takes feedback and tailor your comments accordingly. I’ve had some managers I’ve felt free to give candid feedback to and others who just don’t take feedback well so you find another way to force change.
>>Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work
Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
The dirty little secret of human relationships is every one wants to be made to feel special, error less and look good. Only thing any kind of feed back, correction or criticism leads to is rivalry/enmity, and it won't end well. The question is not if some thing like that happens, but to what degree.
There are stories going back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, where he refuses to even criticize big mistakes made by generals during the civil war. If that is what some one in the position of Abe Lincoln, in a matter as serious as Civil war did, your code review feedback can wait. Nothing productive ever comes out of these processes.
If you absolutely have to display allegiance to political cartels at work. Wait until a clear leadership superiority is established, Meanwhile use silence and smile as a strategic activity to avoid getting shafted.
There can be no friends at work. In stack ranked systems, with subjective evaluation. You need to follow the Kissinger doctrine. No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Seen too much of this to realize to leave people/systems on their own.
Lincoln did criticize his generals, eventually removing McClellan from command for timidity. He was careful about how he did that though, and how he interacted with the rest of the general staff. But he proved to have a better grasp of strategy than most of them, which he was able to implement once he found Grant.
You're correct he was reluctant to overtly criticize, but the lesson to take away isn't to just not criticize. It's to be diplomatic and patient when trying to effect change. Being a natural leader, brilliant, and with great strategic intuition also helps :-)
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
> There can be no friends at work.
I think that's a bad advice. I'm sad that this is an experience someone can take from a job and that there are jobs where this applies. Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
Not every place is so restrictive and full of backstabbers. And if it is, maybe it's worth discovering that and leaving.
>>Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
This really is the equivalent of marking a giant X on your back and walking in to an arena full of ace snipers.
I have literally seen people being labelled as non-team players and eliminated for arguing against bad technical decisions. In most departments projects are started to gain visibility of high impact work- on which they will later ride to get to rewards and promotions. Disagreeing means telling them they have to eliminate you for their project to happen.
They will get their project eventually. Congratulations, you have now been marked as some that needs to eliminated for them have a good career. And they will deal with you appropriately.
This happens in all people structures. People are the same everywhere, in all times. Don't be in the delusion that some companies are special enough that it won't happen there.
If some one is in a position of power. Any debate, disagreement or criticism is a bad move to make against them.
I've been doing it for over a decade. I've only experienced a bad reaction to criticism twice. Either I'm really lucky or your experience is really bad. Either way, I know I'm not staying in a place where you can't exchange constructive criticism, because alternatives really exist. This sounds like trying to explain an abusive relationship - what you're experiencing is unhealthy, there are better places, unless you're going to go homeless, maybe you should try?
Sure there is. Maintainability in the future, non-obvious edge cases, potential security issues, etc. Either you keep each other accountable for stuff like that or end up with a monster system which you can't realistically work on.
"criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall" is a depressing way to look at it. Try "collectively learning about better approaches on a company-wide visible text wall". You'll need to convince people that it's one and not the other.
All your arguments are valid, in ideal scenarios. In an ideal scenario any comment or feedback should be taken in the right spirit and acted upon.
But in these days of stack ranking and subjective evaluations. You giving a lot of feedback can be considered of lack of ability to write good code on the part of that person(after-all if they could write good code, why would it get so much criticism?). Then the next thing that happens- Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack. Your colleague will and right so think you are actively criticizing them to ensure you get promoted over them.
Enmity and rivalry begins from there. Then they could raid your CR wall and do the same to you. Then all kinds of backstabbing and self-promotion activities start.
Before you know it you would have made a few enemies within the team.
> Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack
Then you have a management problem, not a cr problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees... It's on management to communicate that cr is constructive, doesn't contribute to reviews, and isn't a game.
Not every workplace is as sociopathic. And I would rather emulate people who have ethical limits rather then those who seek power regarless of how much they lie or cause harm .
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
This rule is creating problems. It actively makes relationships and work itself worst. It creates leads to passive aggressive environment where everyone is insecure and in doubt and problems wont get solved.
> There can be no friends at work.
Same here.
> No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Same here too. I am glad I worked in mutually cooperative environment where people took my interests into account and did not based all their actions on their own interest.
Robert Greene's books: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and The Laws of Human Nature.
Stealing the Corner office by Brendan Reid
Assorted works of Niccolo Machiavelli and Balatazar Gracian.
It will be hard to impossible to make transition even after reading these books, but at least you can detect and avoid problems at work. Or at best set up a firewall around you.
Lastly expecting goodness from people is wrong. The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
I'm afraid I disagree with your last statement. It is possible that perhaps I've just been so fortunate that all the people I've ever come across are mostly similar in what they want from life. It seems to be the same all over the world: general well being, safety and security of their family and their future.
People disagree on priorities and not everyone's incentives are the same but I've never felt that by default people are bad. I'm no scientist (or sage) and just an average human. So, this is just how I see things and not based on expert scientific inquiry. Make of it what you will.
> The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
Nope, people are not bad. People are neutral, equally capable of good or evil. Just don't assume anyone except your mother loves you unconditionally and you should be fine :)
I'm only suggesting you wear a seat belt when you drive. You seem to be suggesting I'm a sociopath for wearing a seatbelt and not trust fellow car drivers on the road.
You need to understand how department wide politics work. There are fixed budgets when it comes to giving raises, bonuses and RSUs. The person who negotiates and deals better wins. That means lesser for everyone. Note how even without wanting to harm you, they actually have. Then come the second rounds of power play. One way to negotiate is to prove they are better, second way to prove it is you are not. Setting team mates up for failure happens all the time, even without one realizing it. Plenty of other things happen. Actively building a bad case for other people. It might not be overt, but leave a bad CR comment or two, keep doing it actively. Make it a point to drop a bad comment or feedback for the person you might want to harm. Then over a time you tend to build a case against them mentally in the mind of your manager. These tactics are super common. Wrong people get promoted, and right people get shafted all the time.
In almost every company- promotions, raises and RSUs require building a case(like a promotion packet), which is basically a pile of documentation. That can only be done over time, its chiseling away at a rock wanting to make it into a statue. Part of that is also making sure other people's statue isn't as good as yours. As a part of building that documentation, you need your name plastered to important things in a positive way. Appreciation emails, feed backs, positive CR text walls etc. This is why so much ceremony goes in most companies when it comes to rewards and promotions. Basically quotas are fixed, and you manager needs to build a case for you. Building that requires negotiating and dealing with them to build you a better promotion packet. Almost anybody can be made to look good or bad, regardless of their efforts. Given stack ranked systems, somebody always has to take the fall for the person who negotiates better.
These things are not even new. The world of Politics(regardless of the system(Democracy/Monarchy/Republic)) has had this for 1000s of years now.
We maybe need to consider a change to the order and timing of how rights are granted towards citizenship first, because when you become a citizen in any first world country you get a LOT of benefits, more than we realise, and it is all or nothing.
The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.
Call your house representative and two senators in Congress, and write them each a letter about the abuse. Let them know you value your coworkers and that they should be able to enjoy the same labor rights that you do.
In order for an industry-wide blacklist to exist, large numbers of people would need to have access to it. This large number of people at many different, competing organisations would have no reason to trust each other to keep a secret.
The existence of such a list, the details of its construction, and the possible Social Justice implications of this would attract so many eyeballs and so much advertising revenue, that it would be hard for any online news publication to resist reporting evidence of it.
Unless those news publications are put on the same list, losing access to latest stuff and their relevance. See what is known about Hollywood, internal Google blacklists, Apple preventing newspapers access to latest gadgets as a retaliation for bad reviews, "gatekeepers" in other "mature" industries etc. Seems like it's a defect in human nature, or a really bad heuristics, emergent with increased organizational size and a buffer shielding an individual bureaucrat from fully comprehending that as a moral choice with serious consequences to somebody else.
I’ve always heard of blacklists but I seriously doubt their existence. Who would trust such a thing? It also sounds illegal as shit so I assume you can’t do this for profit.
It's like when you get MBA - you get a free network with it. Now you are inclined to trust your MBA circle due to shared history. Imagine the same with companies; there is a limited number of spots at the top, most people know each other or heard of each other, share common interests, club memberships etc. They are inclined to trust their own, insiders, or see benefit in it, than some random outsiders, i.e. in-group preference and benevolence. Then when an outsider is "put on a blacklist", i.e. some insider holds a bad opinion of an outsider, the whole group might be affected.
My impression of blacklists is that they're much more systematic and pervasive than that. If you're an individual contributor, I think it'd be really hard to become so infamous that your manager's manager is complaining about you to his peers during a golf game and they remember you.
Also, if you're writing your Representative about some kind of abuse or malfeasance, you could always use and assumed name (and say you're doing so to avoid retaliation).
I have a pretty lucky experience with amazon (Sr. SDE at AWS for 3 years) but I completely agree, I’m sure my boss won’t be vindictive if I live a bad connections feedback but I won’t take my chances, also in my previous company I was on a L1 visa which also marries you to the employer, I had bad bosses and great bosses there but I treaded like on thin ice there, trying to stay positive, avoid rocking the boat, as soon as I got my green card and was allowed to switch I moved to AWS. This sounds to me like a bad boss situation and maybe also bad choices situation. In any case I don’t know the details, I hope he sees justice and find happiness, but he’s painting a picture that is totally different than what I experience. It’s a huge company, all I can say it’s nothing like what I experience. Had my doubts, read the NYT article, asked a friend, he swore to me he has no clue where it came from, maybe AWS is much better than retail... but I’m sure anywhere in any big companies you’ll see cases like this. Hope it’s resolved and justice prevails. No one should suffer like this.
> If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
No, you are not.
That's taking the premise way too far. Slaves were owned as property. You are not property of a corporation just because your job is connected to a visa. You don't have slaves rights (almost entirely non-existent human rights, specifically). You chose to immigrate, there is a system involved in that, you knew that ahead of time, you chose to go forward regardless. You did not become a slave in the process, you did not sign on for 'slaves rights' in the process, you did not abdicate your freedom. Your employer may not dispose of your life as it sees fit. You are free to leave and go back to where you came from if you do not like the system, just as you were free to never sign on in the first place. You are not a slave at all in any manner. That's not an argument in favor of the backwards US immigration system, it's an argument that very, very clearly you are not a slave just because your job and visa are bound together. Immigration to N country is not a human right, it's a privilege (which is why I - and a billion other people - can't freely immigrate to Norway tomorrow and begin enjoying the associated perks).
I've been on H1B. It's not a perfect system, but making 6 digit salaries in Silicon Valley was infinitely better than picking cotton in Mississippi in 1840 where you could be murdered by your boss/owner at a whim.
That's an odd analogy knowing USA went into a bloody civil war to fix that.
You're comparing a broken system with an older and even more broken system that we already fixed and trying to find merit in current broken system by that comparison. Of course it's better to be alive than being squashed by a dinosaur. But how's that relevant?
It's not. You're free to leave as an H1B at any time, it's just that you have to leave the country also (or find a new job really fast). It sucks for employees, and it has negative effects on the job market, so there are many good reasons to kill it with fire - but no, it's not indentured servitude, and people who choose this, choose it of their own free will, and can withdraw that decision (and be back to where they were when they made it) at any moment.
Of course it's not literally slavery or indentured servitude, but it does share some common elements that are useful for our analysis. In particular, they both involve voluntary commiting yourself to restrictive labor in exchange for coming to the US.
I partially understand your point, but I don't think "free" is necessarily a better description than "slave".
One is always free in a literal sense to choose between available options (e.g. a slave may choose to escape, an employee to quit). However, ability of a second party to attach consequences to those options (e.g. corporal punishment or death, deportation away from one's family, removal of healthcare from sick loved ones, etc.) amounts to restricting the freedom of the individual.
I don't accept that legal freedom equates to practical freedom, e.g. you have the legal right to quit your job therefore in a practical sense you are completely "free" to quit your job. If your employer can attach extremely negative consequences to quitting, then your freedom has been severely limited.
I also have trouble with arguments that the choice to immigrate was made of free will, therefore all consequences are one's own responsibility. It's not legal nor ethical to allow people to "freely choose" to sign themselves into slavery.
Anyway, this is obviously a contentious and charged issue, but I hope this helps communicate a different perspective.
>If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
This is why it is critical for people with citizenship to advocate for their coworkers with visas, both within the context of their workplace and outside. Pressure your congressional representatives to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Have a conversation with HR about visa-blind recruitment and retention policies.
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc.
After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated vendor and the difference in cost was between me leaving the office at rush hour and me leaving the office around 9-10pm.
Not only did he reject the taxi expenses, but the hotel, the flights, the food, etc. The guy was obviously a class act in his 50s, rejecting the expenses of a fairly underpaid 25 year old employee living in Scotland.
Super illegal but ultimatly I quit, because life is too short to work for horrible people.
I worked for a similarly horrible person many years ago.
I was doing on call support for a bunch of Linux machines. Literally it was him and me left because the moment I started the other two engineers bailed. One went to work packing salad because it was a better job (big warning!) and the other one had a breakdown.
So didn't get paid properly, argued mileage down to the mile, the clients and him constantly gave me verbal abuse over and over and I ended up working until 10pm some nights with my 9 month pregant wife at home on her own and virtually immobile due to a back problem.
So I get home one night after a tirade of abuse for the day and sent him an email saying "Fuck you I quit". Get a call about an hour later and he's drunk shouting abuse down the phone. This suddenly turns into undying love and care for me after the abuse wasn't working and he realised I couldn't be brow beat into coming back again. Then there's a thud which I assume was him falling off his chair. Never spoke to him again but the company folded about a year later.
So I sit down and I'm about £2000 down then on salary and expenses that were missing. I had £250 in the bank, £400 rent due a week later, wife about to have a baby and an empty fridge. So fuck it. I sold all the stock I still had of the company on ebay (back when you had to take photos and get them developed and scanned and futz with cheques which was hard work), broke even and scraped a first pay cheque at a job just before my credit card melted into a puddle.
It took 10 years to get out of the hole and back to normality. NEVER put up with this for a second. If anyone treats you like this RUIN THEM before they ruin you, your life, your relationships and everyone else they go near. I don't usually advocate this attitude but the damage and destruction that type of person leaves is immense.
Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
... but sometimes your boss really is just an asshole, liar, alcoholic, and/or a sociopath.
Never assume the later off the bat, but never completely discount the possibility either. Because it'll probably happen at least once in an average career.
A good boss does not mistreat employees simply because the company asks them to, just like a good engineer does not implement backdoors simply because the company asks them to. If there's no way to do your job ethically, quit. Don't harm others so you can keep collecting a paycheck.
So the difference doesn't really matter. You have a bad boss; take care of yourself first and don't let them push you around.
Point taken, but either way, it's so not my problem. Maybe in the former case I'll refrain from aiming a flamethrower back behind me as I run as fast as possible out of there!
> Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
So? That's the boss's problem to deal with. You owe the company absolutely nothing beyond your contracted hours in exchange for your contracted salary.
You owe common decency to other human beings trying to act decently.
If your boss happens to be a cog in a broken machine, treating them like it's their fault isn't fair to them or you.
Of course, you can always quit (and usually should). But failing to determine root cause and mis-blaming your boss is about as useful as screaming at the gate attendant when your flight gets a weather delay.
You only owe it to them so long as they do it to you.
And someone who by choice decides to be (or remains) a cog in the broken machine, specifically at the point where it requires being nasty to someone, is fully responsible for that action and its consequences.
Court takes time. Court takes money, or at the least incurs opportunity costs. And court takes emotional reserves. People in dire straits don't necessarily have enough of any of those things, and that is why people like the described get away with shit.
(Labor advocacy programs help balance the scales a little, if only because your advocate is predisposed to believe you and help you navigate the options available to you. But they're fairly thin on the ground in the UK and the US.)
Exactly. In this circumstance at the lowest I had £12 to buy a week of food. I had to cash advance the rent from my credit card and the £12 was what was left. I also had to maintain a perfect appearance and state of mind and hide all this from my new employer for the 4 weeks until I got paid.
Didn't have the cash or energy to start it off and after 5 years I didn't want to go back to that bit of my life and kick it all off again. Plus he folded the company after a bit so chance I'd get anything were near zero.
I'm glad things worked out for you eventually. That super sucks to go through.
It is one of the reasons I am so very suspicious of folks who diminish the value of labor protections. Most of us end up downrange of some shady stuff at least once.
So mission accomplished from his point of view: "This person is weak, let's just add some adversities to their life, they would quit; my cousin can't wait to join us."
Same thing happened to my wife. A newly promoted VP transferred her out of a great position she loved to work on a special project he invented to make department look innovative, under promise of a promotion once complete. Instead as soon as the project was done he hired a new manager into another newly created position above my wife, only supervising her. He proceeded to have the manager take all her responsibilities and make her life hell until she quit. Manager was told she would get a director position for doing it, instead they did the same to her a few months later until she quit too. VP promoted to SVP.
Yeah, it's fun :( Sociopathy seems to be the norm these days.
Anyway, nothing beats that one German bank that told all employees of a branch on Friday that on Monday they are working at a location 80 miles away and are required to be there as usually.
Even in the US something like that would trigger labor law protections (generally it would be treated as a constructive layoff, triggering unemployment benefits and any contractually or legally obligated severance benefits), so this story seems more like a fable than something that actually happened. Do you have any more details about this?
EDIT: Europe generally has stronger labor laws than the US, so if something wouldn't pass muster in the US, it almost certainly wouldn't pass muster in the EU.
And what happened? My understanding of German labor laws is that, for any reasonably sized German company, there would be a workers council that would have to approve work level changes like this. Did that happen?
He might still be taking advantage of and hurting people though, just like there's people like him making life harder for someone with a disabled child and many other "horror stories", the worst of which will never come to light. Please don't get me wrong, I don't blame you at all for not picking that fight, at age 25 in a situation I know nothing about. But that situation is over, other situations aren't, future situations are incoming, be it with that person or others. When someone throws someone else out of the window, I don't shrug just because the victim happened to land on their feet. The other didn't plan for that, they didn't care. I cannot fully get over that.
As an individual, it's great you let it slide, and I think forgiveness is really important mental hygiene, it's something you do for yourself more than for someone else, IMO... but as a member of a society that ideally would be somewhat just and decent, we shouldn't forgive something that hasn't even been repented of and is still ongoing. Disarm, explain, forgive, that'd be my preferred approach. Not fail to disarm, fall on deaf ears, forgive.
Yeah, I am actually upset I didn't take one such person down when I had all cards in my hand, but I still believed in innate "goodness" of all humans; now that person is doing damage at a higher position at one of FANGs; who knows how many people were destroyed on their ascending path? The usual argument about stopping one that would allow another horrible person to rise, so it's futile, has some merit though; I've been shocked multiple times when I helped some desperate person only to observe horrible behavior of that person once their problems went away.
Forgiveness can't be dispensed automatically; it has to be deserved/earned by real actions/intentions. I think because mainstream culture was "meek", it allowed sociopaths to hack it and pervert it, pushing victims to always forgive while laughing at them and making their lives more and more miserable. I think in middle ages required penance was quite brutal by our contemporary soft standards.
Well amazon hires a ton of H1Bs. When they let go, they have to go to back to their country unless they can find another company to sponsor their H1B.
So people go to extreme lengths and managers can get away with anything.
I’m super grateful for Microsoft to help me with my green card. However my life there was miserable and my manager frequently asked us to work weekends. Pagerduty was hell and I once came home at 5am from work.
F that.
I’m glad I wasn’t born in India. My Indian x-colleagues didn’t have that freedom simply due to where they were born.
Yea you can feel this when you work on a team mostly of H1B. Most of them don't speak up and just say yes to whatever project management gives them. Ofcourse upper management loves this, they take all the credit and become the face of the project and if it fails they simply blame it on h1b/contractors ect.
I've seen this many many times in all company sizes over last 15 yrs. I would steer clear of teams where most ppl are h1b indians.
Ex Indian h1b here. Here are some of the things I experienced that finally ended up with me throwing away everything and come back to India.
1. Was working on a project without issues. Ex manager forced me to go back to India 3 times over a 9 month period. Every time my ex manager tells me to go back, I get ready packing and then he tells me stay for 3 more months. On the 3rd time, I said I am resigning. Now my manager doesn't want me to go to India. I got another job and went to resign. Manager indirectly threatens me that I won't get service letter (which is required for green card). I was afraid and ended up staying. It turns out my manager was lying to the customer also. Everytime, he will tell me to get ready to go back and then tell the customer that I have to go back due to visa issues. Customer had still some work for me, so they ask for 3 more months and this repeated 2 times. Each time, I would be under incredible stress. It was like telling someone waiting in jail for their death sentence that they will be hung 2 weeks from now, then a few days later tell them it was extended.
2. Came to India for my marriage. Forced me to cancel my honeymoon and work from India for 1 month for another customer while lying to the original customer that I extended my vacation. I spend one whole day in my room sad and angry. I still want to beat up the manager who made me do this even though this happened over 2 years ago.
3. Asked me to work for a temporary customer in another state. I didn't want to, but agreed since I was afraid and worked for around 5-7 weeks while staying in hotel. This was before marriage. After marriage, again asked me to work for this customer for 1 month. My wife is completely dependent on me because she cannot drive in US. I said I cannot go because my wife is alone. Lead told me to ask my wife to stay in hotel for 1 month with me. I didn't want to because she already spend 3 weeks in a hotel with me instead of honeymoon. Thankfully manager agreed and sent someone else.
4. Forced me to relocate to another state. I didn't want to. After a lot of pressure, I sort of agreed and asked to at least adjust my salary for the rent increase. The customer was paying $20+ per hour more if I was working from the new state, so I expected at least a little bit of raise. Manager lied to me saying he will take care of it. I didn't trust him because there were many stories from my ex colleagues of being treated like a donkey with a carrot tied to their front. Sent him an email asking him to reply. He didn't. At one point, he said "I will snip you". He had said a similar line once before - "I will cut you". At that time, I didn't even understand he was threatening me, I was wondering why is he talking about circumcising me. This time I understood it was a threat. Got everything ready for move and told him I am ready for the move, and as expected he said HR didn't approve the raise which is a lie.
5. Moving expenses was about $3500. Getting that refunded was another big battle. Thankfully, my manager helped me in this and got the money after about 1.5 months.
6. Got RFE for visa extension. Employer waited till the last moment to submit the response to USCIS. I couldn't drive because license duration is tied to visa. Asked my manager and immigration team multiple times to speed up. No. They submitted the response only 5 days before the last day. So couldn't drive for 3 months. Since I was in a new state, I had no friends to help me either. Employer did pay for my Uber for these 3 months, but still I hated every moment of it, especially because of a few bad experiences with Uber drivers. Thankfully, I had sent my wife back to India before all this happened, otherwise I don't know how I would have managed.
Even though my visa got extended for another 3 years, I threw away everything and came back to India.
One more point I forgot to add. They delayed my green card till the last moment. I am not saying I am entitled to it, but they should tell me if they won't do it. I ask my manager and he would say we will start the process next month for sure. It continued for about 13 months. Finally they started. But by now green card applications as well visas from Indians were getting a lot of scrutiny from USCIS. Mine got denied and went for appeal and got approved finally. Took over 10 months just for the whole thing and got approved just 30 days before visa expiry. Applied for visa extension as soon as possible, got RFE on that also and spent another 4 months in uncertainty.
Echoing the HP employee, submitting claims monthly for remote work expenses (phone/internet bills, office supplies, travel) is normal. Ive worked as an apps engineer at a couple BigCos with same policies and the process never bothered me, I submit my claims as soon as a trip ends or when I get the bills.
The thing I would press is to get paid fairly, and bi-weekly. I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
> I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
Interesting. I'm Dutch and I've never heard of a permanent job that was not paid monthly. If someone told me they were not paid monthly, I would assume they are a temp with variable hours.
Bi-weekly, or every 2 weeks, is norm in US as far as I know. It's easier for everyone in my opinion, except maybe employers that want to take advantage of their employees.
It's just a cultural convention, nothing more. Monthly seems to be the norm in Europe, bi-weekly in US and Canada. I've done both, and there's no practical difference.
It’s always beneficial to have your money faster. No reason employer should get to hold on to it longer and get interest and liquidity. In the extreme case, at least you’re not working a whole month before finding out employer has no money to pay you. And while you may legally be entitled to it, who knows how long the legal system delivers it to you.
This is standard in every world. Corporate credit cards are usually reserved for senior executives or people who travel/entertain a lot (e.g. sales reps). Cash advances aren't a thing outside of small companies.
Huh? Google made it super easy to get a GCard, you just request it on a web form and it arrived a few days later. It was pretty common for L4 engineers (that's the level below senior) to have them.
I am also a former Google employee. I also had a GCard, and it is exactly as easy to get one as described.
Google is the exception here, IMO. Every other employer I have had has generally required the employee to front the cash for expenses, and used something like Expensify to get reimbursed. There are some exceptions, such as hotels or airfare, which I've booked through corporate booking systems; these only let you see "approved" flights/hotels, and once booked, is charged direct to the company.
And corporate credit cards aren't blank checks. Employees will generally have to pay back any spend on their corporate card that is not approved as an expense.
It may prevent the employee from holding the bag if the company goes bust. But some "corporate cards" are issued by banks in a way that makes the cardholder jointly liable.
It's actually quite unusual to make employees anything except for incidental expenses (like meals) up front. Generally, making employees pay big-ticket expenses (including travel) and seek reimbursement is a legal and accounting nightmare, so it's something that a well-run business tries to avoid. (In some states, it's even illegal to require employees pay for necessary business expenses.)
The exception tends to be law and accounting firms, which issue cards to their employees for business use. The employee "pays" up front using the cards, but the card is connected to the employer's expensing system and the funds are deposited to the employee's account the payday following his submission of the expense report.
My employer wanted us to pay upfront and then claim. I was an Indian h1b. One time, they forced me to relocate to another state even though I didn't want to. "I will snip you" was my ex-manager's words when I refused. My moving expenses was about $3500k. I paid everything from my pocket. When I tried to claim, finance team refused to pay and agreed only after a lot of escalations. I finally got the money after about 1.5 months. This plus many other bad experiences made me literally throw away everything and come back to India.
My employer issues corporate Visas to any employee expected to incur >$500/year in expenses. Which means most of us have cards, at least in the US. We still have to complete expense reports, but we don’t pay anything out of pocket.
This is how it has always worked for me. When I was more junior and didn't have a corporate card, I had a person who booked all my travel on the company account. At worst, I might have to cover a few incidentals like food or taxis.
This is the way it should be done. No employee should carry the burden of loading up their own credit or paying for big ticket items up front no matter how trustworthy the company.
Sony Computer Entertainment does this, but then they don't pay back for 6-9 months, forcing your personal credit to be their credit cushion. One of the reasons I quit.
When/where did you work? Corporate cards are normal at SIE, even engineers on my team have them. I don't dispute your experience, just curious.
Edit: As an addition, the expense isn't paid by the employee. Costs over $2000 need justification above your boss, but your immediate boss can approve up to $2000 no issues.
Worked in Santa Monica Studio, and was sent to Tokyo several times. Each trip was in the $8K range, as each trip was for weeks at a time. Their slow payback was killing me.
I have a corporate Amex card, and even though its a "Corporate" card, given to me by my employer, it is in my name and I am legally responsible for it. My company will reimburse me for my expenses if approved by my manager. I have always thought this was a liability and weird, but everybody else at the company (a 500 company) thinks it's normal. So any expenses not approved at the end of the month are my responsibility. Anybody else have similar experiences?
Approximately one week a month on-site at client(s) location. So, flights, food, accommodation.
I expected company payment card. If everything turns to shit one month the employee, in this sort of situation, could be left holding a fairly hefty bag.
In my experience, the norm is minor expenses are, well, expensed. Dinner, taxis, whatever. The big ones that require planning, sometimes HR just take care of - i.e. booking your flights and hotel for you. That being said it isn't unheard of for that to be something you "expense" as well. If they fuck you, sue them. They probably won't though.
Side note: if you're in a situation where you're loading up a credit card with business expenses that are later reimbursed, you may consider looking into a credit card that offers rewards like airline miles. It's essentially a "free reward no fee ATM." I always volunteer to grab the company lunch tab for this reason.
A company who values inclusion and diversity should understand that people who are unable to float a monthly expense buffer are very often those same demographics that have been marginalized by those working in the software industry.
Getting credit card points while you know your employer is almost certainly going to reimburse you is a nice benefit, but the industry should definitely seek to improve by making this optional. Especially for prohibitively large large expenses (flights, lodging) default to paying these upfront.
Are you actually paying cash? Assuming you're using a credit card, and assuming your company isn't looking to defraud you, using a card with decent cash back makes it a nonissue and "fronting the cash" for expenses is just a way for you to get a kickback from your credit card company for using them as a payment processor for work expenses. (And kind of a net positive relative to if you had a company credit card where the company claims any kickbacks.)
I do not possess a credit card for ideological reasons.
I do have two debit cards, one Visa and one MasterCard, for redundancy.
I see what you are saying and it makes sense. I’m just ideologically opposed to the use of consumer credit for regular / recurring / general living expenses.
If you're ideologically opposed to consumer credit because of the cycles of debt it incurs just pay off your credit card in full every month (which is what I do). No interest will be paid.
Submitting claims monthly is fairly standard, at least in my experience. At HP, they gave us a corporate AMEX card but I was responsible for paying it while I waited for the outsourced^2 HR operations to cut me a check.
Definitely need more pay not less to work remotely. Also, biweekly is better than monthly as another here stated. As for expenses, can’t talk much on that but it’s best if you get them paid up fast or if they are fairly typical in terms of the amount each time, ask for a payment up front to cover the bulk and make up the difference later. Employee does not mean you cannot make demands. Make all the demands you want and if they say no then you can say no too. It’s a 2 way street.
Yes. Fronting your expenses and then getting reimbursed after is pretty normal practice. Every employer I've had has done this with the exception of certain major purchases like airfare where the company has just purchased it for me directly, but some employers I had to front large costs like that as well.
Both of those numbers are possible, but much higher than average by my estimation. Glassdoor says average ~$111k for software engineering as a whole[0]. A more realistic expectation for a 'good' compensation package would be ~$80-95k for junior engineer and ~$180-250k for senior. Obviously there are many factors to account for, and both those numbers can vary widely, but the ones you gave are not what one should be expecting outside of a very select few 'elite' companies, and even then they are on the high end.
May I ask (in good faith) how you know what the real "truth" is? I would totally believe Glassdoor is a bit low. Levels.fyi, which I didn't know about but just checked, seems really high. I believe both are based on real data points, but is there any reason to believe either is a better reflection of the actual numbers? (My relatively poorly-informed speculation is that Glassdoor is using old/irrelevant statistical data while levels.fyi is suffering from some pretty extreme selection bias being a comparatively obscure site relying on self-reporting.)
> they do not make up a significant portion of all developers in the US
I'm not sure that's true, but I will admit that most of my friends work at FAANGs (outside the bay area). So let me add that I know at least one senior engineer at a non-FAANG tech company that left a $300k job for a "significant pay bump".
Frankly, no large tech company could survive if it didn't pay competitively with other large tech companies.
I fully agree that pay is less in small, non-tech companies in rural areas, but I would be surprised if such businesses hire the majority of developers. Big tech hires a LOT of engineers.
That is total number of employees worldwide. so lets conservatively take off a third. Also Reasonably only a third of those employees (probably a lot less at amazon) are actually developers. That gives us ~200,000. The Bureau of Labor statics says there are 1,200,000 software developers in the US in 2016.
FAANG does make up a lot more software development jobs than I thought, I would have to say a significant portion. Very interesting.
Microsoft hires junior engineers out of college at ~$80k in Seattle. FAANG might be a bit higher, especially with COL in the Bay Area, but plenty of people get hired by the big companies in that range.
No, this is false. The top paid junior engineers might be paid $150k in base salary PLUS bonuses and stock/other compensation. Same goes for the 300k+ for senior engineers.
Gonna disagree. Do not go to HR. HR is there for the company, not for you. They will seek whatever is the fastest, easiest way to resolve things for the company — which probably is not firing a manager.
In case it's not clear, I have not had helpful experiences with HR.
At 27 I took on a multi-million dollar, VC-backed property management startup that was trying to defraud me on my rent and rental deposit. It’s amazing what some legal research and a few hours of spare time can do.
The salient part of that story was the unfair reimbursement policy. My point was that it would have been unfair regardless of the age of the manager or age of the employee.
Where did I suggest that anyone "take on" the company?
Welcome to life in practically any large US corporation. Most employees will never complain to HR, they may need some routine services that HR provides and that’s the extent of their interaction. But there are a few who do complain. If these are peer-related complaints, HR will work with the employees managers to resolve the issue. But let’s say someone has a problem with their manager. Maybe no one else has complained about him before, or if so the complaints appear to be isolated incidents. Let’s say he has a lot of positive feedback from his peers, manager, and other subordinates.
Now you, the complainant, are the problem. And oh boy you have some special life circumstances - yikes, you are like a loaded bomb dropped in the lap of HR. They are not in any position of power, they can’t set the policy for your department (rightfully - they are not in the know), so your boss holds all the cards. HR won’t dig to the bottom of anything, and a manager is more important that a developer. At best it’s he-said-she-said and ignored, at worst you are shown the door after some minimal make nice by the company to avoid future liability.
I think it takes a strong top-down initiative to avoid cultural issues like this at an organization. At some place as large as Amazon there are bound to be isolated incidents but to all indications this behavior is, if not encouraged (in some cases it appears to be), not actively discouraged and is hence tacitly approved of at Amazon. I’ve seen what it takes to get a bad manager moved or fired by their subordinates - it requires an outright coup. Rarely does such a thing happen and it’s not guaranteed to succeed. Whereas, a conscientious and capable manager can walk in and straighten something like this out in fairly short order, with minimal drama.
> Welcome to life in practically any large US corporation
This is a common refrain, especially on HN. But it is a bit misplaced:
Small companies are just as bad and often worse.
All you have to do is look around at the average small company where nepotism is the default (doesn't matter how good you are, the owner's son will be the next CEO) and where many owners see staff as personal servants.
Some of the things I've seen in the past year with friends & acquaintances who work at small companies:
- An office admin being told to arrange the owner's wedding (without pay).
- A nail salon worker being told to go pick up the owner's dry cleaning since there weren't any customers in at the moment.
- The owner of a small hotel telling staff they were all working on Saturday to cater a party at her house. (If you say no, you are fired.)
- A company owner taking $40,000 out of the company bank account to pay for his family vacation to Croatia and then missing payroll that month. It ended up being two weeks late.
Many small business owners treat their business (and by extension their staff) as their personal fief and property.
Plus, the people who own and run small businesses aren't going to listen to ideas for feedback and improvement any more than big company managers. They always fall back on -- well, I've succeeded so far doing it my way.
> They always fall back on -- well, I've succeeded so far doing it my way.
Put more simply: "My way or the highway".
I wonder if there are probing questions you can subtly ask to ferret out these kinds of managers/workplaces so you can avoid during interviews or early on the job?
Only: Small ones are even worse (see other comments). With big ones you have at least "something": Colleagues and "a lot of money blowing in at the front". HR is not your friend. OP makes a lot of mistakes. Life is hard. Big companies are a good / reasonable choice: The money. With smaller companies there is less money and more problems, usually, EXCEPT they are directly dealing with big corps (e.g.), which puts you back into big-corp-exposure. You have to go where the money is.
This has not been my personal experience at all. I've worked for huge companies and tiny ones, and the only real difference I've seen is that the working conditions tend to be far superior in the tiny ones.
Compensation between the two tends to be comparable as well (ignoring startups -- I'm not talking about them here, as they're a unique beast). I don't think that large companies have an edge on that score (actually, I think the opposite is true, but not by a enough to matter much). As an example, I left a megacorporation to work at my current job, a truly tiny company. My total compensation at my current job is about $5,000/yr less than at the megacorp -- not nearly enough of a difference to matter.
I mentioned further up thread, there's a book about this topic written by an HR person called "Corporate Confidential" which basically reinforces all this. It's a fascinating read.
Might work, but that's a very high-stakes maneuver that could backfire possibly even worse than through HR because now you have two people with the power to make your life hell and potentially no record in HR about the situation (potentially losing first strike opportunities - now your manager or manager's manager can begin to record problems caused by you before you can record problems by them). And also IME it is basically impossible to read how your manager's manager feels about your manager
Realistically if you have a bad manager your only 100% safe option is to switch companies. Switching teams internally can work depending on the place, but it does carry risk, especially if you're on a visa
Amazon employee here, though I do not speak for the company.
At any big company, your management chain is the #1 influence on the quality of your culture. My experience at Amazon has been extremely positive, but then my org head is a great guy, so it's all been in line with my expectations. I've also left critical feedback through the Amazon Connect survey for my immediate manager and not suffered for it. That manager, as far as I can tell, made no effort to deanonymize the feedback, and addressed the issue fairly in a team meeting.
So, YMMV, but I would certainly encourage skilled devs, artists and designers to come help us make great games. :-)
That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the people that work on the "good" teams never seem to be terribly concerned about horrific reports, and I frequently wonder why that is. In companies I've worked for, had I heard about people crying at their desk and being forced to choose between their child's health and their job I'd want to know how the company is putting a stop to it. It seems that everyone believes that the people complaining are doing so for attention, but from the outside it seems like there's been a lot of reports that are credible - and this is the white collar stuff, not even warehouse worker things.
Its hard to know: Is everyone indoctrinated? Are they addicted to the paychecks? Is the sense that there are bad things happening but its being handled properly?
That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working.
By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems.
The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites.
This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them.
They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it.
All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on"
So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
This is a decent argument from an employee perspective, which is that its so silo'd that its basically different companies. While I find it pretty horrifying when awful things happen in places with the same external name as is on my resume, I could see how people could go "not me" - thats pretty close to how the workforce works outside of amazon too.
There's very much in the 14 principles about optimizing for results and very little about leading or cultivating people. Obviously, this can be interpreted in very many ways, but the impression I get from the people that work there or have worked there is that it becomes a win-at-all costs environment and that the upper tiers of management are political hell.
Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production systems. Sometimes dysfunction happens. You live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success.
(My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)
I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason...
That's some sanctimonious bullshit.
There is zero public information indicating any cheating. We know that there was a trial separation. We don't know what agreements there were. We do know that the divorce is being presented as being amiable.
My attitude is that if his soon to be ex wife is not upset, then random strangers like yourself have zero business being upset on her behalf. You aren't part of or privy to his relationships or agreements. It is none of your business.
Unless you have non-public information indicating that he violated any agreement with MacKezie, the best information available to you is information in places like https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/09/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-div... - which indicates that the relationship began after both couples separated, and was known by both ex partners.
Which would indicate that this isn't cheating. No matter how much it offends your sensibilities.
If you mean the "No thank you, Mr Pecker" one, then it doesn't look to me as if he does any such thing.
(He certainly implicitly admits that he is in a relationship with Ms Sanchez. But, at least in my book, that's only cheating if it happened before his "trial separation" with his wife, and I don't see that he's admitted that it did.)
Read it again. What Bezos said there is in line with the TMZ article. Yes, he had the relationship. There is no indication that he broke any agreements with his ex-wife.
> In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
I totally agree that being disciplined and challenging oneself to grow is really important. Still, I wouldn’t want suggest someone to stay in a bad place if it’s actually a detriment to their health or quality of life. It’s really hard to find a balance for me personally, and I don’t feel I can give concrete advice on the matter to others.
That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands.
Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
There are a couple reasons. First, Amazon has hundreds of businesses and almost 700,000 employees globally now. Every business has different culture and managers. You are not going to find a consistent good/bad/indifferent experience here, because it's highly varied. I can guarantee you a seasonal worker in a fulfillment center has a vastly different day to day experience from a software development engineer in Seattle.
The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.
As a former employee, it’s more that there’s only so much you can do in that situation. I didn’t have any ability to impact the situation other than advocating for good practices, helping people I know manage their careers, and giving truthful feedback for managers (being able to since I wasn’t in a “bad” team).
I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience.
If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?
Ex-Amazon employee here, and I definitely do not speak for the company.
Amazon, more than any other company that I know of, has a ton of ex employees whose opinion either amounts to "Amazon was horrible" or "I thought Amazon was great for a long time, then it went south and in retrospect can't believe I put up with it for so long." So despite your current positive opinion, there is a good chance that you will some day be singing a very different song.
I am personally glad I worked there, because it was a fascinating experience. But I wouldn't want to work there again, nor would I recommend it to a friend.
As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company, but as hundreds of startups under an umbrella organization. You cannot generalize from a single one of those organizations. It is impossible, IMHO, for a company to have as many employees as Amazon and maintain a normalized employee experience.
Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.
I am also an Amazon employee (and also do not speak for the company), and I agree with this assessment. My manager has told me and my teammates on multiple occasions to take care of family stuff first, to make sure we're working sustainably (i.e., not super late all the time) and so on. I also have scored some questions low on the same survey and not suffered retribution.
I don't want to claim that anyone's experience isn't valid, just that it doesn't match mine.
At any reasonably sized company individual managers are going to have a lot of control over their subordinates, and their underlings aren't going to have any say pretty much at all. What are they going to do, complain to HR? HR at any large company isn't in the business of keeping people employed, it's in the business of keeping the company safe. If you rock the boat, you are now the problem. It's no wonder that all of the negative comments about Amazon boil down to either "this job was absolute shit" - bad manager from the start - or "this job was amazing and then turned to shit" - either the good manager quit/was fired by their superior for not being shit/was promoted and their replacement was garbage, or they were a sociopath that slowly turned up the heat so the proverbial frogs wouldn't notice the boil until they were cooked.
Remember, your boss is ultimately not your friend, certainly not in a professional setting. An individual contributor/manager relationship fundamentally must be adversarial, because one side holds all the power, and even if the manager breaks trust the worst thing that will happen is the IC's replacement will be less productive for a few months.
When managers have this much power over their reports and there's no way for someone to fight back against their manager, it's no wonder that shitty managers are so common. It's a situation ripe for abuse.
As someone who worked for Amazon for a long time, I agree with you -- most managers I worked for took anonymous negative feedback well, making changes at the team level.
Import Caveat to your last point: If you make games for Amazon, you give up your ability to make them in your spare time. Amazon has pretty aggressive game development policies around side projects.
As an org head in a tech organization experiences I try to find managers/supervisors like this and actually move them out of the organization.
I know that you direct management and peers can be one of the greatest influences for good or bad for the broader team. A person like the Manager in this situation is a clearly going to create more problems for other team members in the future.
That’s fantastc! Seriously, it’s good that you feel great about the work you do and have a management team that allows you to breathe easy, is supportive, and helps you out put the best work possible.
BUT, and I truly believe this in the depths of my soul, everyone is as evil as their most sociopathic executive.
Everyone is contributing to the same bottom line, some people just sell out for less.
Whose more evil, the hitman that won’t kill for under 1 million or the hitman that will do it for minimum wage?
I used to think big tech companies like Amazon and Google would be different, however now I see they are just becoming like any older traditional corporation with a HR department functioning like the stasi and the ability to oppress through mass policies and hiring contracts.
We are lucky as developers to have a fairly easy way of life but I still follow my Grandpa's advice from years working in the shipyards of Glasgow:
I think you should keep in mind that company culture, values, as well as operational dynamics are not scale-free. The size of a company matters, immensely. But in a market driven economy, you can jump ship and seek greener pastures, especially if you're skilled and operate in a high demand industry.
I agree with many of the comments here about how ymmv based on your management chain. My experience at Amazon has been very positive, but I do want to call out some major issues with the Amazon Connections tool reference in this post.
This tool is pitched to employees as an anonymous way to provide feedback about their team via daily questions. The reality is anything but.
* Responses are not anonymous, they are viewable by anyone on the Connections team, and individual responses are shared with managers in many cases. The Connections team will deny this because it is technically against their policy, but I have seen Connections case managers share information with managers many times.
* Feedback results are not viewable by employees, only managers (this is in contrast to the yearly tech survey, which anyone can view). This leads to data being conveniently left out, or entire orgs simply not reviewing the data.
* The questions are incredibly poorly constructed and there have been multiple internal tickets about propaganda and insensitive questions. A few examples off the top of my head are "Did you know that Amazon was voted the best company to work for 5 years in a row by xyz organization? (Yes/No)" and something to the effect of "How do you feel working with foreigners?" (The wording was significantly more sensitive, but this was the undertone and caused a massive uproar internally.)
These issues have been brought up repeatedly internally and in almost two years, nothing has been done. The Connections team has essentially disabled all feedback channels surrounding the tool. If anything comes of this, I hope a serious look is taken at how the Amazon Connections program is implemented.
FWIW I have heard that org leaders can manually insert questions, deny some default questions, and generally tailor the Connections to the types of things they want tactical feedback on. I contracted for a different Amazon team and saw plenty of Connection. They were often bland, “How many hours a week do you spend in meetings?” “True/False: when I begin a project goals are outlined clearly” “When was the last time you sought direct customer feedback for a decision?” Etc. nothing like what you mentioned.
This kind of retribution is pretty normal from the companies I've worked it, it's clumsy that it ended up in writing here and a bit more vicious than usual with a child involved. Normally it's done offline in private conversations or simply as something that's understood between like minded managers with passing comments.
One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
> One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected.
How would he be affected by giving you a well-deserved good performance review? I don't understand.
>One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
I must be dense because I don't understand this. Your manager couldn't find another job, was instead looking to retire, and gave you a bad performance review?
Yep, the tl;dr is that at the time my manager's manager didn't appreciate me being transparent on mistakes our department made with other depts. So in an effort to make me quit, aside from other things, he wrote a review for my direct manager and required him to say it was his review. If he didn't he would be fired.
Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.
The red flags I look for now:
- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally
- very ambitious, but risk averse
- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not
- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow
There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.
In California you are not legally allowed to audio record someone in private without their consent. They must know that they are being recorded for it to be used as evidence in court.
This reminded me of a comment I read some years ago.
Here it is:
You seem obsessed with laws, as if they possess value and worth in and of themselves, when really they are a very high latency sidechannel of society and power.
I had an horrible experience with a terrible manager about 10 years ago. We didn't get along at all, and he tried to throw me under the bus for a project that he mismanaged. He basically wrote lies about me on my performance review.
I fought it via HR. The HR rep couldn't care less about it, but I kept persisting, and I had my coworkers vouch for me that what our manager said was false. He ended up rescinding the entire performance review, and I changed teams and left the company shortly afterwards.
But I was lucky. I was well-liked by my peers because they knew I worked hard, and they were willing to go to bat for me against our manager. And my manager was utterly stupid because he wrote lies that could be refuted by my teammates. It was basically the perfect conditions in my favor. Had I not had those favorable conditions, I'm pretty sure HR would have done nothing to help me, and I would have gotten fired. Even if managers write lies about you, it's very very difficult to fight back.
Have heard many Amazon stories around review being used by managers as a revenge tool. A true incident - a friend of mine and his coworker (same level) didn't get along. Their manager left and this coworker was made the manager since he had longer tenure. My friend received a PIP in 2 months flat and ended up leaving the company rather than put up a fight.
A similar thing happened to me outside of Amazon. When the person I didn't get along with was made my manager I immediately went outside my reporting chain to find a place to transfer (though I considered quitting on the spot)
It didn't really work out though. New team was better but my past followed me and I let the whole experience get me down.
Word of advice, never work for Amazon. Out of the FANGs, it is quite easily the sleaziest place to work. As someone who worked there, I can believe OPs side of the story. At this point, most of the people who tolerate working there are indentured Indian H1-B employees because they’re stuck in the Green card queue. Even amongst them, the good ones left for greener pastures a long time ago!
Which team? Before I joined I spoke with a few friends who work there (after reading the NYT article and comments like yours) and got positive feedback. I work here for the past 3 years and so far touch wood nothing even near this. Pretty happy all in all. It’s like people talk about a different company. I’m at AWS, Sr SDE, any teams the above warning is more applicable to? Asking for myself in case I want to switch a teams to know what to avoid but also since we are hiring, I’d like others to know if it’s a specific team / department to avoid... Also, all of us in “good teams” should take ownership and figure out how to systematically fix the issues others obviously experience in other teams. If it’s a specific branch or department, I’d like to see all amazon employees protest to eradicate any toxic bosses / culture in these teams. I just have no way in knowing which ones are, it’s a huge company
I’m not located in Seattle, but if I was there, and got the details, and was convinced Oleg is right I’d try to mobilize some like minded people, make sure there is no clause forbidding me to do so as I like to have a job, maybe give my boss a heads up (maybe he would even join) and I’d be happy to join his protest. But I believe this should start internally, it will look better to leadership if some of us for example write a one pager on this amazon good bad discrepancy and that the fact many teams are happy doesn’t cover the fact there are apparently some toxic ones. I love my job and I hate the fact the same company can cause others have the opposite experience, it hurts them but also much to lesser extent, hurts all of us at Amazon. Ego hurt, can intimidate candidates, lost prestige. Small problems but still should make us all concerned and driven for action to fix it.
> make sure there is no clause forbidding me to do so as I like to have a job
You realize that any retribution would be a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, right? You can't sign away your right to protest, unless you work for the government as a critical employee (read: firefighters, police).
> At this point, most of the people who tolerate working there are indentured Indian H1-B employees because they’re stuck in the Green card queue
I used to think so myself, and mentioned that to various people including friends and acquaintances who worked for Amazon. All of them told me that they really liked it there and don't know why I had this perception. I haven't met a single person, friend or not, who would validate my view.
I still don't know how prevalent bad working conditions at Amazon are, but the data points I gathered point against the blanket statement you made.
Disclaimer: I currently work at Amazon as an SDM (I do not speak for the company). I've also worked a lot of other places. In my experience, bad managers can happen anywhere.
I'm not going to take sides since all we have is a story told by an ex-employee who has every reason to be spiteful toward his former employer. The other side of this story is one we'll likely never hear.
I do want to comment on the visa aspect of this (sounds like he's on an EB3). I have worked with and managed visa-holding engineers who've been passed over for promotions or otherwise discriminated against because of their visa status (not at Amazon). Certain kinds of promotions can run the risk of a visa holder getting their visa rejected. Many things a company might do to improve the circumstances of a regular employee runs the risk of triggering a visa re-evaluation. More often than not the company will play it safe so the employee doesn't run the risk of getting deported. That can involve denying them promotions or "unofficially" giving it to them (all the responsibility but no title). It's systemic discrimination, and the worst part is it has the "best interests" of the visa holder at heart.
Personally, I tried to counter this kind of discrimination by making the employee aware of the situation and the risk, then asking what they would like me to do. Usually, though, my influence is limited and I get blocked by HR and legal.
If this story didn't happen to a visa holder, it would be a simple story of "just go somewhere else," but I can understand how helpless these people must feel.
WTF? Why it can't be simple "just go somewhere else"? Well, just go to some other country.
I'm not saying it's easy, but why bang your head against the wall. Go somewhere else, and, if you really want, come back another time, through a different company or on different terms.
Imagine being in their shoes. Are you prepared to move to the other side of the globe on a moment’s notice if you’re unemployed? Do you have the funds to do that, such as moving your precious items, and breaking your lease? If you have a family, are you prepared for the impact it will have on them (this guy’s child has health care concerns)? What would you be prepared to put up with in order to avoid that?
Also, many just think of the US as home despite not being a citizen. Many who worked for me went to college here on a study visa. This is the only home they’ve known their adult life. They wouldn’t know the first thing about how to live if they went back to their native country.
My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey. The BEST outcome I've seen from them is incredibly painful meetings that only seem to make the matter worse.
My speculation on this is two fold. The first is that putting things in those surveys is a "permanent record" or at least "yearly review" issue for your manager. So you are (justly or not) harming them, and they will tend to respond to being harmed. The other is that, if you think about it... if your manager is not a person who you can talk to about a problem in a non-anonymous way... doing it anonymously is not likely to help, it's probably better to just quietly leave.
This guy I know, we can call him Jim, left a large tech company and was honest in his exit interview about why he was leaving, and it was mostly his manager. He was later asked to apply for a job with a different team after his manager left the company years (and promotions) later. HR blocked the hire because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. As far as I know, they did nothing to recognize or fix the problem. But they held it against him because his feedback was negative. Unfortunately, a company that views employees as the enemy will find it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kill the incentive to try help fix problems, and create a situation where you like it or you leave.
It's the inverse of the ubiquitous "why do you want to work for us?" interview question. "Because you give money to your employees and I require money for food and housing" is somehow never what they're looking for.
> My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey.
Even better, game the system and give them glowing reviews.
For example I had noticed the feedback "anonymous" surveys they were sending had a location field as in employee's country, city, town, etc. Well, in a distributed team it's pretty clear who is who based on that location. So I just gave them glowing and happy reviews.
Same when leaving a company. Nice and happy feedback like "I'd love to work here more, but the tech landscape is so exciting and varied and I'd like to gain experience in other areas..."
Yep, couldn't agree more despite the down votes on my previous post. The picture that we like to paint about how companies work is far from the reality, you have play by the real unwritten rules.
It's funny how you guys take some kind of pride in maneuvering what to an outsider obviously sounds like a dystopian-style bureaucratic nightmare of unevenly applied laws and insider-connections.
Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.
This is how you fight to change systems when you're ultimately powerless to do so directly, by subverting the system. The only real power we have is to collectively agree to make the data/system useless.
I'm of the mind that only good comes of it. It's very therapeutic and who cares what they think anymore. Besides, that's one of the few things that no one faults you for - it's almost expected. I highly recommend it.
Strongly disagree, and I've got hiring evidence on my side (former subordinates going to work for friends, and said subordinates didn't know of the relationship) after airing some pretty reasonable grievances when I hired then and when they worked with me.
Of course, there's a scale. "I don't like their tech decisions"--yeah, that's an eyebrow raise, unless there's some real meat there. But I'm never going to judge somebody poorly for saying plainly that they felt disrespected or mistreated at a job, because it's happened to me too.
It doesn't matter if their grievances are legitimate or not (and you have no way to tell if they are). It's bad form to trash talk one's former employer or ex.
It's not just me. You will often talk yourself out of getting hired and many will not pursue a relationship with you if you indulge in it. There is nothing to gain by engaging in it.
It's not just you. Virtually every article I've read on interview tips gives this same advice. Speaking negatively about your former employer always reflects negatively on you.
Abusive managers... after all the years I need to thanked them because they forced me to start my own company.
My "favorite" was a CTO that I worked for in NYC.. horrible human being with few ex wives and an eye for girls that barely turned 18. My favorite line was: "if you have family, don't work here" when I was complaining that he really didn't need me at the office on Sunday 9pm to "monitor" system I could remotely connect in case all the way from home.
He also did the same to me - everyone came at 10, he wanted me at 7. Everyone left 5pm, he wanted me to work on extra project at 7pm. Those projects never came and I was just sitting there bored. Of course I questioned his reasoning few times but he just said "you're the most important person in the company you need to be here earlier and leave the last in case". At the same time I was making the lowest salary in the corp... on time asked him about raise he told me: "remember you are on McDonald sales guy salary here.. you are not an exec".
Fun times looking back at 15 years ago when I was young and naive...
The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
Any large company is going to have abusive individuals in it. I think the real issue this story illustrates is that when people are brought over on work visas they have no leverage with their employer.
As an American citizen software engineer my boss knows that if I'm unhappy I will just leave. But the boss of someone on a work visa knows they can do pretty much whatever they want to them and the employee is just stuck.
So we need to change the work visa system so those employees aren't in such a vulnerable position. How exactly? I don't know..
> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
No, the author lists a whole bunch of names from HR. That's not just an abusive boss, that's an abusive boss protected by HR, which makes it a story about Amazon.
I worked at Amazon and never had any issues like that. In fact, my experience was completely opposite and I had several wonderful bosses, great co-workers, awesome environment and fun things to work on.
I'm certain there are many stories like mine. That doesn't matter at all, as long as there's one case like Oleg's.
But isn't that why companies hire employees on visas to begin with? I would venture to guess for every 1 truly pioneering mind that is working in the US on a H1-B visa there are 100 people working on CRUD software at Amazon or Microsoft.
Depends on the company. Companies like Tata and Infosys (which, until recent changes, had something like 80% of H1B quota), sure. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft do not do this as a matter of policy (which is why they sponsor most of their H1B employees for green card); but individual managers are still aware of the kind of leverage this gives them, and some of them try to use it.
They hire employees on visas to build CRUD apps, because it's a seller's market for employees that can pass <arbitrarily high whiteboard interview standards>, and if you're having trouble filling headcount, there's no reason to exclude 7.2 billion people from your hiring pool.
I saw a suggestion a while ago that the H1B1 visas should only be granted to the highest paid employees. The idea being that that they would be more likely to be essential to whatever business brought them in, so less likely to be the subject of abuse, and less likely to be abusing the h1b1 program to hire cheaper labor.
Allow H1B holders to incorporate their own companies in the US, so that they could work on their own thing in parallel. It's often better for talented persons to live in e.g. Canada close to US borders working for US corps (Vancouver, Toronto) and run multiple LLCs in the US, than to work for those same corps in the US and enjoy slave lifestyle.
It sounds like “brown uncle” syndrome to me. I hear south-east Asian women complain about it all the time, as a male I don’t have to deal with it much, but fits the description.
I feel like I should point out the value in surrounding yourself with people like Oleg here who 1. Have a completely different socioeconomic perspective than someone like myself, and 2. Feel (rightfully) entitled to voice their opinion on anything and everything that the judge to be of enough importance to voice such an opinion.
If anyone in the Seattle-area values an engineer who will voice such opinions on ethics and morality above their own career-oriented self-interest, perhaps extend an invitation to an interview. Because surely there is no safeguard in place that will save this man and his family from being fired and then deported.
He's self representing himself for the case? Does anyone know if there is any reasoning behind this? Even lawyers aren't recommended to represent themselves... going up against Amazon's lawyers with- no offense to the author- imperfect English, sounds like it would be more of a firing squad than a lawsuit.
As a fellow Russian, the impression I got from the original post is that the author has no idea how PR, legal system, juries, diplomacy and workplace politics work in the U.S. Kinda sad because those things are orthogonal to your software development skills.
I've been downvoted here before for "victim blaming", but I'm going to say this anyway because someone has to.
It's your responsibility to be in control of your life. There is no grand order of things that will take care of you. There will always be things working against you. Entropy, competition, environmental hazards, psychopaths, etc, are everpresent.
You need to have the confidence to walk away from situations that aren't in line with what you want, and not just throw up your hands and say - I guess this is my life now.
If you are on H1B and you have a family in the country I think you need to be very careful about how you behave at work, and if your work situation sucks you better start looking for a new H1B sponsor. You can always complain later.
If you've been downvoted before for victim blaming, maybe there's cause for you to think before plowing ahead forward? I don't think anyone is implying that it's not your responsibility to be in control of your life. But I think it is the case that there are such things as power asymmetries, powerful institutions, and well intentioned systems that have been left wide open to abuse (H1B system).
To misattribute the failings of a broken system to a lack of personal responsibility is to fundamentally misunderstand the full entirety of the situation. For your own sake, please try to think through this situation a little bit more carefully. Remember, in America, we once used to have a system of indentured servitude that we looked back on with shame. A very large amount of Americans could find it to be a similar kind of shame if we were to re-implement a modern version of it without knowing that it was happening.
Stories like this can serve to shine a light on it. Truth be told, I don't know what happened in this particular case. However, what cannot be argued is that the incentives are ripe for abuse. It is a false equivalence to say that psychopaths are there just as entropy, competition and environmental hazards. Some of those are arguably beneficial. But I will say, at this juncture point and at this particular point in time, people seem to be increasingly unhappy with tolerating openly psychopathic behavior. Sadly, if this employee had a better handle on how American PR, optics and law operates, there's a good chance he could have dropped a nightmare of a PR bomb and be walking away with a settlement right now...
And if he did that, he'd be doing that opposite of what you're suggesting. He'd be standing up, and fighting, which is a thing you can do in this country. It's why I think you're wrong, in this case.
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."
Amazon Leadership principles are for all employees at the company not managers.
"Leaders are right a lot" isn't indoctrination to trust your manager implicitly because they are right. It's "Be a leader. Have good judgement. Work to improve it. As a result be right a lot"
Backbone one is also misunderstood: "Don't succumb to do the easy thing. Push back when you know when it's the right thing to do even if it's harder. BUT if you are overruled, and the group decision goes against it, don't try to fight it and undermine the decision, commit to the path."
Perhaps the principle was updated since the article was written, but the actual (current) description says, "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." In other words, a leader can only be right a lot if they gather external data in order to undermine their preconceptions, but they do not get caught in analysis paralysis. I think that's a very well articulated principle, overall, regardless of how it manifests in the company culture.
It's funny how you often notice bullies getting promoted - is destruction of a low-level person a rite of passage for a middle manager to get ahead at many US corporations these days? I can imagine if they select for some dark-triad characteristics and going all-in, demonstrating cold/calculating/cruel moves while keeping paperwork clean signalizes the right person?
Bullies are often beneficial to the person they work under. That person can delegate unpleasant bullying-work to the bully and the bully will never bully his boss.
Agreed. Have seen plenty of 'kiss up, kick down' behavior at larger tech companies. It is at times amusing and a small break from the suffering to see the person transform rapidly during interactions with the kissee or the kickee in short order.
It does somewhat establish a baseline capability of being able to put people through emotionally not nice things.
I suppose that any manager whether they are malignant or they are really just ordinary, well intentioned people have to at some point not of their own volition do exactly that because of legitimate business reasons outside of their control. So when push comes to shove if they can prove they are capable of handling those responsibilities then I guess that sends a useful signal???
Abusing it out of some childish sense of revenge is just unfortunate beyond belief.
Besides H1Bs, and fresh graduates (who don't have any choice), I don't understand how Amazon can still higher Software engineers. I understand that Amazon teams are diverse, but as a candidate with any other possible option, how could anyone even consider amazon considering everything that's been written about the company already.
I interviewed onsite a few weeks back and got bad vibes from five of the six interviewers. A few seemed to hate being there, and the others seemed like nightmares to work with. One guy was cool, though.
How about because Amazon develops some of the most interesting and innovative products out there? AWS, Alexa, Go Store, to name a few?
I've worked on several AWS services, and I'm very proud of being a part of them and of AWS in general. I bet there are very few other places where I would find problems this interesting or of this scale.
If you have some experience, you probably know better than just look for a job at company X - you probably choose specific role in a particular team or product. And Amazon sure does have a lot of great products with very interesting positions.
There are plenty of companies that have interesting projects and don't have such a toxic culture. GCP and Azure are the exact same technical challenge as AWS without all the Amazon BS.
I was answering why choose Amazon over "any other possible option" - because Amazon has awesome projects. If cultures at Microsoft or Google are less toxic is an unrelated topic.
> One Amazon employee said when her father was dying, her boss told “you are the problem” and prevented her from visiting the father. Another Amazon employee saw his unborn child died during pregnancy when he was under oppression by his manager. There are a lot of cases like that. Amazon is built on blood.
Holyshit. This sounds like modern day slavery. Isn’t this bordering on crime against humanity?
I used to believe that. But I saw very close how an IT union was taken over by old school, corrupt fat union guys. And they just pander to the lowest common denominator. They go against meritocracy.
"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.
there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.
Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?
> i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority
Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.
> screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.
They both seem to pay a lot of lip service while the reality greatly undermines the verbiage. I’d argue that in acting the representation of women is far better than in software development. The degree to which software development is an asocial boy’s club is hard to understate, and the pet theories about intelligence and genetics don’t help, but rather reinforce the farcical nature of the self-serving “meritocracy” narrative.
Unions are supposed to fight for each of their members equally. As such it is in their interest to eliminate performance based pay as much as possible. Increases in pay should be based on time in job (positively) and likelihood of losing job on time in job (negatively). If you have performance based pay someone who’s three times as good might get paid more, or long serving staff might be let go before the newly hired. That is not what the average union member wants, they want security and stability and they work to get it.
Nowhere is a perfect meritocracy but a union that did not actively work against meritocracy would not be working in the interest of its average member.
Unions operate according to the rules the union members agree to. There is no "one way" that unions function. A "programmer's union" would be structured according to whatever makes sense to the programmers.
agreed, unions have had issues akin to this across the board in the last decade or so, and it's extremely sad (to say the least). active worker participation and leadership of the union is the antidote to that.
Having a union represent you at work is like having a lawyer represent you at court. Sure some rugged individualists choose to represent themselves pro se, but we all know how smart that is.
Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000. [1]
For reference-- that's $318,160 more than Jeff Bezos' salary. That's insane.
How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
If journalists focused on developer unions for even a fraction of the time they spend criticizing Amazon, I'd bet we'd have some blogs that sound just as damning as the one the author has written.
Sure, but that's because the company is doing better. If it stagnated then he would only make base salary. If the union does their job poorly the Union leader still gets paid.
> How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
Are you saying the Amazon has a developer union that could have helped defend this employee? Citation needed. AFAIK, developer unions have been advocated for, but don't actually exist (in a functional form, in the US at least).
You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
> You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
There's actually not a big difference, after one factors out the remarkable level of spin you've worked into your characterizations.
> Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000.
If you object that people in large-organization senior management roles can make that much, you won't believe what many corporate CEOs make. It'll blow your mind!
Always, it's insane how people who work in this tech can think about reshaping this social convention or disrupting that industry and still think that "nope, unions are inherently bad and always will be bad, there is no way for us innovators to redesign labor relations for the good of workers."
So sounds like you should be okay with the minimum amount of politics that unions have!
At any rate, it's definitely arguable that office politics in tech have gotten worse and worse in the last few decades, as more money and money-men have poured into the industry. Compare Silicon Valley now to how it was prior to the Netscape IPO, and the toxicity has definitely grown.
Politics may be inherent, but the type of politics can vary in quality and livability. Ditto for the politics in a union.
I do think it is an implicit reality of any organized group of human beings, which is why I want a group that does it on my behalf, not just one that does it against my behalf.
One may not like militarism, but even the most extreme anarcho-libertarians see the benefit in having a military to protect them.
Unions are the same way. They are the only way you, as an employee, can meaningfully protect yourself.
Its unfortunate but at the same time its the bitter truth. The visa restrictions/dependency create a slavery system within the software industry at-least in US as far as I have seen personally. The person fighting must have received his green card by now I guess which is why he is able to come forward like this. On the other hand if some one is on short leash (PIP) like this with a H1B visa, they would spend their time and energy on finding another job before their status becomes illegal.
I have personal experience of a PIP which was personally motivated and I was naive enough to think that I had all the evidences to prove my case. At one point of time I was thinking whether to go to court or focus my energy to find a better job. As some one said earlier the HR is not for the employees, they are for the company. The management chain is more interested to protect one of they own, even if there are evidences.
I hear you. I know this has happened to many other people and they've told me everything that has happened to them. I say - focus your energy on getting a better boss next time.
There are laws against workplace harassment and it needs lawyers to enforce them. In this specific company, complaints of such harassment would go only to dead ears and further lead to retaliation.
If there are enough cases (and I bet there are), it would mean a class action against such practices. Get some lawyer friends and have a few beers with them.
Once again, I hear you.
Addendum: If you wish to put your SDE skills to good use, develop a social shaming browser plugin with anecdotal evidence tying to a person's professional profile, say, LinkedIn. That will ensure that bad managers are automatically flagged when people visit their profile.
There's been much discussion in this thread about the role of HR and corporate processes in these kinds of situations. I would encourage anyone that works in a BigCo to read the book "Corporate Confidential".
Sorry to be pedantic as this is often incorrect: King county was NOT named after MLK Jr, but rather changed recently from referring to Rufus King to MLK Jr. I had mistakenly believed this too before I learnt about our history.
But Washington State is indeed named after George Washington.
It's no accident you assumed that. King County Metro uses MLK as their logo, so you can't even walk a block downtown without seeing a 10-ft mobile billboard of MLK's face.
Another tidbit I learned today: S Jackson Street (running through the International District in Seattle) is, in fact, named after President Andrew Jackson.
>it seems to be his immediate manager that's the larger problem
Not discounting this, but someone that thinks comparing to Jeff Bezos to Adolf Hitler is either legitimate or merits public attribution is bringing their own issues to the table, and is likely not telling us the whole story.
Now I know an ad-hominem is ipso facto against HN's rules, but look at not just the Hitler comparison, but the writing style.
Disconnected sentences. Run ons. This is more than a case of someone who's a bad writer or a non-native English speaker. I've written in non-native languages before -- organization, paragraphs, and spacing transcend language.
To not mince words, this blog post seems 50% in the format of one of those crazy political ranters that show up in your inbox, or Timecube ( http://timecube.2enp.com/ ).
Inference-wise, is there a good (>20%) chance this guy's story is legit and he's really just a very, very, jumbled writer. Yes. But is there also a good (>20%) chance this guy is kinda off his rockers? Also yes.
This is not meant as an ad-hom itself. It's merely statistical inference (like inferring someone writing about Python but mispelling it as "Pyton" all the time is probably not that proficient at Python)
As intense these allegations are, someone on the Internet once said that it's best to keep these things offline until investigations/lawsuits are done. Is that true?
Note that this is filed "pro se" (he is acting as his own lawyer), which is universally a bad idea.
Having read that complaint, I think he is extremely likely to have a case (though I am not a lawyer). I think he's extremely unlikely to manage to get results through the court unless he gets a lawyer.
Hmm, it's a really bad strategy to go public including the names when a case is open. The author seems to be weak and needs to work on mental fortitude; that might be reason why he was so mercilessly exploited by his manager, as certain people can spot that from distance.
The company employs something like 300,000 people. I’d imagine many stories of bad management just at that scale. Since it’s Amazon it always gets an unfair level attention.
Former Amazon employee here (worked at Lab126, on the original Kindle devices).
While I didn't have a bad manager there (my managers were actually nice people), it is Amazon's corporate culture that turns the place into a 'dog eat dog', arse-hole driven, development. Managers have to run around and cover their arse, as in the first or second misstep, they are out. This pressure filters down to employees who are often thrown against very tight deadlines without much corporate support (ie. basic training on new tech, or even clear coding review standards, and more). Code reviews usually turned into: "Who screams the loudest wins".
Amazon tends to be notoriously 'cheap/frugal', to the point of lacking basic things that most work places take for granted. (I am not talking about cheap coffee and lack of perks, but not even throwing a Christmas party, even though the Kindle was a huge success and sold more than then even the more optimistic prediction). The company will not show/give a basic token of appreciation, even though the team is performing well. Hence, employee morale was not high, but people saw it just as a job. If you are 'young' and still learning and want to grow as a person, you will hate an environment like that.
But the worst abuse was done to H-1B folks like me.
1. Amazon abuses on people that are on H-1B and need their greencard application going to stay in the country. They delay your application at every step, to the point that you realize that something that should take 1 year, it will take 3-4 years at the given pace, or maybe not even done ever. They dragged their feet, and played with your life as a simple leverage tool. (even after talking to the VP of HR, and while getting: 'Yes, it will be done', nothing got done, and things got dragged out anyway).
2. Amazon abuses on people that need some flexibility (due to family reasons). I remember really as at some point I had to pick up the project of co-worker as she had a mental break-down at work. (crying and all). Reason? She needed some time off due to children/family reason and she couldn't get it as 'we were on a tight deadline'.
My first week at work there, there was a 'goodbye' party at my team, where one of the managers/lead engineers was leaving. The reason: Burnout. (I learned that part later).
3. Their back dated options, (i.e. you get most of your stock compensation only on your 4th year), are done in purpose, as they know you probably will not put up with it until then, and leave the money on the table by leaving. Most people stay 1-2 years and move on.
So, yeah, I think Amazon is a bad actor/employee to even software engineers (who tend to have options). I can't imagine their warehouse and lower level employees.
When the NYTimes article came out, I thought it pictured a very accurate portrait of the company. Perhaps things have changed, perhaps they are still the same, but I usually do not recommend friends to work there. They fully deserve their bad rap, and I am glad NYC didn't subsidize their abuse.
Everyone I've ever known in real life to actually work there (it is more than just a couple of people) has told me that its not a place a person should want to work. I've never heard of literally everyone I know who works for a company has nothing good to say about it at all....especially from other engineers. So I always ignore the recruiters when they send me linked in messages and emails.
Same. I try to keep in mind that anecdotes do not evidence make. However, when my sample size is in the high thirties and I still do not have one positive opinion, something smells.
There is long standing evidence that Amazon actively manipulates social media to try to paint working in the warehouses as a great job.
HN tends to have an outsized representation of prospective H1B candidates.
Added up, it's really hard to take any of the positive comments from "Amazon Employees" seriously in this post.
I just want to contrast this with the fact that in my case Amazon was extremely diligent with my green card process.
I applied day one after joining (my manager knew that I joined with that expectation so he approved right away) and they started working on it immediately. I had some delays with the lawyers but in general it went pretty smoothly.
This sounds like retaliation. I am not a lawyer, don't know the details, and this is not a pleasant process to go through, but it may be illegal in your state. For example, here are some of the laws in California[1].
Someone talented enough to work at Amazon has the option of going out on their own. This was the best decision I’ve made and now I have all the time in the world to spend with my child. There was an excellent post on how to be a consultant and charge good rates. It doesn’t matter where you live or your accent if you do it right. Sucks for the poster to be treated the way he was, these companies need to be held accountable for human suffering on all levels but at the same time it’s hard to sympathize when the company is that large and the chance that the CEO can control what one asshole supervisor does is tiny. Bezos probably has no clue about this or has few reasons to care. He rightfully stated that he is making others rich, hence all the more reasons not to keep doing it at other places. Russia is a beautiful country where highly paid developers can live comfortably. I’m not saying he shouldn’t live where he wants (US) but there are means of doing well outside of working for behemoths like Amazon, google or Facebook.
This is true of _any_ company, _especially_ if you happen to be a straight white male (i.e. not a minority in any way).
Go to HR only if you're 200% sure you can make the company suffer if they don't listen to your complaint. I'm talking _documented, corroborated_ sexual harassment, or _very heavily documented_, strictly illegal discrimination of other types. It is best to also take a medical leave if you're being hazed like this, that way you will have what passes for evidence should they try to sweep things under the rug, which they almost certainly will (and truth be told, after the abuse described in the article, I'd probably need to take a leave for real).
And of course do not under any circumstances go to HR if you're an H1B without first rounding up another job in a 100% guaranteed fashion. If you don't, it becomes very easy for them to get rid of the problem by simply firing you. By law, you have to leave the country in 2 weeks. They know this.
Not to be snarky but, I think, a lot of commentators and the original poster would benefit from Gramarly subscription. The stories are compelling and make me quite sympathetic to Oleg (to the extent of helping him financially or in some other way) and everyone else, but, my God, it is very hard to read typos and grammatic errors.
While Amazon’s work culture doesn’t surprise me(similar experiences from multiple sources), while I feel sympathetic to the author’s struggles, I do feel the author went a bit too far with his invectives against his previous manager. The reason I say that is, we don’t know the manager’s side of the story and may be it wasn’t exactly like how this guy characterizes it.
While people working on visas don’t have as much freedom as people who don’t need sponsorship, I don’t think this problem is present in every company that has lot of immigrants. Part of the problem is Amazon’s culture and I think this problem is trickled top down.
It seems like people at the top management of amazon work hard and there is probably better than linear returns for their extra efforts. But it seems like they push that even on the lower rungs where it seems like it is not justified.
I had a similar horror story from 2014-2015 Seattle Amazon. But I opted to quit rather than being subjected to further abuse.
I had a really bad manager whose name was Maulik Patel. He had the worst attributes you could ask for in a manager. Unsupportive, jaded, and emotionally draining. He kept threatening to fire me but never would...for something like 4 months until I said fuck it and quit. His main reasons were that I wasn't fast enough despite finishing the tickets in my sprints pretty much all the time. He had a vendetta against me for being hired to do the job he couldn't. He had flat files of libraries like jQuery and KnockoutJS and d3 committed into our repo. He used the synchronous ajax call flag to download language files...freezing every page for a quarter of a second. There was no way to upgrade all our libraries or fork them properly without undoing all of his mess.
I put us on Bower for web packages and rerolled everything. He was pissed about that. Pissed I fixed his mistakes. He would say things like I am level 4 so I need to pull tickets from the next sprint when I am done with the current sprint. Fundamentally he did not understand what role management had in planning and how to do it properly without antagonizing individual contributors.. Maulik attacked team members including me with qualitatives like slow and fast. He would spread his hands like he was showing a quantity and say you are here but need to here [moves hand higher.]
It was his first time as a manager. When I took the job Jeff Grote was actually signed on to be my manager..but Jeff pulled a bait and switch early into my start..sticking Maulik as a middle manager under himself. Coulda all been avoided if Jeff did me proper.
When I left I sent an email to the team explaining my grievances which I felt they deserved but which is for sure unprofessional. I probably shoulda went to HR but I had heard bad things about HR at large companies. Couldnt have been worse than not getting severence or unemployment. Live and learn... Care to share any similar stories? Would probably make me feel better to hear how someone else dealt with a bad manager scenario. If not its fine.
Here's an email I had sent to Jeff (his manager):
Jeff,
I'm coming to you about Maulik's behavior. Literally, it's so bad that even when I come home, or I'm off on weekends, I'm thinking about how to deal with the guy. It's totally unsuitable for job satisfaction. My job satisfaction isn't even reflecting the tickets I do anymore, it's literally tarnished, shit on, by the passive-agressive comments Maulik makes on the regular, he usually sticks a smiley face at the end of his insults as if that makes them less offensive.
When I came onboard, the javascript and front-end workflow and ui, and code, were absolute chaos. I am not one to cry over spilled milk. I fixed 90% of it and did not insult Maulik, because I understand that it isnt productive to do so.
However, I don't know why Maulik feels the need to stomp on me for what amounts to the smallest kind of things. If you look at my ticket resolving rate, I'm like a speed demon, Ashley can vouch for this. So I'm getting my job done.
But either Maulik has a personality or managerial deficit, he is somewhat envious that I am doing a category of task right (front-end) that he only was shoddily able to do. Or he has no idea, is oblivious, and thinks his unelegant and critical behavior is conducive to being a good manager. And it isn't, I can tell you, based on my satisfaction and willingness to do good work. He's going against that with his continued vitriol.
For example, this timezone issue. He has 100 other issues to deal with. And he chooses to spend 20 minutes researching and finding a library (Which he may not have found...20 minutes could end up empty handed..) Just so he can trump me.
And it's a habit with Maulik. He ended up saying "This kind of reserach is what is expected from an Amazon engineer."
All too common for me to talk to him, and then he ends up using corporate culture rhetoric to crap on me. "Andrew, most people don't last long here. A lot of people get fired. Amazon culture, you need to learn it" Intimidation tactics, dismissal of my concerns, and basically abusing the idea of Amazon culture to avoid taking personal responsibility.
I really need you to step in here and deal with Maulik. He's a new manager and is showing it. A good manager is supposed to improve the teams efficiency, correct? He's actually making me not want to work, because of the amount of vitriol I get for performing well. It's anti-correlated. It's negative reinforcement.
Word of advice to anyone. Don’t complain about your boss, in any company, very few cases it will end up in your favor. Second, never complain to HR. As Oleg said, HR is to protect the company, not you.
I’m very saddened it ended up this way. I don’t know the full story so I can’t judge. But if even half of what he says is true, everyone involved should be fired.
Having that said, I work for AWS and pretty happy but I’m very concerned I keep hearing cases like this in the media. Maybe when the dust is settled I’ll try to take apply to his team and this will give me an excuse to see their culture from first hand. So far all employees I personally know didn’t have similar issues, but maybe I’m just lucky.
Sounds terrible and hope justice prevails. I’m not familiar with the case but in case anyone wondering or caring, I work for AWS and never heard of any similar cases in any of the teams I’m working with. It’s a big company and there are some bad bosses apparently. I wouldn’t have taken that approach personally even if I was in his shoes but I’m not in his shoes and don’t know all the facts. I hope this gets resolved but this is far from my own experience (3 years in AWS as a Sr SDE)
Worst protest for them would be when a lot of people left at the same time. Project would be slowed down, they would have problems hiring, people who stay would be overwhelmed and left later.
Protesting against amazon and still working there means nothing, because you're still doing job for them, which means you accept the state of things, despite not tolerating it at the same time.
>To somehow improve its reputation, Amazon manipulates public opinion on the Internet! Amazon pays to its employees for posts in social networks! Don’t believe? Google it!
I couldn't be the only one who found some irony in this statement.
What makes people, especially managers, to act so shittily with people working 'under' them. I can't begin to imagine how crappy a person has to be to abuse power. Humans seriously cannot handle power.
amazon managers used the data from internal feedback system against their subordinates.
I think this shows exactly how we the customers(some say the products) can trust them with our data. Very vivid example that is.
Given the abuses mentioned, even in WA, if there was legitimate documentation of things like “be in by 7am”, HR would have worked with the situation - shitty manager or not.
I’ve heard at Amazon, if you are on a PIP, if you manager tells you to juggle bananas on a unicycle and you don’t make a damn good attempt you can be fired. Probably hyperbole, but still.
The author of this article seems very junior / immature, and honestly feels like he's got some mental health issues going on. Airing this much dirty laundry is not likely to get you what you want, and is likely going to make it hard for him to get hired by the next company.
Always talk to your boss 1:1, face to face. Never give shitty feedback over an online system. If you can't work out your issues, or you don't get along well with your manager, best to just move on and look for a new job.
This seems like a tiff with a particular manager, not all 600,000 people that compose Amazon.
Also, I'm not sure if he ever learned this, but his manager doesn't control whether he can transfer or not. All he needed was a hiring manager to say s/he wanted him on the team and he could've just left.
Mgrs block transfers of engs they don't think meet the performance bar. Apart from official channels to 'block' transfers, they block them by asking other mgrs to not hire you (You're marked as needs-improvement and put on a 'dev-plan' at the sole discretion of the mgrs participating in your OLR process, post which you'd need a VP approval for transfers; you can't contest a 'dev-plan'. Oftentimes You're not even told abt it. When you're told the justifications are vague: You're told the mgrs have got written peer feedbacks, but you're never shown any. You're told you didn't do enough because there weren't enough commits or enough issues resolved depending on which ever metric suits them).
Mgrs treat engs like puppets and engs are okay with it cause the pay rise and sometimes even the job is at stake through this dreadful OLR process. Folks who readily sacrifice their work life harmony are the ones that get the plaudits. This is unsustainable long term, but Amazon doesn't care abt your long term, ironically. It isn't uncommon for "top tier" and "least effective" talent to work for their mgrs on weekends, late nights, be involved in important meetings in different timezones. On several occasions, I've seen engs work on vacations because there was an emergent issue, or because they were due a promotion and couldn't say no.
Mgrs have their favourites and shower them with best possible work, best possible compensation, best perks (like overseas travel to attend conferences, attend re:invent, fly for recruitment drives). In one instance, I saw the pay gap was 3x between equally tenured folks at the same job level. You'd usually find these "top tier" engs defending their mgrs, the work culture, the processes, the policies to death.
The HR department is the worst and complicit in all of this. The new peer feedback system is a hog wash and isn't even considered for OLRs. The promotion process is now less bureaucratic but puts too much power in the hands of the mgrs who decide who should get good enough work and just enough responsibilities to get promoted. OLR process and promotion alike is basically 'how to lie with statistics (only when your mgr allows it)' if you get what I mean. Mgrs can lie or argue either way depending whether they like you or not. I've seen mgrs reject negative feedbacks for engs they are looking to promote. The reason usually is a terse 'Inappropraite' with no further explanation. The mgrs are known to seek negative and positive feedback depending on how they want to build a case for or against you from their "yes men" who are usually the "top tier" engs.
God help if you've got personal or health issues. At least on one occasion, one of my friends was told by his mgr to be worried abt their performance since they've got mortgage to pay. And on several occasions, employees asked to leave because they broke some Amazon code of conduct or policy, but the actual reason to put them to sword in the first place could have been anything, ranging from personal prejudice to revengeful mindset to "let me show you who's the boss"
Multiple mgrs doing 'amazon things' can mean only one thing: It isn't because of a few bad apples... The whole basket is rotten.
Despite all of this, it's amazing so many good engs I know work there. But I also know that they'd give up that job at Amazon for Googles of this world in a heartbeat.
All that reads like the ramblings of a frustrated (probably mentally broken down), extremely self-entitled, combative individual.
He needs help, but not of the legal variety... of the psychological variety. I truly hope he seeks it out and accepts it.
It's just too big as a company. It cannot be fair. With all those layers of middle managers, talented people are bound to get ignored and fall through the cracks; suppressed by managers whose only interest is maintaining the status quo.
I'd say this isn't about "talented people", this is just basic decency that an employer should have to extend to an employee, regardless of that employees position or talent.
Very delusional and poor writing by this guy. I have no doubt Amazon is a miserable gulag to work at, but I have no doubt this guy has made his situation much worse through his behavior.
In case people don't realize, the linked site has one blog post per day going back the past ~2 weeks all about this protest. Some choice excerpts:
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
> There are 2 most difficult parts in the rally:
> - to get courage to start
> - to make a banner
> Courage is easier. Few YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, AC/DC song "Thunderstruck" and I am ready to fight.
> To be honest, in the morning fear of public shame almost caused symptoms of bed wetting.
> But Deadpool told me how to manage this fear. [embedded youtube video from the deadpool movie here]
> They can argue citing last words: Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Why didn't I commit? I ask: decision taken by whom? If my manager and his managers all the way till Bezos support oppression, should I respect their opinion?
> Then the only authority here is God. I say: Once a decision is determined BY GOD, I commit wholly. But God didn't ask me to stop protesting yet.
> Thus, most of NYT Amazon examples are really cruel and inhuman. Employees are punished because their parents are dying, their children are disabled etc. I hear shaking Hitler in his coffin. These are not single examples of "bad" managers. This is a company culture. Official company policies support the CULTURE worse than genocide. During the genocide, Jews were not treated in that way.
> If I don't find printer today, tomorrow nobody will know about horrors of Mr Bezos.
> How can I do leafleting without printer?
> Where are all these librarians?!!!!!!
> Btw - got to library. The one near of UW was open even during the "storm"... How can you call this nice Christmas snow a "storm"? I thought the storm is when Dorothy flies in her house through the sky... In Russia we have such storm 9 months a year with a temperature of -22 F.
> Anyway I printed almost 300 sheets of dirt about Amazon. Tomorrow 300 Amazonians will know the True. Jeff, I am coming.
> I was thinking I am afraid of people. But then I realized: in fact people are afraid of me. Now I feel I am more powerful and more free than anybody else. Amazon employees are restricted in their freedoms: they are forced to spend most time of their lives to do the work they hate. They are restricted to speak.
> I am free to speak and Jeff Bezos with all his billions can't close my mouth and can't prevent me from walking on the street with my banner.
> I like that. Like a student who lost virginity. I mean, well, you know.
> But today it will be incredible day. I am going to Whole foods store at Denny way. If Spheres s a heart of Amazon, Whole foods is its stomach. This store is always full of people and engineers. God bless me.
Before the outrage machine gets going, probably worth reading that and asking how reliable of a narrator this is.
It is interesting to see the mindset of the person who wrote this post. He's obviously been triggered by some internal politics and then he's extrapolated that all the way up and down the corporate chain of command. Amazon has 613,000 employees. I can imagine there's going to be a few bad managers in that mix.
I don't doubt that the author had a negative career experience at Amazon, but his account doesn't present as credible. The associations he makes between action and intent do not compute in many places. There are things that are misunderstood or factually wrong.
- "Amazon Connect." The program is called Connections. Every employee gets a multiple choice question every day. You never submit specific comments about a manager. It's truly high level stuff. "Does your manager help clear obstacles for you?" "How many teams do you need to work with to get something done?" "Are you achieving your career goals" "Are you accruing tech debt?". Responses are anonymous and the results are not shown once the population gets below 4 or 5 total responses.
Maybe some rogue Connections employee is sharing data--they should be fired if they are. But it's wildly against policy and the idea that a manager would care enough to go find out what an individual employees response is seems off. Who has time and the individual data points don't matter that much.
It's just good macro level data. It's great to have a pulse on what's working in a team and what isn't. It's actually a great way to find where teams aren't happy with their manager. Call it a bad manager locating device. That Connections is the triggering point seems improbable.
- His manager asked HR how to prevent them from receiving immigration benefits. Seems very off. Individual managers do very little w/ respect to immigration. Employees interact directly with the company's immigration department and lawyers. Managers approve green card sponsorship and work with employees where they have immigration challenges like renewals or home country returns. His manager didn't ask HR how to do this unless he was seeking his own performance problem.
- Transfers. With few exceptions, Amazon has one of the most liberal transfer programs you can find. Don't like your job on your first day, you can apply to a new one. You cannot link transferring to any conditions involving spouses or other external factors. You can be blocked from transferring if your current manager has flagged you as having an active performance problem, and you can appeal that block itself. You cannot be prevented from transferring for any other reason than performance. If the author was blocked from transferring to another role, it's only due to performance.
- Working from home. Amazon's a pretty in-person culture, but people work from home. Some teams have different norms. A manager might discourage an employee who was struggling performance-wise from working from home, if, for example, they had done so previously with limited results. It's not a rule, but people use common sense when people are scuffling, particularly if them being around others will help them avoid getting stuck.
- Pivot is a process where people who have been identified as having performance problems can appeal this determination. If you lose the Pivot appeal, you then go through the usual performance improvement plan dance that most companies use. An employee's case is heard by three peers (people in the same job role) or a manager who manages people in that job role. Which appeal choice is up to the employee. Most people choose peers and more people win their appeal than lose. Three independent peers agreed with his manager that he had performance problems. That's the only way you lose a Pivot appeal.
Bottom line, it seems likely the person in question was not performing at the level needed. They don't see that and don't agree. Most people who aren't performing don't agree. They began having the expected performance management interactions with their manager and it sounds like many wires were crossed along the way. Did they have a demon manager? Maybe. Some level of Dunning-Kruger seems like a more likely cause. It's a big company with lots of great jobs and people who enjoy them, ymmv.
The author of the article posted their Amazon user name, so I decided to look them up. I'll start with raw data, and then inject my own thoughts:
* The author is the bottom contributor on his team by a large margin. Their few contributions are primarily configuration changes and pixel pushes.
* The author hasn't made any contributions since last August, likely due to a leave of absence
* The author's manager has received overall positive feedback in the yearly employee survey for the last two years
If I were to speculate, I would guess that the author was put on a PIP very early on and, combined with his short tenure, is the reason the transfer was denied. I really hesitate to speculate any farther than that since there are clearly other circumstances to factor in, but I encourage everyone to consider that there are two sides to this story. Personally, given the data I can see, it doesn't look very good for the author.
Poor performance shouldn't be a reason to mislead and treat inhumanly. The bit about "allowing transfer when wife gets a job in NYC" is misleading, and asking someone to work when their daughter is sick is just plain wrong. There is a respectful way of letting under performers go without being dicks.
I imagine the number of people who today looked up Oleg's commits and his manager's survey results is in low single digits. I don't think you are being as "throw away" as you think here.
Why do you think looking up someone's code commit history should have negative repurcussions? Every tech employee within the company has access to this information. Same with the tech survey that lets you see a manager's results.
As an Amazon employee, I'm interested in seeing how much credence this story has and how much I should support the author's cause. I clearly don't know the details, but what I can see gives me pause (not original author you replied to)
For what it's worth, it bears keeping in mind that the tool that you are likely using does not report activity on any parts of the codebase that you personally don't have permission to view. Also, many teams keep codebases out of the standard code store, either in alternative self-managed version control systems or on GitHub.
There are jokes about "retiring to retail" among more senior engineers in AWS. There are a lot of older low-activity codebases where the pace is slower and someone senior can essentially retire-in-place. There's also a massive diversity of teams in retail. But yea, as far as I can tell most everyone would rather work in AWS, and nobody in AWS seems to seriously consider the possibility of transferring to a team in retail.
There is a yearly tech survey with a lot of detailed questions about your experience at Amazon and about your manager and team. The results for every single Manager are public. The scores impact a manager's overall rating. I pay a lot of attention to the responses when considering new teams internally.
When I had a corporate job, digging through internal data like this for personal curiosity could have gotten me fired if I were caught, even without posting it publicly on the internet.
Digging through internal data is OK with Amazon because it's available to everyone. Posting it publicly is definitely not OK though. I'm sure he's violated NDA in some form or another.
Not at all implying that is negative, just saying that it contradicts the story of being forced to work weekends.
EDIT: I've gone ahead and just removed that point from my original post. Just because his manager asked him to work weekends, doesn't mean he did. I sure as hell wouldn't.
You're not fooling anyone with this, and it's really unethical* to post personal information about the guy here. You should really consider deleting your post.
Edit:
* And, as others have noted, extremely unwise for you personally. This post is at the top of Hack News and you've used your privileges as an Amazon employee to leak information about someone suing the company.
Devil's advocate - since there's two sides to every story- he's trying to provide more data points around the story. In my view, he's doing people a favor here.
And why should we believe your throwaway account? Put your name on here if you are willing to destroy this person even further. If you really do have access to such data, I'm absolutely astonished that you would think it ok to access it and post it like this. And finally, as anyone with any experience with data should know, data doesn't always capture the full story.
Anyone within Amazon can look at code contributions. The manager results he's talking about are also public. I think this gives a sense for the other side of the story here.
It's not good form to post such information publicly. Also, it probably is in violation of a few confidentiality clauses you signed. On top of that, this also violates the author's privacy.
Anonymously sharing incomplete personal information about someone you haven't worked with from Amazon's internal systems and making an assessment of them by the number of commits they have made isn't really making a strong case for Amazon having a good culture.
So you "voluntarily" decided to burn a colleague in public because of an opinion post?
If someone is on a PIP that should stay between a worker and his/her manager, or stay inside a team at most
The good reviews of that manager can be explained by people knowing how the system works and not willing to rock the boat. I've seen it happen, but when a manager tried any funny business with the team, he hadn't realized the team was very united and impervious to his shenanigans.
Together with several "anonymous" comments at his blogpost telling to dismiss his comments because of his bad English (which is obviously due to it being his 2nd language but it is not bad per se)
Thanks for writing this post, it really highlights what can be expected from this company.
" I left a negative feedback about my manager Uwais Khan in the daily “Amazon Connect” survey. Amazon Connect team sent to me the report showing how my manager can calculate my answer. At our 1:1 meeting, Khan prohibited me to leave feedback in the system. Since then oppression started.
Khan asked me to work on weekends. Then he asked HR how to prevent me from immigration benefits (not informing me about that)."
"My 3 yo daughter has a development delay and I need to bring her to therapy. For that, I asked Khan for work from home once a week like everybody else in our team. Khan prohibited me to work from home. Moreover, he asked me to come to office at 7 am and sit there alone. All the other team members came to office at 11 am and worked from home without restrictions. And their children were not disabled."
It sounds bad, but I'd reserve judgement until I heard the other side. There's always the other side, and I for one am tired of the recent rushes to judgement we see in the media recently.
This is happening in every big org, especially in banks, people are people. Politics, games of thrones. I would never join any big org, tried twice :).
Indian here. If your manager is from India, he probably sucks. He is insecure, has zero empathy, leadership skills or any skills.
He probably memorized data structures and algo's interview questions and got a job at Amazon. He got ahead by sucking up to his boss and being political. His boss is probably an Indian too who sucks up to his boss and so on. But that is okay, as this company is stable and they just need people to slog.
In india there is a term "sangkamya" that means someone does what they are told to. No questions asked. Indians are very disciplined and years of slavery under British has conditioned us to be good workers.
This might be true for many Indian folks. I had an Indian manager who was the kindest soul, cared deeply for the team, to the point where he would stay late if there was a high severity issue just for morale support and to help debug, focused heavily on career development for us... he let management push him around, which he shielded the team from... he got passed on promotion opportunities and eventually left. It was a huge loss for our team, and after he left, within 3 months the entire engineering team he built parted ways.
I am Russian and my best manager ever, in 20 years of software development, was Indian. So YMMV and these kinds of generalizations need to become a thing of the past.
I need to clarify, this is from the perspective of American or first world working conditions. Coming from Russia an Indian boss must be a god sent(just guessing, don't know).
There are maybe 100 millions Indian bosses. Do I know all of them? Like everything in life, this is my experience. It isn't a scientific fact!
I am an Indian. When I was working in Indian IT, I used to think that Indian managers were the worst. Then I went to US and worked with some US managers. Two of my worst experiences in my career were due to US managers. So now I think majority of managers are bad, good ones don't reach the top any more.
Being racist would be discriminating someone based on their race without actually looking into the circumstances. Pointing out cultural roots of a very real problem and openly taking about it is a totally different thing.
Pretending that “Indian” describes a single culture composed of more than a billion people is the defintion of racism. India is an incredibly diverse place full of people who have less in common in terms of culture (not to mention language) than a Californian does with a New Yorker.
It does not describe every single person in a country. However, if you deny that certain countries have certain cultural identities you are lying to yourself.
I would argue that reducing more than a billion people who don’t even speak the same language, eat the same food, listen to the same music, worship the same gods... to a single stereotype is the sweaty face of ingorance, no matter how you try to dress it up or defend it. The fact that “arguments” such as yours always seem to be devoid of a grounding in reality and exist as appeals to emotion or common sense speaks for itself too. In short, ignorance and heuristics combine to produce bullshit every time.
You got to be kidding. Here are the things I can safely say about most Indians, not all, "most":
1. They eat roti and rice.
2. They speak Hindi
3. They wash not wipe their ass.
4. They are Hindu and worship one of the Avtars of shiva and all believe in bharma and bhraman.
Some things are common across a culture. The first step is to acknowledge the problem then we can solve it
You got to be kidding. Here are the things I can safely say about most Indians, not all, "most":
1. They eat roti and rice. 2. They speak Hindi 3. They wash not wipe their ass. 4. They are Hindu and worship one of the Avtars of shiva and all believe in bharma and bhraman.
Some things are common across a culture. The first step is to acknowledge the problem then we can solve it
The first step is actually learning about something to the point that, when you talk about it, you’re doing something other than revealing and revelling in your own ignorance.
For example...
1. Rice and flatbread are staples around the world. All of India doesn’t eat roti, feel free to learn about the many varied cuisines of India sometime. For example, some parts of India have a tradition of eating beef, others of eating pork, still others tend to be vegetarian. Some regions have blazingly spicy cuisine, others are mild.
2. No, again, even a cursory search online would show you otherwise.
3. Stop spying on people in the toilet.
4. Only the Hindus, not the Muslims, Sikhs, and other religions.
I won’t be replying again, I’m having a hard time assuming that you’re posting in good faith, and if you are that’s worse in a way.
Yet if you compare a Californian and a New Yorker to a Russian like myself, you can safely bet that both will smile more and be less direct in conversations due to the cultural differences.
It's not about ethnicity because these stereotypes completely exclude Indians that grew up in America. Whether you classify it as racist or not, going around classifying stuff as racist is a total non-contribution to the world. Opinions being "racist" per your view does not imply they are incorrect or morally wrong to hold, or express.
(There is something ambitious about remotely diagnosing some guy (by association) to be a cookie-cutter Indian manager, but I'm having a hard time figuring out a way it's more than just unfashionable.)
i did not see the clause that excluded people that did not grew in India.
Every time you take one label and you apply it to a large group of people that have something in common you have the potential to be labeled yourself as racist. IMHO that’s the definition of racism: you take a negative attribute and you map it to a class of people. usually you also imply that you/we are better than them.
“prejudice against people based on their ethnicity”
i may have an idiosyncratic definition of racism or we may have different understandings but this definitely crosses the line.
if the claim was made that the guy’s manager is so and so, we would have left it at that. but the claim was targeted at all managers that are indian. that’s fucked up.
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
The guy may have a case somewhere in there, but this kind of hyperbole isn't doing it any favors.
Stripping out the fluff, the concrete concerns seem to be:
- Denied permission to transfer
- Denied permission to WFH
- Placed on PIP and eventually fired
The author's hypothesis is "manager is evil and this is all retaliation", but this is not easily distinguished from "author did not perform well", and the only evidence of performance we have is one "nice" performance review.
- Left negative feedback for manager -> Prohibited to leave feedback by manager.
- Required to work on weekends.
- Denied some form of immigration benefits behind his back.
- Told that his wife having a job has anything whatsoever with him being able to transfer.
- The above being a lie.
- Required to show up 4 hours before everyone else.
- Punished for using sick days.
I don't think any of the concrete concerns I listed above are subject to the authors interpretation. Short of the author lying they appear to be valid complaints.
Washington is an "at will" employment state. You can be treated poorly and fired for any reason unless it is for a protected class(race, sex etc). Amazon and his manager could have fired him because they put a bunch of names on a dart board and his was the one hit.
I do think the treatment was incredibly unfair and unjust. Unfortunately, in "at will" employment states in the US, this appears to be perfectly legal behavior. As shameful as that may be.
Most US states are at will; and people still win lawsuits against their employers quite often for just run of the mill toxic behavior, and not just for things as cut and dry as bigotry (although, being a visa holder, he may have a case for, especially since it was a part of these discussions - national origin and immigration status are protected classes).
> Harassment in the workplace is a form of employment discrimination. Unlawful harassment is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and as such is illegal. Unfortunately harassment can come in many forms, both verbal and physical and can be based on any of the following forms of discrimination:
> Race, Color, Religion, Sex, Sexual orientation, Age, Disability (mental or physical), Retaliation
See above about "Retaliation"
Is there something I'm missing in there? Because that again appears to only protect one from a protected class. It does not mean if your boss is being mean or insulting to you for things outside of those protected classes. But again, am I missing something in there that is different? Do you have an example of a civil or criminal case won by a plaintiff for "toxic behavior"?
I'd be very interested in that, as that would mean the advice I've recieved from two diffent legal counsels I've contracted for advice. If you are correct, it appears I may have a civil claim against those attorneys.
I mean one one thing your missing (but probably also the person you're replying to) is that in the actual lawsuit he alleges racial discrimination with some credibility.
But also disability discrimination with regards to his kid.
If my manager asked me to come to office at 7am, I would ask for 6am instead, so that I could be gone at 2pm and have a life, with a bonus of avoiding traffic jams. Choose your punishments carefully, aspiring middle manager!
You’re a software engineer. Quit and move on. So your boss is a dick. Invoking civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr.!? Melodramatic and offensively out-of-touch with reality.
The only thing you should have done was tell your boss to fuck himself and get another job. That’s it. No need for a 2000 word blog post. No need for a “protest”.
This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong.
Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.
Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?
People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.
Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else.
You seem to be confused. Being able to bring someone someplace at a certain time can be, depending on the locations, much easier and less time intensive if done from home.
So, for example: If your commute takes twenty minutes and therapy is twenty minutes from your home taking someone to therapy who is at home takes 40 minutes if you do home office or between 60 and 80 minutes of you have to be at work.
Nowhere does it say that he wanted to do home office to take care of someone. That’s nonsensical and a nonsensical interpretation of what was said. The most straightforward interpretation is that this is a simple case of simplifying logistics.
No, working from home means working, as in getting particular things done.
Working from home often means that your (equivalent of) lunch break is a time you can spend elsewhere, e.g. take your child to therapy. You don't waste time commuting from your office if the doctor's office is nearby.
You can also spend more time for off-work activities in the middle of the day, but work until a later hour, again because you're not commuting back from the office.
As long as you get done what you planned to, and participate in whatever communications you planned to participate (video calls work well these days), I don't see why working from home would be a materially inferior way of working, at least if practiced in moderation.
Your statement may be right. I am inclined to believe that he means he needed to take her to therapy and then back. This means he might start the day a bit later or he might be unavailable for some time. People generally WFH in those situations as it saves the time of commute and they can get something else done. Overall it might be an hour or 2 that he might not be available or it might be just the same as before as he saves commute time both ways and can work later in the day as he is already home.
No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.
I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.
I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.
And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.
Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.
If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.
Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.
Yeah, I can see how one could make an amoral, pedantic argument around the definition of working from home. But to do that you have to 1) remove the argument from it's surrounding context, which is flawed reasoning and 2) successfully prove that there is a significant difference in the practical outworking of the definition of working from home between the subject and their workmates. The latter is immediately and significantly relevant to the definition and, unfortunately for the oppressor, drags context back into play.
Thank you. I've seen a lot of abuse of the term. One time I worked with a recruiter [1] and said I was feeling really bad that day and took the day off from work and was resting at home. She replied, "ah, gotcha, so you're working from home today". And I was like, "no, I'm resting."
(With that said, it could still be a good-faith usage here -- like, he legitimately does work from home, and the therapy is relevant here because all the back-and-forth pickups would otherwise eat up much of the day.)
I have been working from home for almost 5 years now, and one thing that I learned in the first 18 months was that it is important to take sick days. In the beginning I would just sit at my desk and try my best to work even though I was sick, but not be able to concentrate and ultimately not get anything done. Then I would stress about it and work extra time, which would just make things worse. Now I take off any time I think I would have if I were in an office.
Unless you don't have sick days or your company cuts PTO in half. In that case, in front of the computer or in bed, that's still working from home. Fuck them for not providing sick days and cutting PTO in half. Fuck them for no raises in half a decade. This is the way one can get more money in the same time from the same company without a raise. The less I work, the more money I make per hour, so my incentive is to work as little as possible while still getting the minimum amount of shit done. It's management that sets the incentives. Welcome to the idiots of corporate America. Sure they could give some raises sometimes or increase vacation or add sick time or really do anything whatsoever to show employees that they are appreciated and that their salaries are not going down each month due to inflation. Instead, they try to force extra work like trying to squeeze water out of stone. In the office, it's no different. People waste time in other ways. I'm just shocked that corporate executives and managers are so fucking oblivious to the incentives they create and the empty praises they try to placate their employees with. Fuck them. This isn't a situation where one should be ethical. The cards are stacked against employees and employees need to use any dirty trick to get the most out of their shitty employers.
This sort of attitude does not help. I'm sorry that you've had bad management experiences, but things don't need to be like this, and part of that is the attitudes of both parties.
Ball's in the employer's court. It's their turn to make a move. The employee (me) can only react. Therefore as long as the employer continues to be like this, I have no choice in how I respond because I'm a human being with dignity and I deserve to be treated as such. On the other hand, this is the best job/employer I've ever had out of dozens in the industry. This is nothing compared to not getting the health insurance promised, being physically assaulted, having to work weekends/evenings for no reason at all and the other bullshit employers feel entitled to do to their employees. I couldn't disagree with your statement more, however. My attitude is one of responding to things out of my control. If my employer wants to fix this and improve my attitude, they just have to make good on the promises for a raise I was given multiple times or give me back the vacation time they cut in half. It's very simple and extremely easy for them. By saying that I should change my attitude, you're blaming the victim and implying that the employer is right to treat their employees like shit, without a shred of respect, perpetuating this bullshit forever. Nope, I will not accept the blame for their failing to be decent human beings who keep their promises and respect their employees.
Or it could be about reducing the impact of taking his child to therapy on work time. If it saves him an hour or more of travel during the day then it makes sense to let him WFH.
a specific therapy session unlikely lasts the entire day and a flextime (starting work at 11) probably covers a single day being split up a little bit.
>Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at office" when he's not actually "working" while at office, he's actually [getting coffee | taking a walk | socializing | etc?
I judge my teem members by the quality of their work and the efficiency with which they do it. Ass in the seat time is a dumb metric and is always used in a power play.
I want to preface this comment with a statement that in no way am I trying to blame the victim here, only to point out what can be learned from this situation.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of Amazon being a shitty place to work at, and I don't see much reason to doubt the story of a vindictive boss doing everything they can to make an employee miserable after learning that the employee submitted bad feedback against them.
The two lessons I can extract from this post for myself are.
1. Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work, especially against a particular person, especially your boss.
It's been covered on HN before how these things are never really anonymous and confidential, and it should be kind of obvious to figure out if you think about it.
2. If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
Re: Number 2: This is a common pattern in all big American companies. Hire an H1B, make the employee an indentured slave forever. H1B employées born in India and China have to wait 10+ years for a green card to break free from indentured servitude. While you can switch jobs on an H1B, it's risky and if it screws up, your queue position gets reset.
Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
This is true, I left my previous company because they said I had to wait 1 year to apply for my green card. According to the HR lady this was the policy (there was no policy) and it was always better from an immigration point of view to wait more. Of course this is all bullshit. This was just a dirty strategy to keep people one extra year.
> Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
I have some experience with how LMIA is not perfect, but I was excited when the administration was openly considering copying it ~18 months ago, because it's hard to imagine anything between H1B and LMIA which is worse than H1B (whether from the perspective of a protectionist, a progressive, or a common liberal).
LMIA seems like a balance. In LMIA, the employer is made to test the local labour market before applying for a visa, rather than an LCA in which the USCIS trusts the employer's word.
The LCA process also forces the employer to test the labor market first. It's all theater, and based on 20 year-old business practices (you have to publish your job ad in a major newspaper and some other places, of which one option is to have it be read out loud by a local radio station!), but it's not like you can skip through that process. How does LMIA compare here?
It has similar rules that can be cheated as well.
However an lmia supported work permit it's the employee's and not employer's, meaning that if you get fired you can still stay in the country and find another job. You do need to apply for the Visa again for the next job but being in Canada already makes it much simpler. Essentially you aren't at your employer mercy.
Also if you work for one year you usually already have enough points for PR, once you apply for a pr you gain the right for a BOWP visa, which is essentially an open work permit that allows you to work for any employer until a final decision in your PR is made.
IANAL but went through all of above and am now a pr
Slight exception in Quebec though. Quebec has its own immigration rules & policies. Quebec do not follow rest of Canada's Express Entry or provincial nomination. In regards to obtaining a skilled work permit in Quebec, its a longer process with Federal + Provincial involvement. ie: LMIA (Federal) + CAQ (Quebec).
In Quebec there are no BOWP. So if you lost your job, you have to move out of Quebec province and get another LMIA work permit. Getting a permanent residency while working and residing in Quebec is not easy as Quebec's immigration system and policies are archaic and downright broken with more importance given to French language than any other employable skills. Recently 18,000 Quebec applications were downright rejected by Quebec in the name of bringing in a new skill based immigration system.
I would suggest anyone looking to move to Quebec in a skilled work permit or applying for residency while residing in Quebec to refrain from it as it will take at least 4 years (CSQ - 2 years + Federal - 2 years ) instead of 6 months in comparison with the rest of Canada. This applies to foreign students who come to study in Quebec too.
Permanent Residency Processing time:
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
Quebec skilled worker applicants face uncertain future in light of immigration overhaul:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-immigration-a...
Hiring in the province of Quebec:
https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/servi...
I have been through LCA some years back before I called bullshit on H1B and immigrated to Canada for good. For LCA, the advertisement was done on a local newspaper which no one reads and the job was posted on the company pantry notice board with a broad confusing salary range 65K - 130K. It was also posted on the company's career page where no one could find it easily. The employer that I worked for was a top 10. They were just playing the system to bring in cheap H1B workers on chains.
LMIA on the other hand, has advertisement requirements like LCA and a transition plan as well. They are particularly strict on the transition plan including one of which is assisting the worker for permanent residence !
https://meurrensonimmigration.com/service-canada-transition-...
Thanks. That sounds like LCA in terms of testing the labour market, though. What did you mean by "the USCIS trusts the employer's word"?
I've left some scathing feedback in reviews. Frequently spelled out in a way that they could figure out it was me even if it was anonymous. The trick is to not complain about your treatment, but explain why management is taking actions detrimental to the company.
Don't say "boss made me work late and I want to quit". Say "management is overextending the team and it's eroding morale and will likely cause retention issues".
If you come at the king, you best not miss.
I like to whistle Farmer in the Dell sometimes while wandering in hallways.
Re #1: I realize this is the safest option for your own self-preservation, if you don't give negative feedback, how do you expect your work environment to change?
The way I see it, if you're in a bad situation at work, you have two options: try to change it, or leave. If you're going to leave anyway, why not at least try to improve your situation first so you give yourself the best chance of success? And that way, the company has the opportunity to remove or remediate a bad manager.
Basically, my reaction to your #1 is that it helps you avoid getting hurt by the worst possible scenario. But personally, I think it's a better strategy to maximize your chance at a good scenario.
Pro-tip: never expect your work environment to change. The chances of a report overcoming the whims of a shitty manager are very, very small especially in the context of a company that tolerates the shitty manager in the first place.
Generally speaking, the best thing to do is to smile, appear to do reasonably decent work, and begin looking elsewhere.
I second this. You'll almost never convince upper management the smooth-talking buddies they promoted could ever possibly be terrible to their employees.
Well, you could. It sometimes works. The problem is when the manager who manages your shitty manager moves away, and you get a new one. Good managers always get promoted or move away, only the terrible ones stay. The shitty manager will start afresh to get onto you.
They’ll believe it alright, and then laugh about their silly peon’s protest together.
Trying to change things might be an acceptable strategy in other industries, but I don't think it works in technology because the accepted method of achieving worker/workplace fit is to change jobs. This goes not only for bad management but also for raises (even if you like your current job).
Easiest way to improve your situation in software engineering is to just get a better job and move laterally or up.
Depends on the country.
Those that happen to enjoy IT unions can get some help there.
However don't expect the work environment to actually improve afterwards, unless the bad pieces are gone by then, as winning is only half the battle.
If you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
Maybe I've gotten lucky, but patience has worked well for me. If only I could have told my younger self...
Sadly, this is excellent advice.
For that exact reason, cultural changes in the workplace come from the top down, always.
Believing you can change it will virtually never yield any positive results to yourself. Even if you don't get fired, you will be labeled as the one who complains.
If I'm being honest^Wcynical, all you should care about at work is how great people think you are. It helps if you are at least half as good as people think, but it's sadly not a requirement.
>>how do you expect your work environment to change?
By letting them fail. The only way people learn lessons is through failures and disasters.
Let the bad systems fail, that's the best way you can help them.
You need to understand how your boss takes feedback and tailor your comments accordingly. I’ve had some managers I’ve felt free to give candid feedback to and others who just don’t take feedback well so you find another way to force change.
Option 3: Accept it, deal with it best you can, and keep looking. (As the other reply says.)
>>Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work
Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
The dirty little secret of human relationships is every one wants to be made to feel special, error less and look good. Only thing any kind of feed back, correction or criticism leads to is rivalry/enmity, and it won't end well. The question is not if some thing like that happens, but to what degree.
There are stories going back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, where he refuses to even criticize big mistakes made by generals during the civil war. If that is what some one in the position of Abe Lincoln, in a matter as serious as Civil war did, your code review feedback can wait. Nothing productive ever comes out of these processes.
If you absolutely have to display allegiance to political cartels at work. Wait until a clear leadership superiority is established, Meanwhile use silence and smile as a strategic activity to avoid getting shafted.
There can be no friends at work. In stack ranked systems, with subjective evaluation. You need to follow the Kissinger doctrine. No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Seen too much of this to realize to leave people/systems on their own.
Lincoln did criticize his generals, eventually removing McClellan from command for timidity. He was careful about how he did that though, and how he interacted with the rest of the general staff. But he proved to have a better grasp of strategy than most of them, which he was able to implement once he found Grant.
You're correct he was reluctant to overtly criticize, but the lesson to take away isn't to just not criticize. It's to be diplomatic and patient when trying to effect change. Being a natural leader, brilliant, and with great strategic intuition also helps :-)
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
> There can be no friends at work.
I think that's a bad advice. I'm sad that this is an experience someone can take from a job and that there are jobs where this applies. Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
Not every place is so restrictive and full of backstabbers. And if it is, maybe it's worth discovering that and leaving.
>>Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
This really is the equivalent of marking a giant X on your back and walking in to an arena full of ace snipers.
I have literally seen people being labelled as non-team players and eliminated for arguing against bad technical decisions. In most departments projects are started to gain visibility of high impact work- on which they will later ride to get to rewards and promotions. Disagreeing means telling them they have to eliminate you for their project to happen.
They will get their project eventually. Congratulations, you have now been marked as some that needs to eliminated for them have a good career. And they will deal with you appropriately.
This happens in all people structures. People are the same everywhere, in all times. Don't be in the delusion that some companies are special enough that it won't happen there.
If some one is in a position of power. Any debate, disagreement or criticism is a bad move to make against them.
I've been doing it for over a decade. I've only experienced a bad reaction to criticism twice. Either I'm really lucky or your experience is really bad. Either way, I know I'm not staying in a place where you can't exchange constructive criticism, because alternatives really exist. This sounds like trying to explain an abusive relationship - what you're experiencing is unhealthy, there are better places, unless you're going to go homeless, maybe you should try?
>your code review feedback can wait. Nothing productive ever comes out of these processes
Then the errors get merged and I'm liable.
Of course if you are the person signing off on a piece of code, then your work is code review.
But other wise, unless some one is doing 'rm -rf /', there is no real reason to go criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall.
Sure there is. Maintainability in the future, non-obvious edge cases, potential security issues, etc. Either you keep each other accountable for stuff like that or end up with a monster system which you can't realistically work on.
"criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall" is a depressing way to look at it. Try "collectively learning about better approaches on a company-wide visible text wall". You'll need to convince people that it's one and not the other.
All your arguments are valid, in ideal scenarios. In an ideal scenario any comment or feedback should be taken in the right spirit and acted upon.
But in these days of stack ranking and subjective evaluations. You giving a lot of feedback can be considered of lack of ability to write good code on the part of that person(after-all if they could write good code, why would it get so much criticism?). Then the next thing that happens- Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack. Your colleague will and right so think you are actively criticizing them to ensure you get promoted over them.
Enmity and rivalry begins from there. Then they could raid your CR wall and do the same to you. Then all kinds of backstabbing and self-promotion activities start.
Before you know it you would have made a few enemies within the team.
> Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack
Then you have a management problem, not a cr problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees... It's on management to communicate that cr is constructive, doesn't contribute to reviews, and isn't a game.
Not every workplace is as sociopathic. And I would rather emulate people who have ethical limits rather then those who seek power regarless of how much they lie or cause harm .
Every workplace is made up of Human structures, and humans act as humans.
I'm only suggesting you shield yourself from problems, not create the problems yourself.
Getting yourself immunity isn't exactly wrong.
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
This rule is creating problems. It actively makes relationships and work itself worst. It creates leads to passive aggressive environment where everyone is insecure and in doubt and problems wont get solved.
> There can be no friends at work.
Same here.
> No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Same here too. I am glad I worked in mutually cooperative environment where people took my interests into account and did not based all their actions on their own interest.
Do you have any good resources how to give feedback in work/relationships?
Robert Greene's books: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and The Laws of Human Nature.
Stealing the Corner office by Brendan Reid
Assorted works of Niccolo Machiavelli and Balatazar Gracian.
It will be hard to impossible to make transition even after reading these books, but at least you can detect and avoid problems at work. Or at best set up a firewall around you.
Lastly expecting goodness from people is wrong. The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
I'm afraid I disagree with your last statement. It is possible that perhaps I've just been so fortunate that all the people I've ever come across are mostly similar in what they want from life. It seems to be the same all over the world: general well being, safety and security of their family and their future.
People disagree on priorities and not everyone's incentives are the same but I've never felt that by default people are bad. I'm no scientist (or sage) and just an average human. So, this is just how I see things and not based on expert scientific inquiry. Make of it what you will.
> The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
Nope, people are not bad. People are neutral, equally capable of good or evil. Just don't assume anyone except your mother loves you unconditionally and you should be fine :)
> expecting goodness from people is wrong. The fact of the matter is people are bad
Oh for goodness sake! This is just silliness. Either you have watched too many gangster movies or you are a sociopath
I'm only suggesting you wear a seat belt when you drive. You seem to be suggesting I'm a sociopath for wearing a seatbelt and not trust fellow car drivers on the road.
You need to understand how department wide politics work. There are fixed budgets when it comes to giving raises, bonuses and RSUs. The person who negotiates and deals better wins. That means lesser for everyone. Note how even without wanting to harm you, they actually have. Then come the second rounds of power play. One way to negotiate is to prove they are better, second way to prove it is you are not. Setting team mates up for failure happens all the time, even without one realizing it. Plenty of other things happen. Actively building a bad case for other people. It might not be overt, but leave a bad CR comment or two, keep doing it actively. Make it a point to drop a bad comment or feedback for the person you might want to harm. Then over a time you tend to build a case against them mentally in the mind of your manager. These tactics are super common. Wrong people get promoted, and right people get shafted all the time.
In almost every company- promotions, raises and RSUs require building a case(like a promotion packet), which is basically a pile of documentation. That can only be done over time, its chiseling away at a rock wanting to make it into a statue. Part of that is also making sure other people's statue isn't as good as yours. As a part of building that documentation, you need your name plastered to important things in a positive way. Appreciation emails, feed backs, positive CR text walls etc. This is why so much ceremony goes in most companies when it comes to rewards and promotions. Basically quotas are fixed, and you manager needs to build a case for you. Building that requires negotiating and dealing with them to build you a better promotion packet. Almost anybody can be made to look good or bad, regardless of their efforts. Given stack ranked systems, somebody always has to take the fall for the person who negotiates better.
These things are not even new. The world of Politics(regardless of the system(Democracy/Monarchy/Republic)) has had this for 1000s of years now.
Regarding number 2. I absolutely agree and we need to change the visa system to prevent the routine abuse that happens to people because of it.
Though I don't know how we can change it to prevent that.
We maybe need to consider a change to the order and timing of how rights are granted towards citizenship first, because when you become a citizen in any first world country you get a LOT of benefits, more than we realise, and it is all or nothing.
The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.
Call your house representative and two senators in Congress, and write them each a letter about the abuse. Let them know you value your coworkers and that they should be able to enjoy the same labor rights that you do.
Spot on an industry-wide blacklist is yours!
In order for an industry-wide blacklist to exist, large numbers of people would need to have access to it. This large number of people at many different, competing organisations would have no reason to trust each other to keep a secret.
The existence of such a list, the details of its construction, and the possible Social Justice implications of this would attract so many eyeballs and so much advertising revenue, that it would be hard for any online news publication to resist reporting evidence of it.
Unless those news publications are put on the same list, losing access to latest stuff and their relevance. See what is known about Hollywood, internal Google blacklists, Apple preventing newspapers access to latest gadgets as a retaliation for bad reviews, "gatekeepers" in other "mature" industries etc. Seems like it's a defect in human nature, or a really bad heuristics, emergent with increased organizational size and a buffer shielding an individual bureaucrat from fully comprehending that as a moral choice with serious consequences to somebody else.
It's a seller's market, there's very little teeth to a threat like yours :)
Don't let these people make you afraid to use your power as a citizen and as a valuable employee.
I’ve always heard of blacklists but I seriously doubt their existence. Who would trust such a thing? It also sounds illegal as shit so I assume you can’t do this for profit.
It's like when you get MBA - you get a free network with it. Now you are inclined to trust your MBA circle due to shared history. Imagine the same with companies; there is a limited number of spots at the top, most people know each other or heard of each other, share common interests, club memberships etc. They are inclined to trust their own, insiders, or see benefit in it, than some random outsiders, i.e. in-group preference and benevolence. Then when an outsider is "put on a blacklist", i.e. some insider holds a bad opinion of an outsider, the whole group might be affected.
My impression of blacklists is that they're much more systematic and pervasive than that. If you're an individual contributor, I think it'd be really hard to become so infamous that your manager's manager is complaining about you to his peers during a golf game and they remember you.
Also, if you're writing your Representative about some kind of abuse or malfeasance, you could always use and assumed name (and say you're doing so to avoid retaliation).
You've managed to describe the function of a blacklist, but have not provided evidence that one exists.
I have a pretty lucky experience with amazon (Sr. SDE at AWS for 3 years) but I completely agree, I’m sure my boss won’t be vindictive if I live a bad connections feedback but I won’t take my chances, also in my previous company I was on a L1 visa which also marries you to the employer, I had bad bosses and great bosses there but I treaded like on thin ice there, trying to stay positive, avoid rocking the boat, as soon as I got my green card and was allowed to switch I moved to AWS. This sounds to me like a bad boss situation and maybe also bad choices situation. In any case I don’t know the details, I hope he sees justice and find happiness, but he’s painting a picture that is totally different than what I experience. It’s a huge company, all I can say it’s nothing like what I experience. Had my doubts, read the NYT article, asked a friend, he swore to me he has no clue where it came from, maybe AWS is much better than retail... but I’m sure anywhere in any big companies you’ll see cases like this. Hope it’s resolved and justice prevails. No one should suffer like this.
^That profile was created a few hours ago. I've often seen this happen when people create profiles to defend this employer on social media.
> If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
No, you are not.
That's taking the premise way too far. Slaves were owned as property. You are not property of a corporation just because your job is connected to a visa. You don't have slaves rights (almost entirely non-existent human rights, specifically). You chose to immigrate, there is a system involved in that, you knew that ahead of time, you chose to go forward regardless. You did not become a slave in the process, you did not sign on for 'slaves rights' in the process, you did not abdicate your freedom. Your employer may not dispose of your life as it sees fit. You are free to leave and go back to where you came from if you do not like the system, just as you were free to never sign on in the first place. You are not a slave at all in any manner. That's not an argument in favor of the backwards US immigration system, it's an argument that very, very clearly you are not a slave just because your job and visa are bound together. Immigration to N country is not a human right, it's a privilege (which is why I - and a billion other people - can't freely immigrate to Norway tomorrow and begin enjoying the associated perks).
Came here to say this.
I've been on H1B. It's not a perfect system, but making 6 digit salaries in Silicon Valley was infinitely better than picking cotton in Mississippi in 1840 where you could be murdered by your boss/owner at a whim.
Try to control your self pity, people!
That's an odd analogy knowing USA went into a bloody civil war to fix that.
You're comparing a broken system with an older and even more broken system that we already fixed and trying to find merit in current broken system by that comparison. Of course it's better to be alive than being squashed by a dinosaur. But how's that relevant?
It's relevant if someone just claimed that being alive was the same as being squashed by a dinosaur, to stick with your metaphor.
Or plainly: Someone said that H1B was the same as slavery. I called it bullshit.
Ok, that makes sense.
I suppose indentured servitude is a more apt metaphor.
It's not. You're free to leave as an H1B at any time, it's just that you have to leave the country also (or find a new job really fast). It sucks for employees, and it has negative effects on the job market, so there are many good reasons to kill it with fire - but no, it's not indentured servitude, and people who choose this, choose it of their own free will, and can withdraw that decision (and be back to where they were when they made it) at any moment.
Source: was an H1B (and L1 before that).
Of course it's not literally slavery or indentured servitude, but it does share some common elements that are useful for our analysis. In particular, they both involve voluntary commiting yourself to restrictive labor in exchange for coming to the US.
I partially understand your point, but I don't think "free" is necessarily a better description than "slave".
One is always free in a literal sense to choose between available options (e.g. a slave may choose to escape, an employee to quit). However, ability of a second party to attach consequences to those options (e.g. corporal punishment or death, deportation away from one's family, removal of healthcare from sick loved ones, etc.) amounts to restricting the freedom of the individual.
I don't accept that legal freedom equates to practical freedom, e.g. you have the legal right to quit your job therefore in a practical sense you are completely "free" to quit your job. If your employer can attach extremely negative consequences to quitting, then your freedom has been severely limited.
I also have trouble with arguments that the choice to immigrate was made of free will, therefore all consequences are one's own responsibility. It's not legal nor ethical to allow people to "freely choose" to sign themselves into slavery.
Anyway, this is obviously a contentious and charged issue, but I hope this helps communicate a different perspective.
>If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
This is why it is critical for people with citizenship to advocate for their coworkers with visas, both within the context of their workplace and outside. Pressure your congressional representatives to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Have a conversation with HR about visa-blind recruitment and retention policies.
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc.
After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated vendor and the difference in cost was between me leaving the office at rush hour and me leaving the office around 9-10pm.
Not only did he reject the taxi expenses, but the hotel, the flights, the food, etc. The guy was obviously a class act in his 50s, rejecting the expenses of a fairly underpaid 25 year old employee living in Scotland.
Super illegal but ultimatly I quit, because life is too short to work for horrible people.
I worked for a similarly horrible person many years ago.
I was doing on call support for a bunch of Linux machines. Literally it was him and me left because the moment I started the other two engineers bailed. One went to work packing salad because it was a better job (big warning!) and the other one had a breakdown.
So didn't get paid properly, argued mileage down to the mile, the clients and him constantly gave me verbal abuse over and over and I ended up working until 10pm some nights with my 9 month pregant wife at home on her own and virtually immobile due to a back problem.
So I get home one night after a tirade of abuse for the day and sent him an email saying "Fuck you I quit". Get a call about an hour later and he's drunk shouting abuse down the phone. This suddenly turns into undying love and care for me after the abuse wasn't working and he realised I couldn't be brow beat into coming back again. Then there's a thud which I assume was him falling off his chair. Never spoke to him again but the company folded about a year later.
So I sit down and I'm about £2000 down then on salary and expenses that were missing. I had £250 in the bank, £400 rent due a week later, wife about to have a baby and an empty fridge. So fuck it. I sold all the stock I still had of the company on ebay (back when you had to take photos and get them developed and scanned and futz with cheques which was hard work), broke even and scraped a first pay cheque at a job just before my credit card melted into a puddle.
It took 10 years to get out of the hole and back to normality. NEVER put up with this for a second. If anyone treats you like this RUIN THEM before they ruin you, your life, your relationships and everyone else they go near. I don't usually advocate this attitude but the damage and destruction that type of person leaves is immense.
Stories like this are important.
Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
... but sometimes your boss really is just an asshole, liar, alcoholic, and/or a sociopath.
Never assume the later off the bat, but never completely discount the possibility either. Because it'll probably happen at least once in an average career.
A good boss does not mistreat employees simply because the company asks them to, just like a good engineer does not implement backdoors simply because the company asks them to. If there's no way to do your job ethically, quit. Don't harm others so you can keep collecting a paycheck.
So the difference doesn't really matter. You have a bad boss; take care of yourself first and don't let them push you around.
Who cares if the boss has substance abuse issues or Cluster B personality disorders? These considerations don't put bread on the table!
Point taken, but either way, it's so not my problem. Maybe in the former case I'll refrain from aiming a flamethrower back behind me as I run as fast as possible out of there!
> Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
So? That's the boss's problem to deal with. You owe the company absolutely nothing beyond your contracted hours in exchange for your contracted salary.
I say this as an employer.
You owe common decency to other human beings trying to act decently.
If your boss happens to be a cog in a broken machine, treating them like it's their fault isn't fair to them or you.
Of course, you can always quit (and usually should). But failing to determine root cause and mis-blaming your boss is about as useful as screaming at the gate attendant when your flight gets a weather delay.
You only owe it to them so long as they do it to you.
And someone who by choice decides to be (or remains) a cog in the broken machine, specifically at the point where it requires being nasty to someone, is fully responsible for that action and its consequences.
They are either dishonest or an a##hole then.
Couldn't you have taken him to small claims court?
Court takes time. Court takes money, or at the least incurs opportunity costs. And court takes emotional reserves. People in dire straits don't necessarily have enough of any of those things, and that is why people like the described get away with shit.
(Labor advocacy programs help balance the scales a little, if only because your advocate is predisposed to believe you and help you navigate the options available to you. But they're fairly thin on the ground in the UK and the US.)
Exactly. In this circumstance at the lowest I had £12 to buy a week of food. I had to cash advance the rent from my credit card and the £12 was what was left. I also had to maintain a perfect appearance and state of mind and hide all this from my new employer for the 4 weeks until I got paid.
Didn't have the cash or energy to start it off and after 5 years I didn't want to go back to that bit of my life and kick it all off again. Plus he folded the company after a bit so chance I'd get anything were near zero.
I'm glad things worked out for you eventually. That super sucks to go through.
It is one of the reasons I am so very suspicious of folks who diminish the value of labor protections. Most of us end up downrange of some shady stuff at least once.
So mission accomplished from his point of view: "This person is weak, let's just add some adversities to their life, they would quit; my cousin can't wait to join us."
Same thing happened to my wife. A newly promoted VP transferred her out of a great position she loved to work on a special project he invented to make department look innovative, under promise of a promotion once complete. Instead as soon as the project was done he hired a new manager into another newly created position above my wife, only supervising her. He proceeded to have the manager take all her responsibilities and make her life hell until she quit. Manager was told she would get a director position for doing it, instead they did the same to her a few months later until she quit too. VP promoted to SVP.
Yeah, it's fun :( Sociopathy seems to be the norm these days.
Anyway, nothing beats that one German bank that told all employees of a branch on Friday that on Monday they are working at a location 80 miles away and are required to be there as usually.
Even in the US something like that would trigger labor law protections (generally it would be treated as a constructive layoff, triggering unemployment benefits and any contractually or legally obligated severance benefits), so this story seems more like a fable than something that actually happened. Do you have any more details about this?
EDIT: Europe generally has stronger labor laws than the US, so if something wouldn't pass muster in the US, it almost certainly wouldn't pass muster in the EU.
And what happened? My understanding of German labor laws is that, for any reasonably sized German company, there would be a workers council that would have to approve work level changes like this. Did that happen?
> Sociopathy seems to be the norm these days
What else would you expect from a society that worships profit above all other gods?
Well yeah, but who cares? I went on to much bigger and better things and he's probably still just a twat. :)
He might still be taking advantage of and hurting people though, just like there's people like him making life harder for someone with a disabled child and many other "horror stories", the worst of which will never come to light. Please don't get me wrong, I don't blame you at all for not picking that fight, at age 25 in a situation I know nothing about. But that situation is over, other situations aren't, future situations are incoming, be it with that person or others. When someone throws someone else out of the window, I don't shrug just because the victim happened to land on their feet. The other didn't plan for that, they didn't care. I cannot fully get over that.
As an individual, it's great you let it slide, and I think forgiveness is really important mental hygiene, it's something you do for yourself more than for someone else, IMO... but as a member of a society that ideally would be somewhat just and decent, we shouldn't forgive something that hasn't even been repented of and is still ongoing. Disarm, explain, forgive, that'd be my preferred approach. Not fail to disarm, fall on deaf ears, forgive.
Yeah, I am actually upset I didn't take one such person down when I had all cards in my hand, but I still believed in innate "goodness" of all humans; now that person is doing damage at a higher position at one of FANGs; who knows how many people were destroyed on their ascending path? The usual argument about stopping one that would allow another horrible person to rise, so it's futile, has some merit though; I've been shocked multiple times when I helped some desperate person only to observe horrible behavior of that person once their problems went away.
Forgiveness can't be dispensed automatically; it has to be deserved/earned by real actions/intentions. I think because mainstream culture was "meek", it allowed sociopaths to hack it and pervert it, pushing victims to always forgive while laughing at them and making their lives more and more miserable. I think in middle ages required penance was quite brutal by our contemporary soft standards.
So much this.
Well amazon hires a ton of H1Bs. When they let go, they have to go to back to their country unless they can find another company to sponsor their H1B.
So people go to extreme lengths and managers can get away with anything.
I’m super grateful for Microsoft to help me with my green card. However my life there was miserable and my manager frequently asked us to work weekends. Pagerduty was hell and I once came home at 5am from work.
F that.
I’m glad I wasn’t born in India. My Indian x-colleagues didn’t have that freedom simply due to where they were born.
I imagine Amazon is a worse slaveshop.
Yea you can feel this when you work on a team mostly of H1B. Most of them don't speak up and just say yes to whatever project management gives them. Ofcourse upper management loves this, they take all the credit and become the face of the project and if it fails they simply blame it on h1b/contractors ect.
I've seen this many many times in all company sizes over last 15 yrs. I would steer clear of teams where most ppl are h1b indians.
Ex Indian h1b here. Here are some of the things I experienced that finally ended up with me throwing away everything and come back to India.
1. Was working on a project without issues. Ex manager forced me to go back to India 3 times over a 9 month period. Every time my ex manager tells me to go back, I get ready packing and then he tells me stay for 3 more months. On the 3rd time, I said I am resigning. Now my manager doesn't want me to go to India. I got another job and went to resign. Manager indirectly threatens me that I won't get service letter (which is required for green card). I was afraid and ended up staying. It turns out my manager was lying to the customer also. Everytime, he will tell me to get ready to go back and then tell the customer that I have to go back due to visa issues. Customer had still some work for me, so they ask for 3 more months and this repeated 2 times. Each time, I would be under incredible stress. It was like telling someone waiting in jail for their death sentence that they will be hung 2 weeks from now, then a few days later tell them it was extended.
2. Came to India for my marriage. Forced me to cancel my honeymoon and work from India for 1 month for another customer while lying to the original customer that I extended my vacation. I spend one whole day in my room sad and angry. I still want to beat up the manager who made me do this even though this happened over 2 years ago.
3. Asked me to work for a temporary customer in another state. I didn't want to, but agreed since I was afraid and worked for around 5-7 weeks while staying in hotel. This was before marriage. After marriage, again asked me to work for this customer for 1 month. My wife is completely dependent on me because she cannot drive in US. I said I cannot go because my wife is alone. Lead told me to ask my wife to stay in hotel for 1 month with me. I didn't want to because she already spend 3 weeks in a hotel with me instead of honeymoon. Thankfully manager agreed and sent someone else.
4. Forced me to relocate to another state. I didn't want to. After a lot of pressure, I sort of agreed and asked to at least adjust my salary for the rent increase. The customer was paying $20+ per hour more if I was working from the new state, so I expected at least a little bit of raise. Manager lied to me saying he will take care of it. I didn't trust him because there were many stories from my ex colleagues of being treated like a donkey with a carrot tied to their front. Sent him an email asking him to reply. He didn't. At one point, he said "I will snip you". He had said a similar line once before - "I will cut you". At that time, I didn't even understand he was threatening me, I was wondering why is he talking about circumcising me. This time I understood it was a threat. Got everything ready for move and told him I am ready for the move, and as expected he said HR didn't approve the raise which is a lie.
5. Moving expenses was about $3500. Getting that refunded was another big battle. Thankfully, my manager helped me in this and got the money after about 1.5 months.
6. Got RFE for visa extension. Employer waited till the last moment to submit the response to USCIS. I couldn't drive because license duration is tied to visa. Asked my manager and immigration team multiple times to speed up. No. They submitted the response only 5 days before the last day. So couldn't drive for 3 months. Since I was in a new state, I had no friends to help me either. Employer did pay for my Uber for these 3 months, but still I hated every moment of it, especially because of a few bad experiences with Uber drivers. Thankfully, I had sent my wife back to India before all this happened, otherwise I don't know how I would have managed.
Even though my visa got extended for another 3 years, I threw away everything and came back to India.
One more point I forgot to add. They delayed my green card till the last moment. I am not saying I am entitled to it, but they should tell me if they won't do it. I ask my manager and he would say we will start the process next month for sure. It continued for about 13 months. Finally they started. But by now green card applications as well visas from Indians were getting a lot of scrutiny from USCIS. Mine got denied and went for appeal and got approved finally. Took over 10 months just for the whole thing and got approved just 30 days before visa expiry. Applied for visa extension as soon as possible, got RFE on that also and spent another 4 months in uncertainty.
Really? Name and shame that manager - that shouldn’t be happening at Microsoft
I was recently offered a job by a software company, work from home, paid monthly. I presently work in metal fabrication.
Not only was their offer $30,000 below my current income, their deal was I front cash for expenses and submit claims monthly.
Is this standard in the software world?
Because from my perspective there’s only one possible answer to paying expenses out of pocket and having to claim them back: No.
Echoing the HP employee, submitting claims monthly for remote work expenses (phone/internet bills, office supplies, travel) is normal. Ive worked as an apps engineer at a couple BigCos with same policies and the process never bothered me, I submit my claims as soon as a trip ends or when I get the bills.
The thing I would press is to get paid fairly, and bi-weekly. I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
Google let's you choose. But yes common practice.
A huge benefit of fronting the costs is getting points on the spend, it adds up quickly
I'm currently a software dev getting paid monthly, and fronting around 3 grand this month. It happens.
Isn’t this why you have a corporate card?
> I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
Interesting. I'm Dutch and I've never heard of a permanent job that was not paid monthly. If someone told me they were not paid monthly, I would assume they are a temp with variable hours.
Bi-weekly, or every 2 weeks, is norm in US as far as I know. It's easier for everyone in my opinion, except maybe employers that want to take advantage of their employees.
It's just a cultural convention, nothing more. Monthly seems to be the norm in Europe, bi-weekly in US and Canada. I've done both, and there's no practical difference.
It’s always beneficial to have your money faster. No reason employer should get to hold on to it longer and get interest and liquidity. In the extreme case, at least you’re not working a whole month before finding out employer has no money to pay you. And while you may legally be entitled to it, who knows how long the legal system delivers it to you.
> Is this standard in the software world?
This is standard in every world. Corporate credit cards are usually reserved for senior executives or people who travel/entertain a lot (e.g. sales reps). Cash advances aren't a thing outside of small companies.
Huh? Google made it super easy to get a GCard, you just request it on a web form and it arrived a few days later. It was pretty common for L4 engineers (that's the level below senior) to have them.
I am also a former Google employee. I also had a GCard, and it is exactly as easy to get one as described.
Google is the exception here, IMO. Every other employer I have had has generally required the employee to front the cash for expenses, and used something like Expensify to get reimbursed. There are some exceptions, such as hotels or airfare, which I've booked through corporate booking systems; these only let you see "approved" flights/hotels, and once booked, is charged direct to the company.
Same story at Amazon but most people I know prefer to use their own cards to churn points.
FB is similar, especially in remote offices.
Same at Cisco.
And GCard lets you get cash advances. Okay then.
And corporate credit cards aren't blank checks. Employees will generally have to pay back any spend on their corporate card that is not approved as an expense.
It may prevent the employee from holding the bag if the company goes bust. But some "corporate cards" are issued by banks in a way that makes the cardholder jointly liable.
I had an AmEx @ Deloitte as an intern
I had one at Bank of America as an intern, too. Booked first class transcon tickets on it, no less.
I work for a small (<20 employees) software company. Every single employee has a company AmEx card they can use for any expense.
It's actually quite unusual to make employees anything except for incidental expenses (like meals) up front. Generally, making employees pay big-ticket expenses (including travel) and seek reimbursement is a legal and accounting nightmare, so it's something that a well-run business tries to avoid. (In some states, it's even illegal to require employees pay for necessary business expenses.)
The exception tends to be law and accounting firms, which issue cards to their employees for business use. The employee "pays" up front using the cards, but the card is connected to the employer's expensing system and the funds are deposited to the employee's account the payday following his submission of the expense report.
My employer wanted us to pay upfront and then claim. I was an Indian h1b. One time, they forced me to relocate to another state even though I didn't want to. "I will snip you" was my ex-manager's words when I refused. My moving expenses was about $3500k. I paid everything from my pocket. When I tried to claim, finance team refused to pay and agreed only after a lot of escalations. I finally got the money after about 1.5 months. This plus many other bad experiences made me literally throw away everything and come back to India.
At lockheed we were given unlimted limit cards for certain roles.
You would rack up your tab, submit your expense report and then they would issue you a check with which it was your responsibility to pay the tab.
One guy racked up like $50,000 on his card, got the check and then quit and never paid off the card...
Dont know what ever happened to him.
My employer issues corporate Visas to any employee expected to incur >$500/year in expenses. Which means most of us have cards, at least in the US. We still have to complete expense reports, but we don’t pay anything out of pocket.
This is how it has always worked for me. When I was more junior and didn't have a corporate card, I had a person who booked all my travel on the company account. At worst, I might have to cover a few incidentals like food or taxis.
This is the way it should be done. No employee should carry the burden of loading up their own credit or paying for big ticket items up front no matter how trustworthy the company.
Sony Computer Entertainment does this, but then they don't pay back for 6-9 months, forcing your personal credit to be their credit cushion. One of the reasons I quit.
When/where did you work? Corporate cards are normal at SIE, even engineers on my team have them. I don't dispute your experience, just curious.
Edit: As an addition, the expense isn't paid by the employee. Costs over $2000 need justification above your boss, but your immediate boss can approve up to $2000 no issues.
Worked in Santa Monica Studio, and was sent to Tokyo several times. Each trip was in the $8K range, as each trip was for weeks at a time. Their slow payback was killing me.
I don't understand, if it's a corporate Visa, there's nothing to pay back - the bill goes to accounting, not the employee.
I have a corporate Amex card, and even though its a "Corporate" card, given to me by my employer, it is in my name and I am legally responsible for it. My company will reimburse me for my expenses if approved by my manager. I have always thought this was a liability and weird, but everybody else at the company (a 500 company) thinks it's normal. So any expenses not approved at the end of the month are my responsibility. Anybody else have similar experiences?
What major expenses do you have in a WFH software position? Other than one-time office set up?
Sorry, neglected to include important details.
Approximately one week a month on-site at client(s) location. So, flights, food, accommodation.
I expected company payment card. If everything turns to shit one month the employee, in this sort of situation, could be left holding a fairly hefty bag.
In my experience, the norm is minor expenses are, well, expensed. Dinner, taxis, whatever. The big ones that require planning, sometimes HR just take care of - i.e. booking your flights and hotel for you. That being said it isn't unheard of for that to be something you "expense" as well. If they fuck you, sue them. They probably won't though.
Side note: if you're in a situation where you're loading up a credit card with business expenses that are later reimbursed, you may consider looking into a credit card that offers rewards like airline miles. It's essentially a "free reward no fee ATM." I always volunteer to grab the company lunch tab for this reason.
A company who values inclusion and diversity should understand that people who are unable to float a monthly expense buffer are very often those same demographics that have been marginalized by those working in the software industry.
Getting credit card points while you know your employer is almost certainly going to reimburse you is a nice benefit, but the industry should definitely seek to improve by making this optional. Especially for prohibitively large large expenses (flights, lodging) default to paying these upfront.
Well put.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
Are you actually paying cash? Assuming you're using a credit card, and assuming your company isn't looking to defraud you, using a card with decent cash back makes it a nonissue and "fronting the cash" for expenses is just a way for you to get a kickback from your credit card company for using them as a payment processor for work expenses. (And kind of a net positive relative to if you had a company credit card where the company claims any kickbacks.)
I do not possess a credit card for ideological reasons.
I do have two debit cards, one Visa and one MasterCard, for redundancy.
I see what you are saying and it makes sense. I’m just ideologically opposed to the use of consumer credit for regular / recurring / general living expenses.
If you're ideologically opposed to consumer credit because of the cycles of debt it incurs just pay off your credit card in full every month (which is what I do). No interest will be paid.
I do not have the self control to make that work.
I bet I’m not alone.
Submitting claims monthly is fairly standard, at least in my experience. At HP, they gave us a corporate AMEX card but I was responsible for paying it while I waited for the outsourced^2 HR operations to cut me a check.
Definitely need more pay not less to work remotely. Also, biweekly is better than monthly as another here stated. As for expenses, can’t talk much on that but it’s best if you get them paid up fast or if they are fairly typical in terms of the amount each time, ask for a payment up front to cover the bulk and make up the difference later. Employee does not mean you cannot make demands. Make all the demands you want and if they say no then you can say no too. It’s a 2 way street.
Yes. Fronting your expenses and then getting reimbursed after is pretty normal practice. Every employer I've had has done this with the exception of certain major purchases like airfare where the company has just purchased it for me directly, but some employers I had to front large costs like that as well.
Unfortunately, yes
Software engineer pay at tech companies in the US tends to be $150k for junior engineers to $300k+ for senior engineers.
Both of those numbers are possible, but much higher than average by my estimation. Glassdoor says average ~$111k for software engineering as a whole[0]. A more realistic expectation for a 'good' compensation package would be ~$80-95k for junior engineer and ~$180-250k for senior. Obviously there are many factors to account for, and both those numbers can vary widely, but the ones you gave are not what one should be expecting outside of a very select few 'elite' companies, and even then they are on the high end.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...
At least for big tech companies, Glassdoor has notoriously low numbers. Last I checked, levels.fyi was closer to the truth.
May I ask (in good faith) how you know what the real "truth" is? I would totally believe Glassdoor is a bit low. Levels.fyi, which I didn't know about but just checked, seems really high. I believe both are based on real data points, but is there any reason to believe either is a better reflection of the actual numbers? (My relatively poorly-informed speculation is that Glassdoor is using old/irrelevant statistical data while levels.fyi is suffering from some pretty extreme selection bias being a comparatively obscure site relying on self-reporting.)
Glass door either only shows base salaries or is completely out of touch with tech companies.
Sure, the lone "web developer" at a small nonprofit might make $80k, but at a FAANG? Please.
FAANG is 5 companies. Granted they have a lot of employees, but they do not make up a significant portion of all developers in the US.
> they do not make up a significant portion of all developers in the US
I'm not sure that's true, but I will admit that most of my friends work at FAANGs (outside the bay area). So let me add that I know at least one senior engineer at a non-FAANG tech company that left a $300k job for a "significant pay bump".
Frankly, no large tech company could survive if it didn't pay competitively with other large tech companies.
I fully agree that pay is less in small, non-tech companies in rural areas, but I would be surprised if such businesses hire the majority of developers. Big tech hires a LOT of engineers.
All numbers from statista.com
Alphabet - 98,000 (2018) Facebook - 35,000 (2018) Apple - 123,000 (2018) Netflix - 5,500 (2017) Amazon - 647,500 (2018)
Total - ~909,000
That is total number of employees worldwide. so lets conservatively take off a third. Also Reasonably only a third of those employees (probably a lot less at amazon) are actually developers. That gives us ~200,000. The Bureau of Labor statics says there are 1,200,000 software developers in the US in 2016.
FAANG does make up a lot more software development jobs than I thought, I would have to say a significant portion. Very interesting.
Microsoft hires junior engineers out of college at ~$80k in Seattle. FAANG might be a bit higher, especially with COL in the Bay Area, but plenty of people get hired by the big companies in that range.
They don't get bonuses or RSUs??
That's not true at all. That's bay area large companies. The rest of the country is nowhere near those numbers.
I know a handful developers in this pay range and only one of them is in the bay area.
No, this is false. The top paid junior engineers might be paid $150k in base salary PLUS bonuses and stock/other compensation. Same goes for the 300k+ for senior engineers.
Why would you think bonuses don't count as pay? All financial compensation is pay.
Too late now, but the way to deal with it would have been first to go to HR, and then to your state's Dept of Labor if HR did not remedy it.
Gonna disagree. Do not go to HR. HR is there for the company, not for you. They will seek whatever is the fastest, easiest way to resolve things for the company — which probably is not firing a manager.
In case it's not clear, I have not had helpful experiences with HR.
"You'll pay it or see me in (small claims) court."
Wait you didn't contact authorities and/or sue them?
What does his or your age have to do with anything?
Just sounds like a penny wise pound foolish story to me.
What 25 year old has the resources to take on even a 100-person corporation, much less a megacorp?
At 27 I took on a multi-million dollar, VC-backed property management startup that was trying to defraud me on my rent and rental deposit. It’s amazing what some legal research and a few hours of spare time can do.
This. At a similar age, I sued Citibank and won. You can used forced arbitration to your advantage.
The salient part of that story was the unfair reimbursement policy. My point was that it would have been unfair regardless of the age of the manager or age of the employee.
Where did I suggest that anyone "take on" the company?
Welcome to life in practically any large US corporation. Most employees will never complain to HR, they may need some routine services that HR provides and that’s the extent of their interaction. But there are a few who do complain. If these are peer-related complaints, HR will work with the employees managers to resolve the issue. But let’s say someone has a problem with their manager. Maybe no one else has complained about him before, or if so the complaints appear to be isolated incidents. Let’s say he has a lot of positive feedback from his peers, manager, and other subordinates.
Now you, the complainant, are the problem. And oh boy you have some special life circumstances - yikes, you are like a loaded bomb dropped in the lap of HR. They are not in any position of power, they can’t set the policy for your department (rightfully - they are not in the know), so your boss holds all the cards. HR won’t dig to the bottom of anything, and a manager is more important that a developer. At best it’s he-said-she-said and ignored, at worst you are shown the door after some minimal make nice by the company to avoid future liability.
I think it takes a strong top-down initiative to avoid cultural issues like this at an organization. At some place as large as Amazon there are bound to be isolated incidents but to all indications this behavior is, if not encouraged (in some cases it appears to be), not actively discouraged and is hence tacitly approved of at Amazon. I’ve seen what it takes to get a bad manager moved or fired by their subordinates - it requires an outright coup. Rarely does such a thing happen and it’s not guaranteed to succeed. Whereas, a conscientious and capable manager can walk in and straighten something like this out in fairly short order, with minimal drama.
> Welcome to life in practically any large US corporation
This is a common refrain, especially on HN. But it is a bit misplaced:
Small companies are just as bad and often worse.
All you have to do is look around at the average small company where nepotism is the default (doesn't matter how good you are, the owner's son will be the next CEO) and where many owners see staff as personal servants.
Some of the things I've seen in the past year with friends & acquaintances who work at small companies:
- An office admin being told to arrange the owner's wedding (without pay).
- A nail salon worker being told to go pick up the owner's dry cleaning since there weren't any customers in at the moment.
- The owner of a small hotel telling staff they were all working on Saturday to cater a party at her house. (If you say no, you are fired.)
- A company owner taking $40,000 out of the company bank account to pay for his family vacation to Croatia and then missing payroll that month. It ended up being two weeks late.
Many small business owners treat their business (and by extension their staff) as their personal fief and property.
Plus, the people who own and run small businesses aren't going to listen to ideas for feedback and improvement any more than big company managers. They always fall back on -- well, I've succeeded so far doing it my way.
> They always fall back on -- well, I've succeeded so far doing it my way.
Put more simply: "My way or the highway".
I wonder if there are probing questions you can subtly ask to ferret out these kinds of managers/workplaces so you can avoid during interviews or early on the job?
> Welcome to life in practically any large US corporation.
This. Which is why I do my best to avoid working for (or doing business with) large corporations. They're simply toxic.
Only: Small ones are even worse (see other comments). With big ones you have at least "something": Colleagues and "a lot of money blowing in at the front". HR is not your friend. OP makes a lot of mistakes. Life is hard. Big companies are a good / reasonable choice: The money. With smaller companies there is less money and more problems, usually, EXCEPT they are directly dealing with big corps (e.g.), which puts you back into big-corp-exposure. You have to go where the money is.
> Small ones are even worse
This has not been my personal experience at all. I've worked for huge companies and tiny ones, and the only real difference I've seen is that the working conditions tend to be far superior in the tiny ones.
Compensation between the two tends to be comparable as well (ignoring startups -- I'm not talking about them here, as they're a unique beast). I don't think that large companies have an edge on that score (actually, I think the opposite is true, but not by a enough to matter much). As an example, I left a megacorporation to work at my current job, a truly tiny company. My total compensation at my current job is about $5,000/yr less than at the megacorp -- not nearly enough of a difference to matter.
I mentioned further up thread, there's a book about this topic written by an HR person called "Corporate Confidential" which basically reinforces all this. It's a fascinating read.
If you have a problem with your manager, wouldn't the person to speak to be their manager rather than HR?
Might work, but that's a very high-stakes maneuver that could backfire possibly even worse than through HR because now you have two people with the power to make your life hell and potentially no record in HR about the situation (potentially losing first strike opportunities - now your manager or manager's manager can begin to record problems caused by you before you can record problems by them). And also IME it is basically impossible to read how your manager's manager feels about your manager
Realistically if you have a bad manager your only 100% safe option is to switch companies. Switching teams internally can work depending on the place, but it does carry risk, especially if you're on a visa
Amazon employee here, though I do not speak for the company.
At any big company, your management chain is the #1 influence on the quality of your culture. My experience at Amazon has been extremely positive, but then my org head is a great guy, so it's all been in line with my expectations. I've also left critical feedback through the Amazon Connect survey for my immediate manager and not suffered for it. That manager, as far as I can tell, made no effort to deanonymize the feedback, and addressed the issue fairly in a team meeting.
So, YMMV, but I would certainly encourage skilled devs, artists and designers to come help us make great games. :-)
That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the people that work on the "good" teams never seem to be terribly concerned about horrific reports, and I frequently wonder why that is. In companies I've worked for, had I heard about people crying at their desk and being forced to choose between their child's health and their job I'd want to know how the company is putting a stop to it. It seems that everyone believes that the people complaining are doing so for attention, but from the outside it seems like there's been a lot of reports that are credible - and this is the white collar stuff, not even warehouse worker things.
Its hard to know: Is everyone indoctrinated? Are they addicted to the paychecks? Is the sense that there are bad things happening but its being handled properly?
That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working.
By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems.
The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites.
This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them. They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it.
All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on"
So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
This is a decent argument from an employee perspective, which is that its so silo'd that its basically different companies. While I find it pretty horrifying when awful things happen in places with the same external name as is on my resume, I could see how people could go "not me" - thats pretty close to how the workforce works outside of amazon too.
The leadership principles in and of themselves strike me as something that is likely to lead to a toxic culture.
For reference: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
What about them leads to a toxic work place?
There's very much in the 14 principles about optimizing for results and very little about leading or cultivating people. Obviously, this can be interpreted in very many ways, but the impression I get from the people that work there or have worked there is that it becomes a win-at-all costs environment and that the upper tiers of management are political hell.
Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production systems. Sometimes dysfunction happens. You live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success.
(My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)
I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason...
That's some sanctimonious bullshit.
There is zero public information indicating any cheating. We know that there was a trial separation. We don't know what agreements there were. We do know that the divorce is being presented as being amiable.
My attitude is that if his soon to be ex wife is not upset, then random strangers like yourself have zero business being upset on her behalf. You aren't part of or privy to his relationships or agreements. It is none of your business.
Unless you have non-public information indicating that he violated any agreement with MacKezie, the best information available to you is information in places like https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/09/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-div... - which indicates that the relationship began after both couples separated, and was known by both ex partners.
Which would indicate that this isn't cheating. No matter how much it offends your sensibilities.
I thought Bezos admitted to cheating in his medium post.
If you mean the "No thank you, Mr Pecker" one, then it doesn't look to me as if he does any such thing.
(He certainly implicitly admits that he is in a relationship with Ms Sanchez. But, at least in my book, that's only cheating if it happened before his "trial separation" with his wife, and I don't see that he's admitted that it did.)
Read it again. What Bezos said there is in line with the TMZ article. Yes, he had the relationship. There is no indication that he broke any agreements with his ex-wife.
> In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
I totally agree that being disciplined and challenging oneself to grow is really important. Still, I wouldn’t want suggest someone to stay in a bad place if it’s actually a detriment to their health or quality of life. It’s really hard to find a balance for me personally, and I don’t feel I can give concrete advice on the matter to others.
That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands.
Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
There are a couple reasons. First, Amazon has hundreds of businesses and almost 700,000 employees globally now. Every business has different culture and managers. You are not going to find a consistent good/bad/indifferent experience here, because it's highly varied. I can guarantee you a seasonal worker in a fulfillment center has a vastly different day to day experience from a software development engineer in Seattle.
The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.
As a former employee, it’s more that there’s only so much you can do in that situation. I didn’t have any ability to impact the situation other than advocating for good practices, helping people I know manage their careers, and giving truthful feedback for managers (being able to since I wasn’t in a “bad” team).
I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience.
If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?
You’re talking about an organization that built market dominance on the backbreaking labor and suffering of underpaid warehouse workers.
It’s just not in the corporate DNA to care. The fish rots from the head.
I'm not familiar with this. Is there some reports on workplace injuries or something of that nature or is this hyperbole?
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-pe...
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-ca...
I heard reports of people crying at their desks at Amazon, but I never witnessed that. They cried in the bathrooms.
Definitely addicted to paychecks. Easy to look the other way when making twice what you could in any other line of work.
Ex-Amazon employee here, and I definitely do not speak for the company.
Amazon, more than any other company that I know of, has a ton of ex employees whose opinion either amounts to "Amazon was horrible" or "I thought Amazon was great for a long time, then it went south and in retrospect can't believe I put up with it for so long." So despite your current positive opinion, there is a good chance that you will some day be singing a very different song.
I am personally glad I worked there, because it was a fascinating experience. But I wouldn't want to work there again, nor would I recommend it to a friend.
As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company, but as hundreds of startups under an umbrella organization. You cannot generalize from a single one of those organizations. It is impossible, IMHO, for a company to have as many employees as Amazon and maintain a normalized employee experience.
Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.
I am also an Amazon employee (and also do not speak for the company), and I agree with this assessment. My manager has told me and my teammates on multiple occasions to take care of family stuff first, to make sure we're working sustainably (i.e., not super late all the time) and so on. I also have scored some questions low on the same survey and not suffered retribution.
I don't want to claim that anyone's experience isn't valid, just that it doesn't match mine.
The thing is, your manager is from a decent background as a human, they probably aren't going to do otherwise no matter where they work!
At any reasonably sized company individual managers are going to have a lot of control over their subordinates, and their underlings aren't going to have any say pretty much at all. What are they going to do, complain to HR? HR at any large company isn't in the business of keeping people employed, it's in the business of keeping the company safe. If you rock the boat, you are now the problem. It's no wonder that all of the negative comments about Amazon boil down to either "this job was absolute shit" - bad manager from the start - or "this job was amazing and then turned to shit" - either the good manager quit/was fired by their superior for not being shit/was promoted and their replacement was garbage, or they were a sociopath that slowly turned up the heat so the proverbial frogs wouldn't notice the boil until they were cooked.
Remember, your boss is ultimately not your friend, certainly not in a professional setting. An individual contributor/manager relationship fundamentally must be adversarial, because one side holds all the power, and even if the manager breaks trust the worst thing that will happen is the IC's replacement will be less productive for a few months.
When managers have this much power over their reports and there's no way for someone to fight back against their manager, it's no wonder that shitty managers are so common. It's a situation ripe for abuse.
While my manager is of course my manager first, we are also friends. It helps that we'd be good friends naturally due to shared interests and age.
As someone who worked for Amazon for a long time, I agree with you -- most managers I worked for took anonymous negative feedback well, making changes at the team level.
Import Caveat to your last point: If you make games for Amazon, you give up your ability to make them in your spare time. Amazon has pretty aggressive game development policies around side projects.
Former Amazon employee here, my experience was terrible. (see my other comment).
While it is great you are happy and defend your company, your experience might not match others.
I think that's the point the parent post is trying to make
As an org head in a tech organization experiences I try to find managers/supervisors like this and actually move them out of the organization.
I know that you direct management and peers can be one of the greatest influences for good or bad for the broader team. A person like the Manager in this situation is a clearly going to create more problems for other team members in the future.
That’s fantastc! Seriously, it’s good that you feel great about the work you do and have a management team that allows you to breathe easy, is supportive, and helps you out put the best work possible.
BUT, and I truly believe this in the depths of my soul, everyone is as evil as their most sociopathic executive.
Everyone is contributing to the same bottom line, some people just sell out for less.
Whose more evil, the hitman that won’t kill for under 1 million or the hitman that will do it for minimum wage?
I used to think big tech companies like Amazon and Google would be different, however now I see they are just becoming like any older traditional corporation with a HR department functioning like the stasi and the ability to oppress through mass policies and hiring contracts.
We are lucky as developers to have a fairly easy way of life but I still follow my Grandpa's advice from years working in the shipyards of Glasgow:
* Never be loyal to a company unless its your own
* When things are good, think about leaving
* Keep your mouth shut and don't gossip
"* When things are good, think about leaving" => Wait what? So what do you do when things are bad?
Likely - leave when things are still good. Meaning look for early signs. Some people stay and hope for the good old days - they almost never arrive.
Not be there.
ABL (Always Be Leaving)
Leave.
I think you should keep in mind that company culture, values, as well as operational dynamics are not scale-free. The size of a company matters, immensely. But in a market driven economy, you can jump ship and seek greener pastures, especially if you're skilled and operate in a high demand industry.
I agree with many of the comments here about how ymmv based on your management chain. My experience at Amazon has been very positive, but I do want to call out some major issues with the Amazon Connections tool reference in this post.
This tool is pitched to employees as an anonymous way to provide feedback about their team via daily questions. The reality is anything but.
* Responses are not anonymous, they are viewable by anyone on the Connections team, and individual responses are shared with managers in many cases. The Connections team will deny this because it is technically against their policy, but I have seen Connections case managers share information with managers many times.
* Feedback results are not viewable by employees, only managers (this is in contrast to the yearly tech survey, which anyone can view). This leads to data being conveniently left out, or entire orgs simply not reviewing the data.
* The questions are incredibly poorly constructed and there have been multiple internal tickets about propaganda and insensitive questions. A few examples off the top of my head are "Did you know that Amazon was voted the best company to work for 5 years in a row by xyz organization? (Yes/No)" and something to the effect of "How do you feel working with foreigners?" (The wording was significantly more sensitive, but this was the undertone and caused a massive uproar internally.)
These issues have been brought up repeatedly internally and in almost two years, nothing has been done. The Connections team has essentially disabled all feedback channels surrounding the tool. If anything comes of this, I hope a serious look is taken at how the Amazon Connections program is implemented.
FWIW I have heard that org leaders can manually insert questions, deny some default questions, and generally tailor the Connections to the types of things they want tactical feedback on. I contracted for a different Amazon team and saw plenty of Connection. They were often bland, “How many hours a week do you spend in meetings?” “True/False: when I begin a project goals are outlined clearly” “When was the last time you sought direct customer feedback for a decision?” Etc. nothing like what you mentioned.
This kind of retribution is pretty normal from the companies I've worked it, it's clumsy that it ended up in writing here and a bit more vicious than usual with a child involved. Normally it's done offline in private conversations or simply as something that's understood between like minded managers with passing comments.
One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
> One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected.
How would he be affected by giving you a well-deserved good performance review? I don't understand.
>One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
I must be dense because I don't understand this. Your manager couldn't find another job, was instead looking to retire, and gave you a bad performance review?
Yep, the tl;dr is that at the time my manager's manager didn't appreciate me being transparent on mistakes our department made with other depts. So in an effort to make me quit, aside from other things, he wrote a review for my direct manager and required him to say it was his review. If he didn't he would be fired.
Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.
The red flags I look for now:
- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally
- very ambitious, but risk averse
- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not
- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow
There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.
Ambitious and risk-averse aren't traits I see in the same person very often
That seems like something you bring up with him to discuss if there's a way to avoid it; and then tape the whole discussion.
This is just how many managers are, the best approach is to just recognize them and avoid them as best you can.
It could be argued the best thing to do is gang up on them, record and post your conversations with them, and tirelessly work to undermine them.
Otherwise we're all complicit in allowing bad actors to get away with their behaviour.
In California you are not legally allowed to audio record someone in private without their consent. They must know that they are being recorded for it to be used as evidence in court.
This reminded me of a comment I read some years ago.
Here it is:
You seem obsessed with laws, as if they possess value and worth in and of themselves, when really they are a very high latency sidechannel of society and power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033481
It's probably a bit too sharp a response to your comment, but it certainly get's the point across.
The point isn't to take things to court.
The point is to take things public.
The court of public opinion is a hugely effective weapon, if you have the documented evidence to back it up.
And if they threaten you about wiretapping laws or whatever, well that just makes the company look even worse in the court of public opinion.
If you will notice, nobody at Uber was stupid enough to threaten Susan Fowler for documenting the stuff that happened to her.
I had an horrible experience with a terrible manager about 10 years ago. We didn't get along at all, and he tried to throw me under the bus for a project that he mismanaged. He basically wrote lies about me on my performance review.
I fought it via HR. The HR rep couldn't care less about it, but I kept persisting, and I had my coworkers vouch for me that what our manager said was false. He ended up rescinding the entire performance review, and I changed teams and left the company shortly afterwards.
But I was lucky. I was well-liked by my peers because they knew I worked hard, and they were willing to go to bat for me against our manager. And my manager was utterly stupid because he wrote lies that could be refuted by my teammates. It was basically the perfect conditions in my favor. Had I not had those favorable conditions, I'm pretty sure HR would have done nothing to help me, and I would have gotten fired. Even if managers write lies about you, it's very very difficult to fight back.
Have heard many Amazon stories around review being used by managers as a revenge tool. A true incident - a friend of mine and his coworker (same level) didn't get along. Their manager left and this coworker was made the manager since he had longer tenure. My friend received a PIP in 2 months flat and ended up leaving the company rather than put up a fight.
A similar thing happened to me outside of Amazon. When the person I didn't get along with was made my manager I immediately went outside my reporting chain to find a place to transfer (though I considered quitting on the spot)
It didn't really work out though. New team was better but my past followed me and I let the whole experience get me down.
Word of advice, never work for Amazon. Out of the FANGs, it is quite easily the sleaziest place to work. As someone who worked there, I can believe OPs side of the story. At this point, most of the people who tolerate working there are indentured Indian H1-B employees because they’re stuck in the Green card queue. Even amongst them, the good ones left for greener pastures a long time ago!
Which team? Before I joined I spoke with a few friends who work there (after reading the NYT article and comments like yours) and got positive feedback. I work here for the past 3 years and so far touch wood nothing even near this. Pretty happy all in all. It’s like people talk about a different company. I’m at AWS, Sr SDE, any teams the above warning is more applicable to? Asking for myself in case I want to switch a teams to know what to avoid but also since we are hiring, I’d like others to know if it’s a specific team / department to avoid... Also, all of us in “good teams” should take ownership and figure out how to systematically fix the issues others obviously experience in other teams. If it’s a specific branch or department, I’d like to see all amazon employees protest to eradicate any toxic bosses / culture in these teams. I just have no way in knowing which ones are, it’s a huge company
Since you mentioned you want to protest, are you going to join Oleg? Seems like a good starting point.
I’m not located in Seattle, but if I was there, and got the details, and was convinced Oleg is right I’d try to mobilize some like minded people, make sure there is no clause forbidding me to do so as I like to have a job, maybe give my boss a heads up (maybe he would even join) and I’d be happy to join his protest. But I believe this should start internally, it will look better to leadership if some of us for example write a one pager on this amazon good bad discrepancy and that the fact many teams are happy doesn’t cover the fact there are apparently some toxic ones. I love my job and I hate the fact the same company can cause others have the opposite experience, it hurts them but also much to lesser extent, hurts all of us at Amazon. Ego hurt, can intimidate candidates, lost prestige. Small problems but still should make us all concerned and driven for action to fix it.
> make sure there is no clause forbidding me to do so as I like to have a job
You realize that any retribution would be a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, right? You can't sign away your right to protest, unless you work for the government as a critical employee (read: firefighters, police).
> At this point, most of the people who tolerate working there are indentured Indian H1-B employees because they’re stuck in the Green card queue
I used to think so myself, and mentioned that to various people including friends and acquaintances who worked for Amazon. All of them told me that they really liked it there and don't know why I had this perception. I haven't met a single person, friend or not, who would validate my view.
I still don't know how prevalent bad working conditions at Amazon are, but the data points I gathered point against the blanket statement you made.
Disclaimer: I currently work at Amazon as an SDM (I do not speak for the company). I've also worked a lot of other places. In my experience, bad managers can happen anywhere.
I'm not going to take sides since all we have is a story told by an ex-employee who has every reason to be spiteful toward his former employer. The other side of this story is one we'll likely never hear.
I do want to comment on the visa aspect of this (sounds like he's on an EB3). I have worked with and managed visa-holding engineers who've been passed over for promotions or otherwise discriminated against because of their visa status (not at Amazon). Certain kinds of promotions can run the risk of a visa holder getting their visa rejected. Many things a company might do to improve the circumstances of a regular employee runs the risk of triggering a visa re-evaluation. More often than not the company will play it safe so the employee doesn't run the risk of getting deported. That can involve denying them promotions or "unofficially" giving it to them (all the responsibility but no title). It's systemic discrimination, and the worst part is it has the "best interests" of the visa holder at heart.
Personally, I tried to counter this kind of discrimination by making the employee aware of the situation and the risk, then asking what they would like me to do. Usually, though, my influence is limited and I get blocked by HR and legal.
If this story didn't happen to a visa holder, it would be a simple story of "just go somewhere else," but I can understand how helpless these people must feel.
WTF? Why it can't be simple "just go somewhere else"? Well, just go to some other country.
I'm not saying it's easy, but why bang your head against the wall. Go somewhere else, and, if you really want, come back another time, through a different company or on different terms.
Imagine being in their shoes. Are you prepared to move to the other side of the globe on a moment’s notice if you’re unemployed? Do you have the funds to do that, such as moving your precious items, and breaking your lease? If you have a family, are you prepared for the impact it will have on them (this guy’s child has health care concerns)? What would you be prepared to put up with in order to avoid that?
Also, many just think of the US as home despite not being a citizen. Many who worked for me went to college here on a study visa. This is the only home they’ve known their adult life. They wouldn’t know the first thing about how to live if they went back to their native country.
Take a look at green card priority dates sometime, and consider how many people it takes to push them there.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
American citizenship is an extremely valuable commodity in the developing world.
My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey. The BEST outcome I've seen from them is incredibly painful meetings that only seem to make the matter worse.
My speculation on this is two fold. The first is that putting things in those surveys is a "permanent record" or at least "yearly review" issue for your manager. So you are (justly or not) harming them, and they will tend to respond to being harmed. The other is that, if you think about it... if your manager is not a person who you can talk to about a problem in a non-anonymous way... doing it anonymously is not likely to help, it's probably better to just quietly leave.
This guy I know, we can call him Jim, left a large tech company and was honest in his exit interview about why he was leaving, and it was mostly his manager. He was later asked to apply for a job with a different team after his manager left the company years (and promotions) later. HR blocked the hire because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. As far as I know, they did nothing to recognize or fix the problem. But they held it against him because his feedback was negative. Unfortunately, a company that views employees as the enemy will find it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kill the incentive to try help fix problems, and create a situation where you like it or you leave.
"I'm leaving because your company is too good."
It's the inverse of the ubiquitous "why do you want to work for us?" interview question. "Because you give money to your employees and I require money for food and housing" is somehow never what they're looking for.
"I am only leaving so that I can experience the joy of joining your perfect company again."
"I'm applying for a new position here, because after working elsewhere for several years I've determined your company wasn't that great after all."
> My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey.
Even better, game the system and give them glowing reviews.
For example I had noticed the feedback "anonymous" surveys they were sending had a location field as in employee's country, city, town, etc. Well, in a distributed team it's pretty clear who is who based on that location. So I just gave them glowing and happy reviews.
Same when leaving a company. Nice and happy feedback like "I'd love to work here more, but the tech landscape is so exciting and varied and I'd like to gain experience in other areas..."
So much, this.
HR works for the company not for you. never forget. You can extrapolate all other rules from this basic rule.
Yep, couldn't agree more despite the down votes on my previous post. The picture that we like to paint about how companies work is far from the reality, you have play by the real unwritten rules.
It's funny how you guys take some kind of pride in maneuvering what to an outsider obviously sounds like a dystopian-style bureaucratic nightmare of unevenly applied laws and insider-connections.
Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.
This is how you fight to change systems when you're ultimately powerless to do so directly, by subverting the system. The only real power we have is to collectively agree to make the data/system useless.
"anonymous survey"
Right. Just like you don't trash-talk about about your ex. No good will come of it.
I'm of the mind that only good comes of it. It's very therapeutic and who cares what they think anymore. Besides, that's one of the few things that no one faults you for - it's almost expected. I highly recommend it.
When your date starts trash-talking their ex, they'll do it to you, too.
When a prospective employee trash-talks their former employer, they'll do it to you, too.
No hire.
Strongly disagree, and I've got hiring evidence on my side (former subordinates going to work for friends, and said subordinates didn't know of the relationship) after airing some pretty reasonable grievances when I hired then and when they worked with me.
Of course, there's a scale. "I don't like their tech decisions"--yeah, that's an eyebrow raise, unless there's some real meat there. But I'm never going to judge somebody poorly for saying plainly that they felt disrespected or mistreated at a job, because it's happened to me too.
It doesn't matter if their grievances are legitimate or not (and you have no way to tell if they are). It's bad form to trash talk one's former employer or ex.
It's not just me. You will often talk yourself out of getting hired and many will not pursue a relationship with you if you indulge in it. There is nothing to gain by engaging in it.
It's not just you. Virtually every article I've read on interview tips gives this same advice. Speaking negatively about your former employer always reflects negatively on you.
If they do it in front of you they will do it to you - Dr Phil
Abusive managers... after all the years I need to thanked them because they forced me to start my own company.
My "favorite" was a CTO that I worked for in NYC.. horrible human being with few ex wives and an eye for girls that barely turned 18. My favorite line was: "if you have family, don't work here" when I was complaining that he really didn't need me at the office on Sunday 9pm to "monitor" system I could remotely connect in case all the way from home.
He also did the same to me - everyone came at 10, he wanted me at 7. Everyone left 5pm, he wanted me to work on extra project at 7pm. Those projects never came and I was just sitting there bored. Of course I questioned his reasoning few times but he just said "you're the most important person in the company you need to be here earlier and leave the last in case". At the same time I was making the lowest salary in the corp... on time asked him about raise he told me: "remember you are on McDonald sales guy salary here.. you are not an exec".
Fun times looking back at 15 years ago when I was young and naive...
>you are the most important person in the company >you are not an exec
I'd have come back with
>yeah but I'm the most important person here so either my time changes or money
This really needs the second half of the story before we all get our trusty pitchforks and start making a shish-kebab from this Khan person.
The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
Any large company is going to have abusive individuals in it. I think the real issue this story illustrates is that when people are brought over on work visas they have no leverage with their employer.
As an American citizen software engineer my boss knows that if I'm unhappy I will just leave. But the boss of someone on a work visa knows they can do pretty much whatever they want to them and the employee is just stuck.
So we need to change the work visa system so those employees aren't in such a vulnerable position. How exactly? I don't know..
> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
No, the author lists a whole bunch of names from HR. That's not just an abusive boss, that's an abusive boss protected by HR, which makes it a story about Amazon.
I worked at Amazon and never had any issues like that. In fact, my experience was completely opposite and I had several wonderful bosses, great co-workers, awesome environment and fun things to work on.
I'm certain there are many stories like mine. That doesn't matter at all, as long as there's one case like Oleg's.
I disagree. A company's feedback system and HR should not be so ripe for retaliation or abuse.
But isn't that why companies hire employees on visas to begin with? I would venture to guess for every 1 truly pioneering mind that is working in the US on a H1-B visa there are 100 people working on CRUD software at Amazon or Microsoft.
Depends on the company. Companies like Tata and Infosys (which, until recent changes, had something like 80% of H1B quota), sure. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft do not do this as a matter of policy (which is why they sponsor most of their H1B employees for green card); but individual managers are still aware of the kind of leverage this gives them, and some of them try to use it.
They hire employees on visas to build CRUD apps, because it's a seller's market for employees that can pass <arbitrarily high whiteboard interview standards>, and if you're having trouble filling headcount, there's no reason to exclude 7.2 billion people from your hiring pool.
I saw a suggestion a while ago that the H1B1 visas should only be granted to the highest paid employees. The idea being that that they would be more likely to be essential to whatever business brought them in, so less likely to be the subject of abuse, and less likely to be abusing the h1b1 program to hire cheaper labor.
> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
That, and Amazon's processes to prevent engineers from this abuse from their managers.
Allow H1B holders to incorporate their own companies in the US, so that they could work on their own thing in parallel. It's often better for talented persons to live in e.g. Canada close to US borders working for US corps (Vancouver, Toronto) and run multiple LLCs in the US, than to work for those same corps in the US and enjoy slave lifestyle.
It sounds like “brown uncle” syndrome to me. I hear south-east Asian women complain about it all the time, as a male I don’t have to deal with it much, but fits the description.
What the hell is "brown uncle" syndrome?
I feel like I should point out the value in surrounding yourself with people like Oleg here who 1. Have a completely different socioeconomic perspective than someone like myself, and 2. Feel (rightfully) entitled to voice their opinion on anything and everything that the judge to be of enough importance to voice such an opinion.
If anyone in the Seattle-area values an engineer who will voice such opinions on ethics and morality above their own career-oriented self-interest, perhaps extend an invitation to an interview. Because surely there is no safeguard in place that will save this man and his family from being fired and then deported.
The truth is that nobody hires whistleblowers.
Which came first, the post or the lawsuit?
Churyumov v. Amazon Corporate LLC (2:19-cv-00136) District Court, W.D. Washington
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14528071/churyumov-v-am...
Yuck,
>Self-Represented Plaintiff Oleg Churyumov.
This won't end well for the guy.
He's self representing himself for the case? Does anyone know if there is any reasoning behind this? Even lawyers aren't recommended to represent themselves... going up against Amazon's lawyers with- no offense to the author- imperfect English, sounds like it would be more of a firing squad than a lawsuit.
As a fellow Russian, the impression I got from the original post is that the author has no idea how PR, legal system, juries, diplomacy and workplace politics work in the U.S. Kinda sad because those things are orthogonal to your software development skills.
The article is dated February 9, 2019. The court case is filed January 30, 2019.
> Khan made me single parent.
I've been downvoted here before for "victim blaming", but I'm going to say this anyway because someone has to.
It's your responsibility to be in control of your life. There is no grand order of things that will take care of you. There will always be things working against you. Entropy, competition, environmental hazards, psychopaths, etc, are everpresent.
You need to have the confidence to walk away from situations that aren't in line with what you want, and not just throw up your hands and say - I guess this is my life now.
Easier said than done you’re on an H1B visa and HR hangs you out to dry.
If you are on H1B and you have a family in the country I think you need to be very careful about how you behave at work, and if your work situation sucks you better start looking for a new H1B sponsor. You can always complain later.
Wouldn't getting a new sponsor just reset your position in the queue?
That’s true. Even as a citizen, I’m hesitant to provide negative feedback about a manager because I’ve seen it backfire way too many times.
If you've been downvoted before for victim blaming, maybe there's cause for you to think before plowing ahead forward? I don't think anyone is implying that it's not your responsibility to be in control of your life. But I think it is the case that there are such things as power asymmetries, powerful institutions, and well intentioned systems that have been left wide open to abuse (H1B system).
To misattribute the failings of a broken system to a lack of personal responsibility is to fundamentally misunderstand the full entirety of the situation. For your own sake, please try to think through this situation a little bit more carefully. Remember, in America, we once used to have a system of indentured servitude that we looked back on with shame. A very large amount of Americans could find it to be a similar kind of shame if we were to re-implement a modern version of it without knowing that it was happening.
Stories like this can serve to shine a light on it. Truth be told, I don't know what happened in this particular case. However, what cannot be argued is that the incentives are ripe for abuse. It is a false equivalence to say that psychopaths are there just as entropy, competition and environmental hazards. Some of those are arguably beneficial. But I will say, at this juncture point and at this particular point in time, people seem to be increasingly unhappy with tolerating openly psychopathic behavior. Sadly, if this employee had a better handle on how American PR, optics and law operates, there's a good chance he could have dropped a nightmare of a PR bomb and be walking away with a settlement right now...
And if he did that, he'd be doing that opposite of what you're suggesting. He'd be standing up, and fighting, which is a thing you can do in this country. It's why I think you're wrong, in this case.
Amazon's leadership principles may have a lot to do with this.
These must be memorized for any manager at Amazon and are part of the interview process.
http://whartonmagazine.com/blogs/learn-from-amazons-leadersh...
Choice quotes.
"Leaders are right a lot."
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."
Amazon Leadership principles are for all employees at the company not managers.
"Leaders are right a lot" isn't indoctrination to trust your manager implicitly because they are right. It's "Be a leader. Have good judgement. Work to improve it. As a result be right a lot"
Backbone one is also misunderstood: "Don't succumb to do the easy thing. Push back when you know when it's the right thing to do even if it's harder. BUT if you are overruled, and the group decision goes against it, don't try to fight it and undermine the decision, commit to the path."
Perhaps the principle was updated since the article was written, but the actual (current) description says, "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." In other words, a leader can only be right a lot if they gather external data in order to undermine their preconceptions, but they do not get caught in analysis paralysis. I think that's a very well articulated principle, overall, regardless of how it manifests in the company culture.
It's funny how you often notice bullies getting promoted - is destruction of a low-level person a rite of passage for a middle manager to get ahead at many US corporations these days? I can imagine if they select for some dark-triad characteristics and going all-in, demonstrating cold/calculating/cruel moves while keeping paperwork clean signalizes the right person?
Bullies are often beneficial to the person they work under. That person can delegate unpleasant bullying-work to the bully and the bully will never bully his boss.
Agreed. Have seen plenty of 'kiss up, kick down' behavior at larger tech companies. It is at times amusing and a small break from the suffering to see the person transform rapidly during interactions with the kissee or the kickee in short order.
In a way I can see how that might be the case.
It does somewhat establish a baseline capability of being able to put people through emotionally not nice things.
I suppose that any manager whether they are malignant or they are really just ordinary, well intentioned people have to at some point not of their own volition do exactly that because of legitimate business reasons outside of their control. So when push comes to shove if they can prove they are capable of handling those responsibilities then I guess that sends a useful signal???
Abusing it out of some childish sense of revenge is just unfortunate beyond belief.
Besides H1Bs, and fresh graduates (who don't have any choice), I don't understand how Amazon can still higher Software engineers. I understand that Amazon teams are diverse, but as a candidate with any other possible option, how could anyone even consider amazon considering everything that's been written about the company already.
I interviewed onsite a few weeks back and got bad vibes from five of the six interviewers. A few seemed to hate being there, and the others seemed like nightmares to work with. One guy was cool, though.
How about because Amazon develops some of the most interesting and innovative products out there? AWS, Alexa, Go Store, to name a few?
I've worked on several AWS services, and I'm very proud of being a part of them and of AWS in general. I bet there are very few other places where I would find problems this interesting or of this scale.
If you have some experience, you probably know better than just look for a job at company X - you probably choose specific role in a particular team or product. And Amazon sure does have a lot of great products with very interesting positions.
There are plenty of companies that have interesting projects and don't have such a toxic culture. GCP and Azure are the exact same technical challenge as AWS without all the Amazon BS.
I was answering why choose Amazon over "any other possible option" - because Amazon has awesome projects. If cultures at Microsoft or Google are less toxic is an unrelated topic.
> One Amazon employee said when her father was dying, her boss told “you are the problem” and prevented her from visiting the father. Another Amazon employee saw his unborn child died during pregnancy when he was under oppression by his manager. There are a lot of cases like that. Amazon is built on blood.
Holyshit. This sounds like modern day slavery. Isn’t this bordering on crime against humanity?
Miscarriages are very common and not much talked about and I am sorry she couldn't see her father that day.
Workers need unions, plain and simple. The addition of an impartial arbitrator at any step along this process could’ve helped so much.
I used to believe that. But I saw very close how an IT union was taken over by old school, corrupt fat union guys. And they just pander to the lowest common denominator. They go against meritocracy.
I'd rather pay attention and vote with my feet.
"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.
there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.
Getting to be a new member of SAG is almost impossible. I don't think we want that model for developers.
Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?
i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority but perhaps that's been done.
"worst system but best we've had" and all that - at least labor would have a fighting chance
> i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority
Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.
> screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.
They both seem to pay a lot of lip service while the reality greatly undermines the verbiage. I’d argue that in acting the representation of women is far better than in software development. The degree to which software development is an asocial boy’s club is hard to understate, and the pet theories about intelligence and genetics don’t help, but rather reinforce the farcical nature of the self-serving “meritocracy” narrative.
> They go against meritocracy.
Not necessarily. You can have union representation and maintain a meritocracy at the same time.
But I also observe that the industry is not nearly as much of a meritocracy as we like to pretend anyway.
Unions are supposed to fight for each of their members equally. As such it is in their interest to eliminate performance based pay as much as possible. Increases in pay should be based on time in job (positively) and likelihood of losing job on time in job (negatively). If you have performance based pay someone who’s three times as good might get paid more, or long serving staff might be let go before the newly hired. That is not what the average union member wants, they want security and stability and they work to get it.
Nowhere is a perfect meritocracy but a union that did not actively work against meritocracy would not be working in the interest of its average member.
Unions operate according to the rules the union members agree to. There is no "one way" that unions function. A "programmer's union" would be structured according to whatever makes sense to the programmers.
agreed, unions have had issues akin to this across the board in the last decade or so, and it's extremely sad (to say the least). active worker participation and leadership of the union is the antidote to that.
> They go against meritocracy.
So does management. The difference is, you can vote shitty union reps off the island.
"impartial arbitrator"
No such thing. They are being paid by someone.
> No such thing. They are being paid by someone.
Having a union represent you at work is like having a lawyer represent you at court. Sure some rugged individualists choose to represent themselves pro se, but we all know how smart that is.
Right. So it's good to have someone on your side.
Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000. [1]
[1] https://laborpains.org/2018/06/04/union-president-pay-watch-...
For reference-- that's $318,160 more than Jeff Bezos' salary. That's insane.
How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
If journalists focused on developer unions for even a fraction of the time they spend criticizing Amazon, I'd bet we'd have some blogs that sound just as damning as the one the author has written.
The bulk of Bezos's compensation is all in his equity.
Sure, but that's because the company is doing better. If it stagnated then he would only make base salary. If the union does their job poorly the Union leader still gets paid.
> How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
Are you saying the Amazon has a developer union that could have helped defend this employee? Citation needed. AFAIK, developer unions have been advocated for, but don't actually exist (in a functional form, in the US at least).
...which is pennies compared to tech CEO salaries.
You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
Depends on the tech CEO. A lot of them seem to be mainly concerned with 'innovating' the stock price higher.
Also, union leaders aren't bureaucrats.
Also, bureaucrats serve a useful function.
> You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
There's actually not a big difference, after one factors out the remarkable level of spin you've worked into your characterizations.
> Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000.
If you object that people in large-organization senior management roles can make that much, you won't believe what many corporate CEOs make. It'll blow your mind!
https://laborpains.org/:
> LaborPains is a joint blog of the Center for Union Facts and the Enterprise Freedom Action Committee.
> We expose the truth about labor unions and the pain they impose upon free enterprise.
So, basically garbage anti-union propaganda. You might as well have just linked this video https://youtu.be/ONKkoiszVSs?t=17.
Wouldn't this situation and others like it simply devolve into an accusation and a denial? What can a truly impartial arbiter do in such a scenario?
Absolutely not.
We don't want union cruft within a hundred miles of tech.
It's already far too hard to shed incompetent people.
I don't want corporate politics and all the worst parts of MBA culture within a hundred miles of tech, yet here we are.
Solidarity is the only way that workers can negotiate on an even playing field.
Always, it's insane how people who work in this tech can think about reshaping this social convention or disrupting that industry and still think that "nope, unions are inherently bad and always will be bad, there is no way for us innovators to redesign labor relations for the good of workers."
>I don't want corporate politics and all the worst parts of MBA culture within a hundred miles of tech, yet here we are.
If you think politics isn't an implicit reality of any organized group of human beings, I've got a bridge to sell you.
So sounds like you should be okay with the minimum amount of politics that unions have!
At any rate, it's definitely arguable that office politics in tech have gotten worse and worse in the last few decades, as more money and money-men have poured into the industry. Compare Silicon Valley now to how it was prior to the Netscape IPO, and the toxicity has definitely grown.
Politics may be inherent, but the type of politics can vary in quality and livability. Ditto for the politics in a union.
I do think it is an implicit reality of any organized group of human beings, which is why I want a group that does it on my behalf, not just one that does it against my behalf.
One may not like militarism, but even the most extreme anarcho-libertarians see the benefit in having a military to protect them.
Unions are the same way. They are the only way you, as an employee, can meaningfully protect yourself.
Its unfortunate but at the same time its the bitter truth. The visa restrictions/dependency create a slavery system within the software industry at-least in US as far as I have seen personally. The person fighting must have received his green card by now I guess which is why he is able to come forward like this. On the other hand if some one is on short leash (PIP) like this with a H1B visa, they would spend their time and energy on finding another job before their status becomes illegal. I have personal experience of a PIP which was personally motivated and I was naive enough to think that I had all the evidences to prove my case. At one point of time I was thinking whether to go to court or focus my energy to find a better job. As some one said earlier the HR is not for the employees, they are for the company. The management chain is more interested to protect one of they own, even if there are evidences.
I hear you. I know this has happened to many other people and they've told me everything that has happened to them. I say - focus your energy on getting a better boss next time.
There are laws against workplace harassment and it needs lawyers to enforce them. In this specific company, complaints of such harassment would go only to dead ears and further lead to retaliation.
If there are enough cases (and I bet there are), it would mean a class action against such practices. Get some lawyer friends and have a few beers with them.
Once again, I hear you.
Addendum: If you wish to put your SDE skills to good use, develop a social shaming browser plugin with anecdotal evidence tying to a person's professional profile, say, LinkedIn. That will ensure that bad managers are automatically flagged when people visit their profile.
There's been much discussion in this thread about the role of HR and corporate processes in these kinds of situations. I would encourage anyone that works in a BigCo to read the book "Corporate Confidential".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62085.Corporate_Confiden...
Sorry to be pedantic as this is often incorrect: King county was NOT named after MLK Jr, but rather changed recently from referring to Rufus King to MLK Jr. I had mistakenly believed this too before I learnt about our history.
But Washington State is indeed named after George Washington.
"Recently" like the 1986 Macintosh Plus came out recently.
* Toledo Blade - Google News Archive Search || https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hw4VAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2AIE...
But, just to be clear, Edgar Martinez Drive was named after Edgar Martinez. (=
Considering King County has been around since 1852, 1986 should be considered quite "recent" in its history.
As with everything, context matters. Just like how we would consider homo sapiens as a whole "recent" in the scale of the geological time scale.
It's no accident you assumed that. King County Metro uses MLK as their logo, so you can't even walk a block downtown without seeing a 10-ft mobile billboard of MLK's face.
Another tidbit I learned today: S Jackson Street (running through the International District in Seattle) is, in fact, named after President Andrew Jackson.
I sincerely hope that this public blog entry and protest leads to some labor reform. Good luck bro.
I hope this guy gets help with his issues, because they seem to extend far beyond "working at Amazon".
And it also seems to not be 'Amazon', it seems to be his immediate manager that's the larger problem
>it seems to be his immediate manager that's the larger problem
Not discounting this, but someone that thinks comparing to Jeff Bezos to Adolf Hitler is either legitimate or merits public attribution is bringing their own issues to the table, and is likely not telling us the whole story.
Now I know an ad-hominem is ipso facto against HN's rules, but look at not just the Hitler comparison, but the writing style.
Disconnected sentences. Run ons. This is more than a case of someone who's a bad writer or a non-native English speaker. I've written in non-native languages before -- organization, paragraphs, and spacing transcend language.
To not mince words, this blog post seems 50% in the format of one of those crazy political ranters that show up in your inbox, or Timecube ( http://timecube.2enp.com/ ).
Inference-wise, is there a good (>20%) chance this guy's story is legit and he's really just a very, very, jumbled writer. Yes. But is there also a good (>20%) chance this guy is kinda off his rockers? Also yes.
This is not meant as an ad-hom itself. It's merely statistical inference (like inferring someone writing about Python but mispelling it as "Pyton" all the time is probably not that proficient at Python)
Just wanted to point out that he's currently suing all of these people and the company for discrimination.
As intense these allegations are, someone on the Internet once said that it's best to keep these things offline until investigations/lawsuits are done. Is that true?
Well, yea, you can only hurt your case, not help it.
If your goal is a payout then best to keep quiet, but if your goal is an actual change in policy public shaming seems to be the only thing that works.
Do you have a link to the suit?
The thing that hurts this post the most is the writing, a brief filed by a lawyer would likely make the case much better.
Answering my own question, here is the docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14528071/churyumov-v-am...
Here is the complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.269265...
Note that this is filed "pro se" (he is acting as his own lawyer), which is universally a bad idea.
Having read that complaint, I think he is extremely likely to have a case (though I am not a lawyer). I think he's extremely unlikely to manage to get results through the court unless he gets a lawyer.
Hmm, it's a really bad strategy to go public including the names when a case is open. The author seems to be weak and needs to work on mental fortitude; that might be reason why he was so mercilessly exploited by his manager, as certain people can spot that from distance.
The company employs something like 300,000 people. I’d imagine many stories of bad management just at that scale. Since it’s Amazon it always gets an unfair level attention.
IBM has a ridiculous number of employees. So does Google and Microsoft. They are all behemoths.
I have heard pretty horrible stories from x-amazonians as well.
Try 650,000.
(Amazon's latest 10-K: "We employed approximately 647,500 full-time and part-time employees as of December 31, 2018.")
Basically making an employee a single-parent, as it feels by wrath/broken promise, is heart-breaking! These managers likely do not have children...
Former Amazon employee here (worked at Lab126, on the original Kindle devices).
While I didn't have a bad manager there (my managers were actually nice people), it is Amazon's corporate culture that turns the place into a 'dog eat dog', arse-hole driven, development. Managers have to run around and cover their arse, as in the first or second misstep, they are out. This pressure filters down to employees who are often thrown against very tight deadlines without much corporate support (ie. basic training on new tech, or even clear coding review standards, and more). Code reviews usually turned into: "Who screams the loudest wins".
Amazon tends to be notoriously 'cheap/frugal', to the point of lacking basic things that most work places take for granted. (I am not talking about cheap coffee and lack of perks, but not even throwing a Christmas party, even though the Kindle was a huge success and sold more than then even the more optimistic prediction). The company will not show/give a basic token of appreciation, even though the team is performing well. Hence, employee morale was not high, but people saw it just as a job. If you are 'young' and still learning and want to grow as a person, you will hate an environment like that.
But the worst abuse was done to H-1B folks like me.
1. Amazon abuses on people that are on H-1B and need their greencard application going to stay in the country. They delay your application at every step, to the point that you realize that something that should take 1 year, it will take 3-4 years at the given pace, or maybe not even done ever. They dragged their feet, and played with your life as a simple leverage tool. (even after talking to the VP of HR, and while getting: 'Yes, it will be done', nothing got done, and things got dragged out anyway).
2. Amazon abuses on people that need some flexibility (due to family reasons). I remember really as at some point I had to pick up the project of co-worker as she had a mental break-down at work. (crying and all). Reason? She needed some time off due to children/family reason and she couldn't get it as 'we were on a tight deadline'.
My first week at work there, there was a 'goodbye' party at my team, where one of the managers/lead engineers was leaving. The reason: Burnout. (I learned that part later).
3. Their back dated options, (i.e. you get most of your stock compensation only on your 4th year), are done in purpose, as they know you probably will not put up with it until then, and leave the money on the table by leaving. Most people stay 1-2 years and move on.
So, yeah, I think Amazon is a bad actor/employee to even software engineers (who tend to have options). I can't imagine their warehouse and lower level employees.
When the NYTimes article came out, I thought it pictured a very accurate portrait of the company. Perhaps things have changed, perhaps they are still the same, but I usually do not recommend friends to work there. They fully deserve their bad rap, and I am glad NYC didn't subsidize their abuse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
Everyone I've ever known in real life to actually work there (it is more than just a couple of people) has told me that its not a place a person should want to work. I've never heard of literally everyone I know who works for a company has nothing good to say about it at all....especially from other engineers. So I always ignore the recruiters when they send me linked in messages and emails.
Same. I try to keep in mind that anecdotes do not evidence make. However, when my sample size is in the high thirties and I still do not have one positive opinion, something smells.
There is long standing evidence that Amazon actively manipulates social media to try to paint working in the warehouses as a great job.
HN tends to have an outsized representation of prospective H1B candidates.
Added up, it's really hard to take any of the positive comments from "Amazon Employees" seriously in this post.
I just want to contrast this with the fact that in my case Amazon was extremely diligent with my green card process.
I applied day one after joining (my manager knew that I joined with that expectation so he approved right away) and they started working on it immediately. I had some delays with the lawyers but in general it went pretty smoothly.
This sounds like retaliation. I am not a lawyer, don't know the details, and this is not a pleasant process to go through, but it may be illegal in your state. For example, here are some of the laws in California[1].
[1] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/HowToFileLinkCodeSections.htm
Someone talented enough to work at Amazon has the option of going out on their own. This was the best decision I’ve made and now I have all the time in the world to spend with my child. There was an excellent post on how to be a consultant and charge good rates. It doesn’t matter where you live or your accent if you do it right. Sucks for the poster to be treated the way he was, these companies need to be held accountable for human suffering on all levels but at the same time it’s hard to sympathize when the company is that large and the chance that the CEO can control what one asshole supervisor does is tiny. Bezos probably has no clue about this or has few reasons to care. He rightfully stated that he is making others rich, hence all the more reasons not to keep doing it at other places. Russia is a beautiful country where highly paid developers can live comfortably. I’m not saying he shouldn’t live where he wants (US) but there are means of doing well outside of working for behemoths like Amazon, google or Facebook.
>> Amazon HR protects company from employees
This is true of _any_ company, _especially_ if you happen to be a straight white male (i.e. not a minority in any way).
Go to HR only if you're 200% sure you can make the company suffer if they don't listen to your complaint. I'm talking _documented, corroborated_ sexual harassment, or _very heavily documented_, strictly illegal discrimination of other types. It is best to also take a medical leave if you're being hazed like this, that way you will have what passes for evidence should they try to sweep things under the rug, which they almost certainly will (and truth be told, after the abuse described in the article, I'd probably need to take a leave for real).
And of course do not under any circumstances go to HR if you're an H1B without first rounding up another job in a 100% guaranteed fashion. If you don't, it becomes very easy for them to get rid of the problem by simply firing you. By law, you have to leave the country in 2 weeks. They know this.
Not to be snarky but, I think, a lot of commentators and the original poster would benefit from Gramarly subscription. The stories are compelling and make me quite sympathetic to Oleg (to the extent of helping him financially or in some other way) and everyone else, but, my God, it is very hard to read typos and grammatic errors.
While Amazon’s work culture doesn’t surprise me(similar experiences from multiple sources), while I feel sympathetic to the author’s struggles, I do feel the author went a bit too far with his invectives against his previous manager. The reason I say that is, we don’t know the manager’s side of the story and may be it wasn’t exactly like how this guy characterizes it.
While people working on visas don’t have as much freedom as people who don’t need sponsorship, I don’t think this problem is present in every company that has lot of immigrants. Part of the problem is Amazon’s culture and I think this problem is trickled top down.
It seems like people at the top management of amazon work hard and there is probably better than linear returns for their extra efforts. But it seems like they push that even on the lower rungs where it seems like it is not justified.
I had a similar horror story from 2014-2015 Seattle Amazon. But I opted to quit rather than being subjected to further abuse.
I had a really bad manager whose name was Maulik Patel. He had the worst attributes you could ask for in a manager. Unsupportive, jaded, and emotionally draining. He kept threatening to fire me but never would...for something like 4 months until I said fuck it and quit. His main reasons were that I wasn't fast enough despite finishing the tickets in my sprints pretty much all the time. He had a vendetta against me for being hired to do the job he couldn't. He had flat files of libraries like jQuery and KnockoutJS and d3 committed into our repo. He used the synchronous ajax call flag to download language files...freezing every page for a quarter of a second. There was no way to upgrade all our libraries or fork them properly without undoing all of his mess.
I put us on Bower for web packages and rerolled everything. He was pissed about that. Pissed I fixed his mistakes. He would say things like I am level 4 so I need to pull tickets from the next sprint when I am done with the current sprint. Fundamentally he did not understand what role management had in planning and how to do it properly without antagonizing individual contributors.. Maulik attacked team members including me with qualitatives like slow and fast. He would spread his hands like he was showing a quantity and say you are here but need to here [moves hand higher.]
It was his first time as a manager. When I took the job Jeff Grote was actually signed on to be my manager..but Jeff pulled a bait and switch early into my start..sticking Maulik as a middle manager under himself. Coulda all been avoided if Jeff did me proper.
When I left I sent an email to the team explaining my grievances which I felt they deserved but which is for sure unprofessional. I probably shoulda went to HR but I had heard bad things about HR at large companies. Couldnt have been worse than not getting severence or unemployment. Live and learn... Care to share any similar stories? Would probably make me feel better to hear how someone else dealt with a bad manager scenario. If not its fine.
Here's an email I had sent to Jeff (his manager):
Jeff, I'm coming to you about Maulik's behavior. Literally, it's so bad that even when I come home, or I'm off on weekends, I'm thinking about how to deal with the guy. It's totally unsuitable for job satisfaction. My job satisfaction isn't even reflecting the tickets I do anymore, it's literally tarnished, shit on, by the passive-agressive comments Maulik makes on the regular, he usually sticks a smiley face at the end of his insults as if that makes them less offensive.
When I came onboard, the javascript and front-end workflow and ui, and code, were absolute chaos. I am not one to cry over spilled milk. I fixed 90% of it and did not insult Maulik, because I understand that it isnt productive to do so.
However, I don't know why Maulik feels the need to stomp on me for what amounts to the smallest kind of things. If you look at my ticket resolving rate, I'm like a speed demon, Ashley can vouch for this. So I'm getting my job done.
But either Maulik has a personality or managerial deficit, he is somewhat envious that I am doing a category of task right (front-end) that he only was shoddily able to do. Or he has no idea, is oblivious, and thinks his unelegant and critical behavior is conducive to being a good manager. And it isn't, I can tell you, based on my satisfaction and willingness to do good work. He's going against that with his continued vitriol.
For example, this timezone issue. He has 100 other issues to deal with. And he chooses to spend 20 minutes researching and finding a library (Which he may not have found...20 minutes could end up empty handed..) Just so he can trump me.
And it's a habit with Maulik. He ended up saying "This kind of reserach is what is expected from an Amazon engineer."
All too common for me to talk to him, and then he ends up using corporate culture rhetoric to crap on me. "Andrew, most people don't last long here. A lot of people get fired. Amazon culture, you need to learn it" Intimidation tactics, dismissal of my concerns, and basically abusing the idea of Amazon culture to avoid taking personal responsibility.
I really need you to step in here and deal with Maulik. He's a new manager and is showing it. A good manager is supposed to improve the teams efficiency, correct? He's actually making me not want to work, because of the amount of vitriol I get for performing well. It's anti-correlated. It's negative reinforcement.
Word of advice to anyone. Don’t complain about your boss, in any company, very few cases it will end up in your favor. Second, never complain to HR. As Oleg said, HR is to protect the company, not you.
I’m very saddened it ended up this way. I don’t know the full story so I can’t judge. But if even half of what he says is true, everyone involved should be fired.
Having that said, I work for AWS and pretty happy but I’m very concerned I keep hearing cases like this in the media. Maybe when the dust is settled I’ll try to take apply to his team and this will give me an excuse to see their culture from first hand. So far all employees I personally know didn’t have similar issues, but maybe I’m just lucky.
Sounds terrible and hope justice prevails. I’m not familiar with the case but in case anyone wondering or caring, I work for AWS and never heard of any similar cases in any of the teams I’m working with. It’s a big company and there are some bad bosses apparently. I wouldn’t have taken that approach personally even if I was in his shoes but I’m not in his shoes and don’t know all the facts. I hope this gets resolved but this is far from my own experience (3 years in AWS as a Sr SDE)
Worst protest for them would be when a lot of people left at the same time. Project would be slowed down, they would have problems hiring, people who stay would be overwhelmed and left later.
Protesting against amazon and still working there means nothing, because you're still doing job for them, which means you accept the state of things, despite not tolerating it at the same time.
This would be disability lawsuit waiting to happen, if he has the means and didn’t sign an arbitration agreement.
>To somehow improve its reputation, Amazon manipulates public opinion on the Internet! Amazon pays to its employees for posts in social networks! Don’t believe? Google it!
I couldn't be the only one who found some irony in this statement.
No matter who was right, no company should allow such kind of escalation to happen.
What makes people, especially managers, to act so shittily with people working 'under' them. I can't begin to imagine how crappy a person has to be to abuse power. Humans seriously cannot handle power.
amazon managers used the data from internal feedback system against their subordinates. I think this shows exactly how we the customers(some say the products) can trust them with our data. Very vivid example that is.
Given the abuses mentioned, even in WA, if there was legitimate documentation of things like “be in by 7am”, HR would have worked with the situation - shitty manager or not.
I’ve heard at Amazon, if you are on a PIP, if you manager tells you to juggle bananas on a unicycle and you don’t make a damn good attempt you can be fired. Probably hyperbole, but still.
My experience with Amazon was extremely positive.
The author of this article seems very junior / immature, and honestly feels like he's got some mental health issues going on. Airing this much dirty laundry is not likely to get you what you want, and is likely going to make it hard for him to get hired by the next company.
Always talk to your boss 1:1, face to face. Never give shitty feedback over an online system. If you can't work out your issues, or you don't get along well with your manager, best to just move on and look for a new job.
What is the purpose of an online feedback system then?
Hate to tell him, the job of every HR department is to protect the company, not the employees.
This seems like a tiff with a particular manager, not all 600,000 people that compose Amazon.
Also, I'm not sure if he ever learned this, but his manager doesn't control whether he can transfer or not. All he needed was a hiring manager to say s/he wanted him on the team and he could've just left.
Mgrs block transfers of engs they don't think meet the performance bar. Apart from official channels to 'block' transfers, they block them by asking other mgrs to not hire you (You're marked as needs-improvement and put on a 'dev-plan' at the sole discretion of the mgrs participating in your OLR process, post which you'd need a VP approval for transfers; you can't contest a 'dev-plan'. Oftentimes You're not even told abt it. When you're told the justifications are vague: You're told the mgrs have got written peer feedbacks, but you're never shown any. You're told you didn't do enough because there weren't enough commits or enough issues resolved depending on which ever metric suits them).
Mgrs treat engs like puppets and engs are okay with it cause the pay rise and sometimes even the job is at stake through this dreadful OLR process. Folks who readily sacrifice their work life harmony are the ones that get the plaudits. This is unsustainable long term, but Amazon doesn't care abt your long term, ironically. It isn't uncommon for "top tier" and "least effective" talent to work for their mgrs on weekends, late nights, be involved in important meetings in different timezones. On several occasions, I've seen engs work on vacations because there was an emergent issue, or because they were due a promotion and couldn't say no.
Mgrs have their favourites and shower them with best possible work, best possible compensation, best perks (like overseas travel to attend conferences, attend re:invent, fly for recruitment drives). In one instance, I saw the pay gap was 3x between equally tenured folks at the same job level. You'd usually find these "top tier" engs defending their mgrs, the work culture, the processes, the policies to death.
The HR department is the worst and complicit in all of this. The new peer feedback system is a hog wash and isn't even considered for OLRs. The promotion process is now less bureaucratic but puts too much power in the hands of the mgrs who decide who should get good enough work and just enough responsibilities to get promoted. OLR process and promotion alike is basically 'how to lie with statistics (only when your mgr allows it)' if you get what I mean. Mgrs can lie or argue either way depending whether they like you or not. I've seen mgrs reject negative feedbacks for engs they are looking to promote. The reason usually is a terse 'Inappropraite' with no further explanation. The mgrs are known to seek negative and positive feedback depending on how they want to build a case for or against you from their "yes men" who are usually the "top tier" engs.
God help if you've got personal or health issues. At least on one occasion, one of my friends was told by his mgr to be worried abt their performance since they've got mortgage to pay. And on several occasions, employees asked to leave because they broke some Amazon code of conduct or policy, but the actual reason to put them to sword in the first place could have been anything, ranging from personal prejudice to revengeful mindset to "let me show you who's the boss"
Multiple mgrs doing 'amazon things' can mean only one thing: It isn't because of a few bad apples... The whole basket is rotten.
Despite all of this, it's amazing so many good engs I know work there. But I also know that they'd give up that job at Amazon for Googles of this world in a heartbeat.
All that reads like the ramblings of a frustrated (probably mentally broken down), extremely self-entitled, combative individual. He needs help, but not of the legal variety... of the psychological variety. I truly hope he seeks it out and accepts it.
It's just too big as a company. It cannot be fair. With all those layers of middle managers, talented people are bound to get ignored and fall through the cracks; suppressed by managers whose only interest is maintaining the status quo.
I'd say this isn't about "talented people", this is just basic decency that an employer should have to extend to an employee, regardless of that employees position or talent.
We must end the H1B.
Very delusional and poor writing by this guy. I have no doubt Amazon is a miserable gulag to work at, but I have no doubt this guy has made his situation much worse through his behavior.
Just don't work for a big corporation.
Unions aren't just for raising wages.
In case people don't realize, the linked site has one blog post per day going back the past ~2 weeks all about this protest. Some choice excerpts:
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
> There are 2 most difficult parts in the rally:
> - to get courage to start
> - to make a banner
> Courage is easier. Few YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, AC/DC song "Thunderstruck" and I am ready to fight.
> To be honest, in the morning fear of public shame almost caused symptoms of bed wetting.
> But Deadpool told me how to manage this fear. [embedded youtube video from the deadpool movie here]
> They can argue citing last words: Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Why didn't I commit? I ask: decision taken by whom? If my manager and his managers all the way till Bezos support oppression, should I respect their opinion?
> Then the only authority here is God. I say: Once a decision is determined BY GOD, I commit wholly. But God didn't ask me to stop protesting yet.
> Thus, most of NYT Amazon examples are really cruel and inhuman. Employees are punished because their parents are dying, their children are disabled etc. I hear shaking Hitler in his coffin. These are not single examples of "bad" managers. This is a company culture. Official company policies support the CULTURE worse than genocide. During the genocide, Jews were not treated in that way.
> If I don't find printer today, tomorrow nobody will know about horrors of Mr Bezos.
> How can I do leafleting without printer?
> Where are all these librarians?!!!!!!
> Btw - got to library. The one near of UW was open even during the "storm"... How can you call this nice Christmas snow a "storm"? I thought the storm is when Dorothy flies in her house through the sky... In Russia we have such storm 9 months a year with a temperature of -22 F.
> Anyway I printed almost 300 sheets of dirt about Amazon. Tomorrow 300 Amazonians will know the True. Jeff, I am coming.
> I was thinking I am afraid of people. But then I realized: in fact people are afraid of me. Now I feel I am more powerful and more free than anybody else. Amazon employees are restricted in their freedoms: they are forced to spend most time of their lives to do the work they hate. They are restricted to speak.
> I am free to speak and Jeff Bezos with all his billions can't close my mouth and can't prevent me from walking on the street with my banner.
> I like that. Like a student who lost virginity. I mean, well, you know.
> But today it will be incredible day. I am going to Whole foods store at Denny way. If Spheres s a heart of Amazon, Whole foods is its stomach. This store is always full of people and engineers. God bless me.
Before the outrage machine gets going, probably worth reading that and asking how reliable of a narrator this is.
It is interesting to see the mindset of the person who wrote this post. He's obviously been triggered by some internal politics and then he's extrapolated that all the way up and down the corporate chain of command. Amazon has 613,000 employees. I can imagine there's going to be a few bad managers in that mix.
another brilliant post about the QOL of Amazon.
I don't doubt that the author had a negative career experience at Amazon, but his account doesn't present as credible. The associations he makes between action and intent do not compute in many places. There are things that are misunderstood or factually wrong.
- "Amazon Connect." The program is called Connections. Every employee gets a multiple choice question every day. You never submit specific comments about a manager. It's truly high level stuff. "Does your manager help clear obstacles for you?" "How many teams do you need to work with to get something done?" "Are you achieving your career goals" "Are you accruing tech debt?". Responses are anonymous and the results are not shown once the population gets below 4 or 5 total responses.
Maybe some rogue Connections employee is sharing data--they should be fired if they are. But it's wildly against policy and the idea that a manager would care enough to go find out what an individual employees response is seems off. Who has time and the individual data points don't matter that much.
It's just good macro level data. It's great to have a pulse on what's working in a team and what isn't. It's actually a great way to find where teams aren't happy with their manager. Call it a bad manager locating device. That Connections is the triggering point seems improbable.
- His manager asked HR how to prevent them from receiving immigration benefits. Seems very off. Individual managers do very little w/ respect to immigration. Employees interact directly with the company's immigration department and lawyers. Managers approve green card sponsorship and work with employees where they have immigration challenges like renewals or home country returns. His manager didn't ask HR how to do this unless he was seeking his own performance problem.
- Transfers. With few exceptions, Amazon has one of the most liberal transfer programs you can find. Don't like your job on your first day, you can apply to a new one. You cannot link transferring to any conditions involving spouses or other external factors. You can be blocked from transferring if your current manager has flagged you as having an active performance problem, and you can appeal that block itself. You cannot be prevented from transferring for any other reason than performance. If the author was blocked from transferring to another role, it's only due to performance.
- Working from home. Amazon's a pretty in-person culture, but people work from home. Some teams have different norms. A manager might discourage an employee who was struggling performance-wise from working from home, if, for example, they had done so previously with limited results. It's not a rule, but people use common sense when people are scuffling, particularly if them being around others will help them avoid getting stuck.
- Pivot is a process where people who have been identified as having performance problems can appeal this determination. If you lose the Pivot appeal, you then go through the usual performance improvement plan dance that most companies use. An employee's case is heard by three peers (people in the same job role) or a manager who manages people in that job role. Which appeal choice is up to the employee. Most people choose peers and more people win their appeal than lose. Three independent peers agreed with his manager that he had performance problems. That's the only way you lose a Pivot appeal.
Bottom line, it seems likely the person in question was not performing at the level needed. They don't see that and don't agree. Most people who aren't performing don't agree. They began having the expected performance management interactions with their manager and it sounds like many wires were crossed along the way. Did they have a demon manager? Maybe. Some level of Dunning-Kruger seems like a more likely cause. It's a big company with lots of great jobs and people who enjoy them, ymmv.
The author of the article posted their Amazon user name, so I decided to look them up. I'll start with raw data, and then inject my own thoughts:
* The author is the bottom contributor on his team by a large margin. Their few contributions are primarily configuration changes and pixel pushes.
* The author hasn't made any contributions since last August, likely due to a leave of absence
* The author's manager has received overall positive feedback in the yearly employee survey for the last two years
If I were to speculate, I would guess that the author was put on a PIP very early on and, combined with his short tenure, is the reason the transfer was denied. I really hesitate to speculate any farther than that since there are clearly other circumstances to factor in, but I encourage everyone to consider that there are two sides to this story. Personally, given the data I can see, it doesn't look very good for the author.
Poor performance shouldn't be a reason to mislead and treat inhumanly. The bit about "allowing transfer when wife gets a job in NYC" is misleading, and asking someone to work when their daughter is sick is just plain wrong. There is a respectful way of letting under performers go without being dicks.
I imagine the number of people who today looked up Oleg's commits and his manager's survey results is in low single digits. I don't think you are being as "throw away" as you think here.
Why do you think looking up someone's code commit history should have negative repurcussions? Every tech employee within the company has access to this information. Same with the tech survey that lets you see a manager's results.
As an Amazon employee, I'm interested in seeing how much credence this story has and how much I should support the author's cause. I clearly don't know the details, but what I can see gives me pause (not original author you replied to)
For what it's worth, it bears keeping in mind that the tool that you are likely using does not report activity on any parts of the codebase that you personally don't have permission to view. Also, many teams keep codebases out of the standard code store, either in alternative self-managed version control systems or on GitHub.
I had considered that. This is common in AWS or Lab126, but I've never seen that be the case in Retail.
Edit: Missed the part about permissions, that's totally possible, but at least in publicly visible contributions, he is way behind his teammates.
The more I hear about Retail the more it seems like its a bad place to be.
There are jokes about "retiring to retail" among more senior engineers in AWS. There are a lot of older low-activity codebases where the pace is slower and someone senior can essentially retire-in-place. There's also a massive diversity of teams in retail. But yea, as far as I can tell most everyone would rather work in AWS, and nobody in AWS seems to seriously consider the possibility of transferring to a team in retail.
Code contributions are public even if you don't have commit permissions on team packages. You can look at anyone's code reviews.
Caveat being secret projects. However that's not the case here.
How did you get access to a specific managers yearly feedback? That doesn’t seem normal that all managers’ feedback is publicly posted.
Quite possible this throwaway account belongs to Uwais Khan, the guy's Manager? :)
Can confirm, this info isn't public at Amazon
You are wrong "bro." It's called the Tech Survey and you can see anyone's feedback going back like 3-4 years.
> You are wrong "bro."
Please don't. Your comment would be fine with just the next sentence.
There is a yearly tech survey with a lot of detailed questions about your experience at Amazon and about your manager and team. The results for every single Manager are public. The scores impact a manager's overall rating. I pay a lot of attention to the responses when considering new teams internally.
Either he's a higher up or the "engineer who installed the red button", to make a xkcd reference (I've been in that position myself - not at Amazon).
When I had a corporate job, digging through internal data like this for personal curiosity could have gotten me fired if I were caught, even without posting it publicly on the internet.
Digging through internal data is OK with Amazon because it's available to everyone. Posting it publicly is definitely not OK though. I'm sure he's violated NDA in some form or another.
Not doing much to help Amazon’s image by bringing up a lack of weekend contributions as a negative.
Also, no commits on weekends does not necessarily mean he did not work on those days. I "commit" my work only every few days.
Not at all implying that is negative, just saying that it contradicts the story of being forced to work weekends.
EDIT: I've gone ahead and just removed that point from my original post. Just because his manager asked him to work weekends, doesn't mean he did. I sure as hell wouldn't.
You're not fooling anyone with this, and it's really unethical* to post personal information about the guy here. You should really consider deleting your post.
Edit:
* And, as others have noted, extremely unwise for you personally. This post is at the top of Hack News and you've used your privileges as an Amazon employee to leak information about someone suing the company.
Devil's advocate - since there's two sides to every story- he's trying to provide more data points around the story. In my view, he's doing people a favor here.
Unless he's already a sock puppet of the legal team.
And why should we believe your throwaway account? Put your name on here if you are willing to destroy this person even further. If you really do have access to such data, I'm absolutely astonished that you would think it ok to access it and post it like this. And finally, as anyone with any experience with data should know, data doesn't always capture the full story.
Anyone within Amazon can look at code contributions. The manager results he's talking about are also public. I think this gives a sense for the other side of the story here.
It's not good form to post such information publicly. Also, it probably is in violation of a few confidentiality clauses you signed. On top of that, this also violates the author's privacy.
Please consider removing this.
Nice try, Uwais Khan)
Thank you very much for sharing this info. It helps understand the context better.
Can you clarify whether the manager's feedback is public info within Amazon?
Also, there's gotta be people at Amazon who knew the author. Did they say anything positive or negative about the experience working with him?
Very poor taste to post this. If I were a higher up at amazon I’d do my best to figure out who you were and fire you immediately.
Anonymously sharing incomplete personal information about someone you haven't worked with from Amazon's internal systems and making an assessment of them by the number of commits they have made isn't really making a strong case for Amazon having a good culture.
So you "voluntarily" decided to burn a colleague in public because of an opinion post?
If someone is on a PIP that should stay between a worker and his/her manager, or stay inside a team at most
The good reviews of that manager can be explained by people knowing how the system works and not willing to rock the boat. I've seen it happen, but when a manager tried any funny business with the team, he hadn't realized the team was very united and impervious to his shenanigans.
Together with several "anonymous" comments at his blogpost telling to dismiss his comments because of his bad English (which is obviously due to it being his 2nd language but it is not bad per se)
Thanks for writing this post, it really highlights what can be expected from this company.
" I left a negative feedback about my manager Uwais Khan in the daily “Amazon Connect” survey. Amazon Connect team sent to me the report showing how my manager can calculate my answer. At our 1:1 meeting, Khan prohibited me to leave feedback in the system. Since then oppression started. Khan asked me to work on weekends. Then he asked HR how to prevent me from immigration benefits (not informing me about that)."
"My 3 yo daughter has a development delay and I need to bring her to therapy. For that, I asked Khan for work from home once a week like everybody else in our team. Khan prohibited me to work from home. Moreover, he asked me to come to office at 7 am and sit there alone. All the other team members came to office at 11 am and worked from home without restrictions. And their children were not disabled."
Holy crap is all I can say, honestly.
Manager: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.
Basically.
Say what you will about Darth Vader, but he was a pretty effective manager.
The first scene in Return of Jedi is literally Vader telling someone: "I am here to put you back on schedule."
That's hilarious, I'd forgotten that whole exchange.
"Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them."
Exactly! I sure bet the lifts ran on time in the Death Star...
I don’t know, even Vader had trouble at the Death Star Canteen.
Unfortunately he wasn't trained in mechanical engineering and failed to spot a serious error during design review.
Eh, I don't know. Why bother securing exhaust ports when someone can just jump to hyperspace and destroy your whole fleet?
Fair point! All that time and money wasted on weapons systems.
Well, he is a cross between German and Japanese stuff.
(Subsequent edits to the parent comment addressed the concern I had mentioned and made my comment irrelevant.)
Apology accepted.
> Holy crap is all I can say, honestly.
It sounds bad, but I'd reserve judgement until I heard the other side. There's always the other side, and I for one am tired of the recent rushes to judgement we see in the media recently.
This.
"DAE Amazon is a horrible employer?" is a pretty common circlejerk the commenterati like to jump on.
Call 911; Seriously it works like a charm;
<edited>
Let's not engage in doxing here.
removed but it was the first hit for "name amazon"
This is happening in every big org, especially in banks, people are people. Politics, games of thrones. I would never join any big org, tried twice :).
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
This guy is a lunatic.
You got fired. Cry me a river.
What are you hoping to accomplish with this post?
Indian here. If your manager is from India, he probably sucks. He is insecure, has zero empathy, leadership skills or any skills.
He probably memorized data structures and algo's interview questions and got a job at Amazon. He got ahead by sucking up to his boss and being political. His boss is probably an Indian too who sucks up to his boss and so on. But that is okay, as this company is stable and they just need people to slog. In india there is a term "sangkamya" that means someone does what they are told to. No questions asked. Indians are very disciplined and years of slavery under British has conditioned us to be good workers.
This might be true for many Indian folks. I had an Indian manager who was the kindest soul, cared deeply for the team, to the point where he would stay late if there was a high severity issue just for morale support and to help debug, focused heavily on career development for us... he let management push him around, which he shielded the team from... he got passed on promotion opportunities and eventually left. It was a huge loss for our team, and after he left, within 3 months the entire engineering team he built parted ways.
I am Russian and my best manager ever, in 20 years of software development, was Indian. So YMMV and these kinds of generalizations need to become a thing of the past.
I need to clarify, this is from the perspective of American or first world working conditions. Coming from Russia an Indian boss must be a god sent(just guessing, don't know).
There are maybe 100 millions Indian bosses. Do I know all of them? Like everything in life, this is my experience. It isn't a scientific fact!
I am an Indian. When I was working in Indian IT, I used to think that Indian managers were the worst. Then I went to US and worked with some US managers. Two of my worst experiences in my career were due to US managers. So now I think majority of managers are bad, good ones don't reach the top any more.
dude (not an indian btw), you can be racist no matter what you are. identifying as an indian does not make what you’re saying less offensive
Being racist would be discriminating someone based on their race without actually looking into the circumstances. Pointing out cultural roots of a very real problem and openly taking about it is a totally different thing.
Pretending that “Indian” describes a single culture composed of more than a billion people is the defintion of racism. India is an incredibly diverse place full of people who have less in common in terms of culture (not to mention language) than a Californian does with a New Yorker.
It does not describe every single person in a country. However, if you deny that certain countries have certain cultural identities you are lying to yourself.
I would argue that reducing more than a billion people who don’t even speak the same language, eat the same food, listen to the same music, worship the same gods... to a single stereotype is the sweaty face of ingorance, no matter how you try to dress it up or defend it. The fact that “arguments” such as yours always seem to be devoid of a grounding in reality and exist as appeals to emotion or common sense speaks for itself too. In short, ignorance and heuristics combine to produce bullshit every time.
You got to be kidding. Here are the things I can safely say about most Indians, not all, "most":
1. They eat roti and rice. 2. They speak Hindi 3. They wash not wipe their ass. 4. They are Hindu and worship one of the Avtars of shiva and all believe in bharma and bhraman.
Some things are common across a culture. The first step is to acknowledge the problem then we can solve it
You got to be kidding. Here are the things I can safely say about most Indians, not all, "most": 1. They eat roti and rice. 2. They speak Hindi 3. They wash not wipe their ass. 4. They are Hindu and worship one of the Avtars of shiva and all believe in bharma and bhraman. Some things are common across a culture. The first step is to acknowledge the problem then we can solve it
The first step is actually learning about something to the point that, when you talk about it, you’re doing something other than revealing and revelling in your own ignorance.
For example...
1. Rice and flatbread are staples around the world. All of India doesn’t eat roti, feel free to learn about the many varied cuisines of India sometime. For example, some parts of India have a tradition of eating beef, others of eating pork, still others tend to be vegetarian. Some regions have blazingly spicy cuisine, others are mild.
2. No, again, even a cursory search online would show you otherwise.
3. Stop spying on people in the toilet.
4. Only the Hindus, not the Muslims, Sikhs, and other religions.
I won’t be replying again, I’m having a hard time assuming that you’re posting in good faith, and if you are that’s worse in a way.
Yet if you compare a Californian and a New Yorker to a Russian like myself, you can safely bet that both will smile more and be less direct in conversations due to the cultural differences.
You haven’t met many New Yorkers have you?
You haven't met many Russians, have you? :)
I’m half Russian, so yeah I have.
if you reread my comment was that the parent was offensive. saying that you’re from X does not give you a free pass to talk shit about people from X.
He's talking about a country of birth, not a race. It's better not to go around worrying about whether somebody will call you racist.
It would be nice if I could read an HN thread without people bitching about Indians though.
depending on how you define race (if you look at it in the broader trrm of ethnicity) you can definitely talk about racism.
It's not about ethnicity because these stereotypes completely exclude Indians that grew up in America. Whether you classify it as racist or not, going around classifying stuff as racist is a total non-contribution to the world. Opinions being "racist" per your view does not imply they are incorrect or morally wrong to hold, or express.
(There is something ambitious about remotely diagnosing some guy (by association) to be a cookie-cutter Indian manager, but I'm having a hard time figuring out a way it's more than just unfashionable.)
i did not see the clause that excluded people that did not grew in India.
Every time you take one label and you apply it to a large group of people that have something in common you have the potential to be labeled yourself as racist. IMHO that’s the definition of racism: you take a negative attribute and you map it to a class of people. usually you also imply that you/we are better than them.
here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
“prejudice against people based on their ethnicity”
i may have an idiosyncratic definition of racism or we may have different understandings but this definitely crosses the line.
if the claim was made that the guy’s manager is so and so, we would have left it at that. but the claim was targeted at all managers that are indian. that’s fucked up.
Well, There is nothing racist about my observations.
I love India and Indians, not fond of Indian bosses.. most of them
How is making negative generalizations about people from a specific country not racist?
Americans are loud, obnoxious tourists. Is that racist?
yes
> If your manager is from India, he probably sucks. He is insecure, has zero empathy, leadership skills or any skills.
Racism! Seriously? We going there?
You are conflating country of origin discrimination with race discrimination. Both are illegal but they're not the same.
It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Thinking about this problem as a larger systemic problem makes me incredibly frustrated and sad about human nature and society overall.
Amazon is a great company as consumer very shitty company to work as an employee.
Source: Ex-Amazon employee.
> Amazon is a great company as consumer
as long as you love monopolies and anti-competitive behavior.
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
The guy may have a case somewhere in there, but this kind of hyperbole isn't doing it any favors.
Stripping out the fluff, the concrete concerns seem to be:
- Denied permission to transfer
- Denied permission to WFH
- Placed on PIP and eventually fired
The author's hypothesis is "manager is evil and this is all retaliation", but this is not easily distinguished from "author did not perform well", and the only evidence of performance we have is one "nice" performance review.
- Left negative feedback for manager -> Prohibited to leave feedback by manager.
- Required to work on weekends.
- Denied some form of immigration benefits behind his back.
- Told that his wife having a job has anything whatsoever with him being able to transfer.
- The above being a lie.
- Required to show up 4 hours before everyone else.
- Punished for using sick days.
I don't think any of the concrete concerns I listed above are subject to the authors interpretation. Short of the author lying they appear to be valid complaints.
I hope he has written email records of all of these claims. If so I'm quite confident he'll have a strong court case.
A strong court case for what?
Washington is an "at will" employment state. You can be treated poorly and fired for any reason unless it is for a protected class(race, sex etc). Amazon and his manager could have fired him because they put a bunch of names on a dart board and his was the one hit.
I do think the treatment was incredibly unfair and unjust. Unfortunately, in "at will" employment states in the US, this appears to be perfectly legal behavior. As shameful as that may be.
https://hkm.com/seattle/retaliation/
Most US states are at will; and people still win lawsuits against their employers quite often for just run of the mill toxic behavior, and not just for things as cut and dry as bigotry (although, being a visa holder, he may have a case for, especially since it was a part of these discussions - national origin and immigration status are protected classes).
From the link
> Retaliation is defined as any action taken against an employee for daring to file a discrimination or harassment claim
And then for harassment: https://hkm.com/seattle/hostile-work-environment/
> Harassment in the workplace is a form of employment discrimination. Unlawful harassment is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and as such is illegal. Unfortunately harassment can come in many forms, both verbal and physical and can be based on any of the following forms of discrimination:
> Race, Color, Religion, Sex, Sexual orientation, Age, Disability (mental or physical), Retaliation
See above about "Retaliation"
Is there something I'm missing in there? Because that again appears to only protect one from a protected class. It does not mean if your boss is being mean or insulting to you for things outside of those protected classes. But again, am I missing something in there that is different? Do you have an example of a civil or criminal case won by a plaintiff for "toxic behavior"?
I'd be very interested in that, as that would mean the advice I've recieved from two diffent legal counsels I've contracted for advice. If you are correct, it appears I may have a civil claim against those attorneys.
I mean one one thing your missing (but probably also the person you're replying to) is that in the actual lawsuit he alleges racial discrimination with some credibility.
But also disability discrimination with regards to his kid.
Anyways, here's the brief he filed (unfortunately pro se) https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.269265...
Agreed. Using the H word doesn't help the author's case.
If my manager asked me to come to office at 7am, I would ask for 6am instead, so that I could be gone at 2pm and have a life, with a bonus of avoiding traffic jams. Choose your punishments carefully, aspiring middle manager!
But this is Amazon so you still need to stay until 8pm.
You’re a software engineer. Quit and move on. So your boss is a dick. Invoking civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr.!? Melodramatic and offensively out-of-touch with reality.
The only thing you should have done was tell your boss to fuck himself and get another job. That’s it. No need for a 2000 word blog post. No need for a “protest”.
This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong.
Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.
Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?
People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.
Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else.
You seem to be confused. Being able to bring someone someplace at a certain time can be, depending on the locations, much easier and less time intensive if done from home.
So, for example: If your commute takes twenty minutes and therapy is twenty minutes from your home taking someone to therapy who is at home takes 40 minutes if you do home office or between 60 and 80 minutes of you have to be at work.
Nowhere does it say that he wanted to do home office to take care of someone. That’s nonsensical and a nonsensical interpretation of what was said. The most straightforward interpretation is that this is a simple case of simplifying logistics.
No, working from home means working, as in getting particular things done.
Working from home often means that your (equivalent of) lunch break is a time you can spend elsewhere, e.g. take your child to therapy. You don't waste time commuting from your office if the doctor's office is nearby.
You can also spend more time for off-work activities in the middle of the day, but work until a later hour, again because you're not commuting back from the office.
As long as you get done what you planned to, and participate in whatever communications you planned to participate (video calls work well these days), I don't see why working from home would be a materially inferior way of working, at least if practiced in moderation.
Taking a day off is a different matter.
Your statement may be right. I am inclined to believe that he means he needed to take her to therapy and then back. This means he might start the day a bit later or he might be unavailable for some time. People generally WFH in those situations as it saves the time of commute and they can get something else done. Overall it might be an hour or 2 that he might not be available or it might be just the same as before as he saves commute time both ways and can work later in the day as he is already home.
No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.
I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.
I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
Hmm, doesn't
> I need to bring her to therapy
imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.
And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.
Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.
If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.
Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.
Yeah, I can see how one could make an amoral, pedantic argument around the definition of working from home. But to do that you have to 1) remove the argument from it's surrounding context, which is flawed reasoning and 2) successfully prove that there is a significant difference in the practical outworking of the definition of working from home between the subject and their workmates. The latter is immediately and significantly relevant to the definition and, unfortunately for the oppressor, drags context back into play.
Thank you. I've seen a lot of abuse of the term. One time I worked with a recruiter [1] and said I was feeling really bad that day and took the day off from work and was resting at home. She replied, "ah, gotcha, so you're working from home today". And I was like, "no, I'm resting."
(With that said, it could still be a good-faith usage here -- like, he legitimately does work from home, and the therapy is relevant here because all the back-and-forth pickups would otherwise eat up much of the day.)
[1] Yes, I know -- never again.
I have been working from home for almost 5 years now, and one thing that I learned in the first 18 months was that it is important to take sick days. In the beginning I would just sit at my desk and try my best to work even though I was sick, but not be able to concentrate and ultimately not get anything done. Then I would stress about it and work extra time, which would just make things worse. Now I take off any time I think I would have if I were in an office.
Unless you don't have sick days or your company cuts PTO in half. In that case, in front of the computer or in bed, that's still working from home. Fuck them for not providing sick days and cutting PTO in half. Fuck them for no raises in half a decade. This is the way one can get more money in the same time from the same company without a raise. The less I work, the more money I make per hour, so my incentive is to work as little as possible while still getting the minimum amount of shit done. It's management that sets the incentives. Welcome to the idiots of corporate America. Sure they could give some raises sometimes or increase vacation or add sick time or really do anything whatsoever to show employees that they are appreciated and that their salaries are not going down each month due to inflation. Instead, they try to force extra work like trying to squeeze water out of stone. In the office, it's no different. People waste time in other ways. I'm just shocked that corporate executives and managers are so fucking oblivious to the incentives they create and the empty praises they try to placate their employees with. Fuck them. This isn't a situation where one should be ethical. The cards are stacked against employees and employees need to use any dirty trick to get the most out of their shitty employers.
This sort of attitude does not help. I'm sorry that you've had bad management experiences, but things don't need to be like this, and part of that is the attitudes of both parties.
Ball's in the employer's court. It's their turn to make a move. The employee (me) can only react. Therefore as long as the employer continues to be like this, I have no choice in how I respond because I'm a human being with dignity and I deserve to be treated as such. On the other hand, this is the best job/employer I've ever had out of dozens in the industry. This is nothing compared to not getting the health insurance promised, being physically assaulted, having to work weekends/evenings for no reason at all and the other bullshit employers feel entitled to do to their employees. I couldn't disagree with your statement more, however. My attitude is one of responding to things out of my control. If my employer wants to fix this and improve my attitude, they just have to make good on the promises for a raise I was given multiple times or give me back the vacation time they cut in half. It's very simple and extremely easy for them. By saying that I should change my attitude, you're blaming the victim and implying that the employer is right to treat their employees like shit, without a shred of respect, perpetuating this bullshit forever. Nope, I will not accept the blame for their failing to be decent human beings who keep their promises and respect their employees.
Or it could be about reducing the impact of taking his child to therapy on work time. If it saves him an hour or more of travel during the day then it makes sense to let him WFH.
a specific therapy session unlikely lasts the entire day and a flextime (starting work at 11) probably covers a single day being split up a little bit.
>Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at office" when he's not actually "working" while at office, he's actually [getting coffee | taking a walk | socializing | etc?
does that help why this makes sense?
I judge my teem members by the quality of their work and the efficiency with which they do it. Ass in the seat time is a dumb metric and is always used in a power play.