My layman interpretation is that you can use the truck to pull on an immovable object and the truck won’t disintegrate. Pulling != towing so the marketing dept is threading a fine line here.
FWIW I did all of those things this article says not to do and ended up making close to 200% of my previous total compensation (which I'm happy with).
Some recruiters didn't ask me for my compensation figures upfront. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, LinkedIn, and some startup recruiters never asked me for my compensation numbers up front. The only ones that did, were to make sure neither of us were wasting each others' times. Usually that meant that I didn't continue to interview with them.
Most if not all recruiters asked me where I was in the interview process and which companies I was interviewing at. I mentioned every company I was interviewing with and where I was in the process with them. I probably got lucky here as I had around 50% onsite to offer rate so I was never left in a spot where I had no leverage.
My best offers were the ones where VPs called me to try to close the process, and I negotiated directly with them instead of the recruiter.
> FWIW I did all of those things this article says not to do and ended up making close to 200% of my previous total compensation (which I'm happy with).
The article mentions this:
> Let’s say that you currently work at a startup and make $150k in cash with some amount of equity. You go to levels.fyi or a similar site and look up Facebook’s salary bands for the role you’re targeting. Let’s say those bands for total comp are $250k-$350k. Hell, that’s way more cash than you’re making now, so you decide to share that range, thinking that if those are their bands already, it does no harm. That’s reasonable, except that let’s say Google ends up making you an offer, and it’s $400k (we’ve seen this scenario happen to a bunch of our users). Now you have to walk back what you said, in which case your recruiter will invariably ask why. And now you have to reveal, before you’re ready, that you have a Google offer, which means you’ll probably end up revealing that it’s for $400k. Now you’ve set an artificial ceiling for your Facebook counteroffer to be $400k as well, when in reality that ceiling may have been closer to $450k or even $500k.
The article is about optimizing for maximum comp, and your strategy is "sub optimal" because who knows if you could have gotten 250%+ of your previous comp had you negotiated better?
What if the rule was created after the tank was already in the park? There was no information given on how the tank was transported to the park, and you're creating a violation based off a hypothetical.
Twitter under Musk would presumably have less bloat, a lot faster decisions, I'm assuming an easy escalation path that doesn't have to go through multiple layers of management, and you can be confident none of your peers are coasting.
Amazon has taken steps to prevent abusive behavior from occurring, such as creating a process for engineers to challenge managerial pips and allowing engineers to transfer while on development plans. In my opinion, these steps seem more like treating the symptom than the cause. The overall culture remains the same. Engineers are still treated by management as resources to be allocated, and for me, this is the hardest pill to swallow. Even though my manager, my skip, and my peers tell me I do good work, at the end of the day, I feel that all I am is X capacity points per sprint. The feeling of being disposable in the huge machine that is Amazon is quite depressing.
Some of those steps are not really genuine in practice though. Getting a transfer while on a dev list requires you to get something like VP approval from the receiving team. The result in a lot of orgs is that they just won't look at the candidate.
Amazon's also re-instituted bell curve attrition goals with little warning to managers (1-2 weeks before annual reviews in my org, and percentages only in the meeting itself). The last few months have been a special breed of stress that I hadn't seen at amazon in my 7 years prior.
I left earlier this year to a much less stressful position.
Tbh I don’t agree that this is amazon specific, generally at any big tech co you will feel this way unless you find your way into something more specialized. For instance, I have a friend at G who was on a front-end team for maps for a while but recently switched to work at google brain after collaborating on side projects. He said the difference is night and day for him in terms of self direction and responsibility.
Other commenters: just because employees _are_ resources doesn't mean that managers should make them _feel_ like they are. There are companies that do a good job of making employees feel more of a sense of being valued, and so at least on that dimension Amazon seems to be doing a poor job.
Back in the Dark Ages when people still had pensions and unions, this department was called "Personnel," which was perfectly descriptive and non-humiliating. This is obviously the reason it had to change to something orwellian that lumps in a company's employees with its inventory of pig iron and staple removers.
Yep, that’s why I ran away fast and got my mba as soon as possible. As despised as the degree is here on HN, it’s a decent route to getting out of the now commoditized swe role.
Working in the role has taught me so much about how shitty it feels to be treated like a commodity, if I ever make a transition to management, one of my top priorities will be treating human beings like.. human beings.. just make sure the sprint gets done on time.
The software engineer profession is becoming like traditional factory workers, only this time they have ping pong tables and free snacks. Also the salary is very high. But the downside is that you are still at the bottom of the pyramid.
