Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn’t fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn’t need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn’t like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn’t feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it’s employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
I fought for getting a 4/5 rating at an old job and gave lots of examples. Their argument was that I didn’t deserve it because those were just expected. I pointed out my work compared to others in my team and was told that it compares across the company, not the team. I kept causing a fuss about it because I was so angry about it and finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less. I was confused because I didn’t want more money, I was just offended they said I was performing on average when I was going above and beyond every day. It was also really embarrassing to me. If they’d just said the rating doesn’t affect anything except your bonus I wouldn’t have even cared.
The whole thing is all BS.
finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less
That’s because they have a fixed budget and the proportions are tied to evaluated performance tiers, increasing your rating would contractually require them to compensate you more from the same pool of money
You’re falling for the “we’ve constructed this machine to tell you no so you can’t argue with us” ploy
No, as I said to another, upper management has every opportunity to fix the budget. Your direct manager however can not
I’ve found that laughing in their faces and putting in 2 weeks is fairly effective at breaking that wall. Amazing what money they can find when faced with the alternative. Otherwise, the correct move is to actually leave. All of you cowards that submit to the machine make it worse for everyone.
And I have in fact left that kind of jobs myself. Not trivial in a job market like this one though.
Need to make unions stronger again.
Yeah, no shit, thank you for repeating what I said. The point being I never cared about the money and didn’t even understand it was only about the money. I only wanted recognition.
This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.
It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.
I worked in a heavily regulated industry. Everything required a manual test. Let’s say you have an employee ID that is 10 digits long which they use to log in. You had to have some else (couldn’t be the developer) to write a series of tests, get those tests approved by 5 people(with specific titles) then a third person to execute the test, then the second person had to write a report saying it all passed, then that report had to be approved by the same 5 people.
That typically wasn’t the delay. The delay was to execute the tests we needed to stop production. That typically was a 6 week wait(unless urgent for “reasons”) and changes like “I will drop scrap by 83%” was typically told wait till July 4th or Christmas breaks. Why? Because production would be down for 3-4 days typically. Someone had to start the system, ok no entry produces error, executor and developer have to sign a physical paper, restart the whole system, now an entry of 1 digit produces an error, sign the form, repeat for all digit quantities up to 9, repeat for all digit quantities up to the choosen value(based on severity if an issue occurred), 2 people sign for each one, system restarted between each. If you had say an enter button and a cancel button each had to be checked for each quantities of digits. Oh but wait what if someone just types there name… Now repeat everything for alphabet values… What if someone does combination, more tests, more restarts, more signing.
Reports easily surpassed 1000 pages, no one really had time to check all that so I saw so many missed signatures and missed tests. I asked the “senior validation expert” can I just automate a lot of these tests using unit tests and attach a computer generated report of all tests passing and the source code of the tests? " the response I got was" what’s a unit test? "they still don’t use any of them to my knowledge.
Similar boat, it’s kinda frustrating that it takes 6 months to approve 30 minutes of work, but at least the job is boring.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If he did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
This is directly caused by squeezing promos down to making your skip level manager horny for the sound of your work instead of having any actual impact on what you are doing.
Its all such stupid horse shit.
“Why does X feature in Y app/game/device take so long??”
This is why
Flawless victory.
Ok, now fire him.
somebody please hack into amazon’s services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
