1w ago

Upwards mobility

170 comments

Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
- Imagine getting paid to do it.
- Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn't fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
  Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn't need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
  And no, I didn't like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn't feel bad about slowing them down either.
  Basically a shitty startup that milked it's employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
  Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
  Was a good run.
- Not really. If that service costs x2 in compute, it also means it causes x2 pollution.

And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.

Sounds like whoever decides these things knows nothing about IT.
- they don't. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on "on call" status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are "well it's 1am and I just got a call...I'm going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I'm doing" annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering "what's the point?"
  I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you're world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.
  
  Its not an initiation, it's hazing
  
  Amazon puts all new hires on "on call" status for like a week every month
  That's insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you'd just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you'd be the "shadow" on call. The primary would get paged and you'd get paged too. You wouldn't actually do anything, but you'd watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.
  being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you're world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world
  Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there's no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.
  Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you'd be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.
  
  "You are saying you are superfluous to the organization, gotcha."
- Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.
  
  You fuck over poor people for money, it's not complicated
  
  Not untrue. I don't understand or give a fuck about the business side. Same goes for my business colleagues about software.
  How do "real" engineers handle this shit? I feel like IT shouldn't have to reinvent it

You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don't get declined anymore.
- These days it's also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it's too clean you'll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
- It's almost like the "meritocracy" under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
- Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG's quit soon after and the new guys remained.
- Or you get fired because everyone else says your code is an unreadable mess.
  
  In my experience... nope. Never seen it happen. Even when there are clear coding guidelines, and stacks of code smell violations.
  
  In my experience, nope. Assuming it works as promised, the situation (usually) gets viewed as a skill gap. You think their code is bad, because you don't understand it well enough. Unless you are personally willing to redevelop it, of course.

What's L5 and L6? What's TC?
- L5 and L6 is a label for career progression, like getting promoted from staff to senior, just with different words. TC is total compensation.
  
  Total compensation per what, year?
- Career levels at Amazon (basically pay grades)
  Total Compensation
- At Amazon you have the following levels
  L4 - Junior. A new grad. Expected to be promoted within 2 years or let go
  L5 - Mid engineer. Very wide band. Encapsulates anything between a level 2 engineer and a team lead at other companies. Can be expected to lead individual teams at times. Is considered a “terminal” position (there’s no expectation of a promotion past here)
  L6 - Senior. Has the scope of what a Staff engineer would at other companies where you’re not only concerned with your team but others in the department. I think like 10% of engineers ever hit L6
  L7 - Principal Engineer. You have like 1-2 of these per department. These are more like architects at other companies. About 1-2% of engineers ever hit this band.
  L8 and beyond are for fancy hires and shit. Very few if anyone ever works their way up to those bands.
  
  So, where are L1-L3?
  Are L3 student programmers?
  L2 people who never coded anything in their life?
  L1 are people who can't read? Like babies?

Not really. That's just how it works at mega tech corporations. He should try working for a startup.

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
  
  Nah, that's bogus. It's a private company, they can do what they want. They could have absolutely given OP the 5/5 rating, and just had them sign something saying that they were content with the bonus appropriate to a 4/5 rating. No one would have had to receive a penny less.
  
  That fixed budget is what they always say. The budget for the company is their problem, not yours.
  
  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.
- You will soon become just as jaded as the rest of us, and stop expecting your company to appreciate you. It wont feel good but you can change jobs often and get your salary up without any feelings of illusional loyalty.
- Haha, the same. Was doing great, supported customer calls, onboarding new engineers, along with ongoing incoming tickets and got 3/5, wrote a few good and a dozen bad RFCs.
  Then the manager had the audacity to ask why I am changing the company with a 40% raise. I could've asked for promotion, he said.
- I don't work at Amazon, but we have a similar system. I've gone all-in on a couple of subordinates saying they deserved a 4/5 for this or that work. And because they were new-hires, I eventually got the grades punched through after a bunch of hemming and hawing.
  Also advocated for my own higher-than-average marks on a few occasions. And just arguing the case gave me the grade as often as not. If everyone in the department had been as stubborn and insistent, I don't know that they'd have given the whole floor these grades. But the squeaky wheel...

Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.
Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.
This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.
- Its pretty well known that "lines of code" is a horrible metric to judge programmers with. It seems "number of new projects" is pretty similar, though at a higher level of abstraction.
  Unfortunately that metric is applied to a lot more than just programmers; and I think getting rid of it would involve completely restructuring the type of activity our society is oriented around, and would run up against the life philosophy of the people in charge.
  Of course I'm not against progress, but I'm talking about executives that don't plan beyond the next quarter, politicians that don't plan beyond the next election cycle, the endless pursuit of growth, and the inability of market economies to cope with the fact that sometimes inaction is more advantagous than action. All of this encourages endlessly churning out 'new' things, without designing those things to last or putting in the effort to maintain them.

Is that why they are gradually replacing the bad AWS Console UI with something 10x worse?
- Apart from being slow, having discoverability issues, not being able combine filters and actions so that you frequently need to fall back to shell scripts for basic functionality, it being a complete PITA to compare things between accounts / regions, advanced functionality requiring you to directly edit JSON files, things randomly failing and the error message being carefully hidden away, the poor audit trail functionality to see who-changed-what, and the fact that putting anything complex together means spinning so many plates that Terraform'ing all your infrastructure looks like the easy way; I'll have you know there's nothing wrong with the AWS Console UI.
  
  Funnily enough I joke all the time that the new UI is a subtle ploy to get us to terraform everything. Still PITA when you want see what is fucked up in an API Gateway route.... So... Much... Wasted... Space
- Probably, it's also why Google has 100 different chat clients.

Perverse incentives combined with underskilled management 😐

You get the behavior your incentives encourage, whether you realize what those behaviors are or not.

Yep, this is the culture I keep running head first into as I try to level up my career.
- Same. Generally speaking our company is pretty healthy, but we're still stuck in this really stupid leveling system where advancement is tied to greenfield development and I've been doing maintenance and compliance work for the last five years.
- Man, it's so frustrating. I just can't turn off my own qualms with shitty corporate culture and it means I will be less successful by the metrics we've set ourselves.
  
  It’s ironic how so many of us find ourselves being extremely valuable for the exact reasons they can’t stand us. As IT, I’m used to being seen as nothing more than red marks on a budget to the folks making decisions. The only thing they hate more than listening to us, is when they have to.
  Kinda got a chip on my shoulder today it seems.

[ In lieu of a comment, please see "Bullshit Jobs", by David Graeber, which is incorporated here by reference. ]
- Something I find cool about this book is that it's so well known that people who haven't even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how "enshittification" caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they'd been experiencing.
  It's a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they'd had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they'd struggled to find anything that wasn't soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.
  They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say "all of this is basically just saying you don't care what job you have, as long as it's a non-bullshit job". They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes
  
  IMO if your survival depends on doing a 'job' (especially if you're employed by someone else), then it's better to look for fulfilment in your personal life and realize the job is a means to survive and hopefully also fund what you really want to do for yourself and your loved ones.
  Work to live, not live to work.

The whole thing is pegging my BS meter, including letting an L5 deploy without a code and architecture review, TC, and the fact that they're posting this and claiming they're still there.
- I've got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too "just-so", the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.
  Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that's sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he'd just written "Twitter" instead of "Amazon", I'd have taken it at face value no problem.
  Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked "Maybe we'll do this in 2029 if we're not busy with something else"? Equally likely.
  Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.
  
  I believe it. I don't work at Amazon, but I've seen proudly launched pieces of shiny crap support promotions at other companies.
- I've seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don't do them well.
  I'm doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn't work. (No, they don't have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that's insane. No, I don't have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It's not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.
  In my experience, people don't want to say "I think this is all a bad idea" if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it's pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he'd spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.
- I can't speak to this situation, but broadly speaking I am familiar with general messed up stuff like this as well as perhaps adjusting some fine details to make the scenario relatable to an audience unfamiliar with the specifics of the real situation and/or obfuscating the details so that the person doesn't out themselves to someone else familiar with the specifics enough to recognize.
  The broad strokes seem plausible and any oddities in details I consider to be less important and/or understandable if it was tweaked for an internet audience.

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.
- Which VCS did they use before git?
  
  SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don't have docker)
  I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don't know what that's like.

Sounds about right. There is no longer any incentive to focus on maintenance and incremental improvement (the stuff that actually keeps the lights on and the revenue flowing). It's all about the new and shiny--even when it results in regression.
- Which is why AI and vibe coding will survive. Besides the part where it’s not my code, the company owns it. The fuck do I care how good it is. If it works and gets me a promoted or moved to a new spot in a different company. Heck yeah. Issues down the road are not my problem.
  
  Personal project: page load takes under 10kB and any button or link loads in millisecond.
  Work project: Fuck it 26MB page load. It's not like the pages load in under 5s before anyway.
- I’m in business operations, downstream from you guys. Reading posts like these are helping me understand better what you all are going through.
  We had several of our systems “upgraded” and broke a lot of our tools. The dev team vanished off to work on the next shiny bullshit “upgrade” and turned my 15 minute tickets into 3-4 hour tickets.
  My manager was telling me to ping someone and let them know. After nothing happened there, I started opening tickets. After about 140 in 2 weeks, I finally got someone’s attention and we’re grudgingly getting a couple devs assigned to start repairing the automation that broke.
  I am sorry to have to do that, but our entire team was drowning and pinging someone on teams with API errors wasn’t getting anything done.
  
  It's a terrible working arrangement in most companies--particularly between dev and infrastructure teams. "Legacy" sysadmins that were previously celebrated for maintaining rock-solid environments with high uptime are now denigrated (and eliminated) when they can't make up a new shiny for MBA managers (who are not real leaders)--to peddle the same bullshit to senior executives.
  It's all fucked.

I apologize for bashing Java so hard in the past. I wish everyone wrote everything in Java these days. Digital life would be so much better.
- You owe royalties
  
  Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.
- Fuck no.
  I wish everyone used C#, Scala, Rust or Python (DSLs like VHDL, SQLs and CUDA and super specific languages like C, Erlang, Haskell and Bash notwithstanding).
  You can hate on them, sure, each for their own reason, but they're all very well supported and good for what they're intended for.
  
  Sure, me too, but that's my point. Even Java is better than what we have now, especially from the user's perspective.

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.
- In a small company noone would try to label you "l5" or "l6" and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
- The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol

Ok, now fire him.
- The fact they had to do this to earn a promotion is an institutional problem. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
  
  I can do both, tbh. Though I do generally hate the game more than the player.
  
  hate the game.
  Game rules: You want a promotion? Make something cool, improve something while using approaches that will show that you deserve a higher position and, therefore, a bigger salary.
  Player: (Lies and creates shit that is even worse than the initial situation.)
  Lemmy: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
  
  the player can always choose not to play, though
- Fire the manager too.

The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it's "business as usual" just for "progress" and fancy buzzwords.
- Java is still supported... Or did I miss the memo?
  
  What's Java???
- Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It's the lightsaber of programming languages. I've got shit to do, give me blasters and all the rest. And I'm not interested in wanking myself off about how I did it all with channels. [edited for typo/clarity]

Flawless victory.

All of you who can't understand the concept of feature complete (see syncthing drama for example) find something useful to do. I promise it's out there.

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

I am so tired of worse products in the name of upgraded products that are literally worse in every way but a bunch of buzzwords and in groups bragging at the top while not knowing anything at all about programs or even the product at all but just seem to be there because they drink with the CTO.
Ugh. The twiddling thumb era of trying to look busy by dismantling the old machines for parts.

So that's why we suffer enshitification.
Those who succumb to the Socio-Economic and climb it so.
"Upwards mobility".

Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn't need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it's a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn't supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
- Yeah, longterm wise - Go is far easier than Java to maintain. This is still a win, albeit with a slight initial disadvantage

somebody please hack into amazon's services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!

https://youtu.be/gwicyfJbYD4

Swap Java and Go in text, then I buy it. Java is memory hungry monstrosity that runs on JVM and idiomatically uses piles of abstractions. I have exactly opposite experience, when rewriting a microservice from Java to Go reduced memory usage tenfold and sped up requests processing.
- No, I believe it this way. It used to be one service that had access to everything it needs. Now it is microservices, so each microservice is caching a bunch of stuff, but of course all the wrong stuff, so every request requires at least one network call downstream. Thus more memory usage and slower.
  
  Well, that's the architecture problem, not the language.
- With a little effort, one can write bad code in any language.
- I don't know why you keep getting downvoted, there's no good code in all the universe written in a language that contains the letters j-a-v-a.
  There is a silver lining: we know at least 16 people and counting who love Oracle and the Ellisons. Keep enjoying your cop shows, Oracle cucks.
  
  According to votes, hating Java is bad, but hating microservices is good.
  
  If the Java monolith used 6 gb of ram and each Go service uses 500mb of ram, but now there are 16 micro services, which uses more memory?
  Monoliths are more efficient, but hav other issues.

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