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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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…
Haha, the same. Was doing great, supported customer calls, onboarding new engineers, along with ongoing incoming tickets and got 3/5, wrote a few good and a dozen bad RFCs.
Then the manager had the audacity to ask why I am changing the company with a 40% raise. I could’ve asked for promotion, he said.
You will soon become just as jaded as the rest of us, and stop expecting your company to appreciate you. It wont feel good but you can change jobs often and get your salary up without any feelings of illusional loyalty.
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
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.
It’s very annoying to have managers say their hands are tied when they very well could go to bat for you with their superiors. I was lucky to have one manager really push for me in the past like that. It’s rare.
You’re falling for the “we’ve constructed this machine to tell you no so you can’t argue with us” ploy
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If the code actually works and is vaguely important, I think you are right.
If anyone ever has to fix it because it’s also broken on top of being a mess, well they aren’t quite so safe. Maybe if you are always available to fix it same day, but if you ever go on vacation and it hits the fan while you are unreachable…
[ 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
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.
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.
I’d ask if you’re at my work, but this is an amount of organizational improvement that they haven’t yet been able to begin
Wow, I imagine that caused a lot of problems.
You would be surprised how far that type of thing can get you when the team is small and experienced.
It tends to explode when you hit a certain number of people or you replace a senior with a junior who promptly explodes the thing.
we dealt with similar stuff at our company as the design team grew. amazing how far simple systems can get you with basic practices and common sense.
now with triple the team size and a few less than extremely competent people, we have tons of file management issues, even though there are more processes in place to avoid them. I hate it.
Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Imagine getting paid to do it.
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
Perverse incentives combined with underskilled management 😐
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.
