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.
