Ex-Amazonian on team
We have an ex-Amazonian on team. He worked at Amazon for 8 years according to his LinkedIn. He was an SDE and then an SDM at Alexa org. Not sure why he would come to join us as a SDE again. Rumored he interviewed as an SDM but was offered an SDE. He is a poison to everyone but a candy to the manager. His behaviors include: - Avoid taking any kind of risks, but take credit aggressively after someone takes the risk and succeed. An example is he rarely takes an ops incident head-on but always writes an email summary to the manager before everyone does. - Leave unreasonable comments in our code reviews. If we argue against him, he takes over the entire pull request, adds a new iteration and merges under his name. - Adding to the above. If we race to the merge before he takes over, he will delete or revert our entire commit, copy over the our code, and then make minor changes to his satisfaction before merging under his name. - Treat everyone extremely nicely before performance review season. After we write him positive reviews, he immediately counters with negative reviews with fabricated facts. - Pretend to side with other engineers before some team decision, but during the official meeting side with the manager unconditionally. We are like WTF are you doing. We tried to mention his behaviors to the manager. However, the manager is unbelievably favorable towards this guy. To be honest, I am so irritated that I want to punch him in the face sometimes. It is apparently not viable because he never ever came to the office. I have a few friends working at Amazon. Sure they look a bit stressed in general, but I don't believe they would behave so badly towards their workmates. Amazonians, are this guy's behaviors the norm at your company? I have sympathy to what Amazonians have to go through in life, but I would seriously gatekeep during interviews if this guy's behaviors are the norm at Amazon. We are a small shop and cannot afford being poisoned more. TC: peanut
I’ve seen one person like this but he really only did the last two on your list of points He just got promoted to L7 too lol However most engineers def aren’t like this in my experience. It’s generally a symptom of a shitty empire building team rather than a team doing anything productive
Let him know the first 3 points, and he will be L8 soon :) It is very hard to detect these red flags during interviews.
He is the bottom 5%
He worked 8 years in your company, so he's probably a keeper there?
I'm ex Amazon (Alexa org as well), honestly you need to have higher culture standards for ex Amazonian generally. Avoiding risks and credit stealing is just natural behavior after a few years in a highly competitive org. Ex Amazon are also extremely skilled at hiding these traits during interviews due to strong political skill
Reject on any red flag? That's probably what I'll do as an interviewer. But our manager is probably in love with this guy, so my doing so will be against my manager.
Please include your salary and not 🥜
120k. Small shop are we.
- Leave unreasonable comments in our code reviews. If we argue against him, he takes over the entire pull request, adds a new iteration and merges under his name. - Adding to the above. If we race to the merge before he takes over, he will delete or revert our entire commit, copy over the our code, and then make minor changes to his satisfaction before merging under his name. This right here is your problem. You are letting him walk all over you. You guys need to set boundaries.
i like my advice without concrete examples
There has to be some degree of ownership over your code @Truefit. The guy seems be a peer and not OPs lead, he should have OPs permission before deleting or reverting his code and not shoot first explain later.
If you feel like punching him, it sounds like interactions with this guy might be causing you Anxiety and Depression. Might want to get a therapist and take FMLA if management makes no effort to get rid of the toxicity.
I honestly didn't know I'm sick. I want to keep my job in this economy though. Worst case scenario, I'll stay low and jump ship when the economy recovers.
I suggest you look into it, it's illegal for them to do anything if you go this route, because Depression and Anxiety are legally protected disabilities. For example, if you simply file an HR complaint against anyone, they'll do their best to manage you out shortly. If you file an HR complaint and go on disability due to depression/anxiety, exacerbated but NOT directly related to the harassment, then you're legally protected until your return. By which time if everyone else quits, they might have to fire this dude, and you'll be the last one standing at that point.
Internal perspective: roughly 90% of internal SDEs and maybe 30% of SDMs are great to work with and are good people in pretty much every way. The 10% of SDEs and 70% of SDMs are what make things toxic.
So he's an outlier even at Amazon. Good to know. Amazon hires so many engineers. We are a small shop and hard to hire, so we cannot auto reject all ex amazonians.
Lots of SDM in amazon are not suitable for managerial jobs. They can only lead monkey in Amazon but not the real talents elsewhere, so he got an SDE offer
I'm glad he's an SDE. If he's SDM, he'll probably pip us all :p
People may think OP be trolling, but I find this relatable. Had an L6 TL who would routinely leave garbage comments everywhere that had to be addressed. Manager would always take his side. One time he didn't leave any comments on my CR, and simply approved. I was honestly shocked at that point.
That's almost stockholm syndrome level.
Wow….same experience with someone from AWS that was brought in by our CTO. He was part of the AWS SA team selling it to us.
Wow, are they molded the same way there.