Suffocating

I worked as a software development engineer at Amazon in their Seattle headquarters. I worked on their website.

One manager decided to move a script from an internal group to our group to detect changes in the website’s error logs. If a change was detected from one hour to the next, a page would go off to a software engineer at any time of day or night. He or she would have to wake up and investigate the problem. The thing was that at first this didn’t really work. For example when I did my week of pager duty, I was woken up three times in the early hours of the morning for false alarms. On the fourth day I was woken up in the early hours of the morning, there was a real problem. But as I was new to the company and was tired from being woken up the previous three nights, I wasn’t that effective at tracing the problem!

In our sub-group, most of the software developers were assigned exclusively to long-term projects of at least 1 years’ duration. During the same time I was given a string of about ten different smaller projects. I was not assigned exclusively to them. This meant I was the go-to guy if any bug or problem was found. Typically the bugs were in code written before I joined the company or created by other groups pushing out new changes. It was difficult. I would have a few weeks to do my project work and at the same time, my manager would constantly interrupt me to fix bugs caused by other people or groups. It meant working weekends was a regular occurrence. For one small project, I was interrupted six times to do other tasks.

Our managers realized there was a problem with people having to do project work at the same time as bug fixing and so they formed a special sub-group that was supposed to be assigned 100% to fixing bugs (handling Remedy tickets). In one meeting our director said each software developer was supposed to fix 10 Remedy tickets per month. A Remedy ticket could be anything. It could a software bug to fix or it could be a mini-project requiring pages of new code to be written and weeks of work.

Well you may think this was a good idea! For some reason, the managers then decided to fire everyone in this group, except me and the team leader! I heard that one of the fired software developers got two month’s pay after being told to immediately leave the building.

Another change that took place was that our group was merged with another group and as such the pager duty (carrying a pager and having to immediately respond to website problems, bugs etc) doubled. Well it wasn’t quite doubled as half the time the duty would be purposely lighter. But it meant carrying a pager was supposed to increase from one week in ten to about one week in four of five.

Unfortunately a whole year’s worth of pager duty for me was compressed into three or four months. It was getting suffocating. I saw that for the next two months, I hardly had any weekends off.

Remember now, I was in this bug fixing sub-group and supposed to only handling Remedy tickets (bugs) and not actually doing project work. Well that didn’t happen.

I was handed a project to do by my manager. Then I was handed two projects originally assigned to a software developer that had recently been fired. Unfortunately my manager never got the true status of this project work before he got a security guard to remove the software developer from the building. My manager told me the two projects were finished and to push them out as soon as possible. Once I had a time to look at them in detail, I found out there was very little that was usable in the work I was handed.

So I had to cope with all the below.

1) I had at least three different projects to do

2) I had a year’s worth of pager duty compressed into 3 – 4 months

3) I was also in a sub-group meant to be handling Remedy tickets and not project work

To make matters worse, a week or so after being handed two projects I was told by my manager my job would end in two and a half weeks.

It was at this time I realized I had very little savings. The apartment I was renting was on a month’s notice and I hadn’t the money to pay rent after my job would end. So I immediately gave one month’s notice to quit my apartment. I also had to pay for a quite expensive air flight back to my home country.

It was insanity. They assigned two projects to one software developer. They then fired him before he had a chance to do much work on them. They then handed the projects to me and within a week decided they would fire me as well. One project was fixing a problem in a vital part of the US customer facing website and the other was for a project launching in about a month.

It was another week of pager duty for me. Around midnight I got a page which woke me up. The US website had a major problem. It was labelled severity two, but the operator said it really could be severity one. Bear in mind at this point, I only had a week left in my job. I did think of telling the operator that I had already been fired and would be leaving the company within a week. However I didn’t. I was obviously very much on the ball at that point and within 30 to 60 minutes, I had correctly diagnosed the problem. The operator woke up the group that messed up the website. I had to stay on a group phone conversation for what seemed like hours. Eventually the problem was fixed.

Anyway toward the end of the two and a half weeks, my manager rolled into my office and told me that they would never fire me with such short notice and in fact my job would end in another three and a half weeks! I told my apartment manager to extend my stay.

We had a new director join the company and he had our managers hire two new people on his recommendations. The new hires didn’t want to do pager duty. One of the new guys asked me to swap pager duty rotations with him. I explained to him that I had not only done all my pager duty for the whole year, but I had done it on two occasions above that. As such I could not swap with him, because I had nothing to swap with. I also explained to him some time ago, that unless I got all my tasks done I was going to lose my job. This is because I was told I had to solve 20 Remedy tickets a month (the reader may remember the director said we only had to do 10 a month in a group meeting). Anyway he went away. My manager came in and said if I did this guy’s pager duty, it would look good and I might be able to keep my job. So anyway I said I would do the guy’s work.

OK roll on time. I finished all my project work. I did the guy’s pager duty. All well and good. In a meeting with Human Resources and my manager, I was told I would stay in the company another year.

In the end I was fired within a couple of weeks of that meeting. Unlike a previous software developer in our group who got two months’ pay on leaving, I got nothing.

I should say I was placed on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). These things are really nasty. It seems like they try to say something technically true, but in such a way it makes you look bad. For example during one project, I was assigned six other tasks. The project manager telephoned my managers and complained about this. He didn’t complain about me. He phoned up to ask me to be exclusively assigned to my project and not continually interrupted. But this was written up as a project manager telephoned to complain. It looks bad for me and is technically true, but it is misleading nonetheless. I did nothing wrong. At the time I was working weekends. I pushed out the project without any problems whatsoever. But I got a bad write-up because of it.