14 ms·

Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year)

152 points by avinassh 8y ago

astazangasta 8y ago
Here is one of many articles on Microsoft's stack ranking debacle: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretive-cynical-and-paranoid-20130827-2snei.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretiv...
chasingthewind 8y ago
I once worked at a company where the new CIO came out and said very plainly that the attrition rate was too low. The implication under the circumstances was that there were too many low competence long-timers. This was followed up with a ham handed campaign of making everybody miserable by dramatically increasing the sense of stress and "urgency" that everyone assumed was designed to increase the attrition rate. That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave easily when things go south.) Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. The company still has a ton of long-timers that they seemingly can't get rid of. Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare?
- salawat 8y ago
  Because at the end of the day, the human brain is wired to recognize "that could have been me", no matter how hard you try to rationalize it away. And at a certain point, it's guaranteed to be you. Not today maybe, but it will be your head on the chopping block.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Low precision systematic sacking of colleges is a dystopian nightmare no mather what the pretext is. You can't fire people and keep the morale up unless the sacked have anti-social behavoiur. Further more, if you can't trust management to hire people you can't trust them to fire people.
- panzagl 8y ago
  Maybe focus on making the less competent more competent?
  - zhengyi13 8y ago
    Nonono, that would require actually investing in your people^Wresources. You're supposed to minimize CapEx, man. Human resources are a fixed asset; depreciation is expected, and good for taxes.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Human resources are a fixed asset Human resources are rented, and thus an expense not an asset; I mean, since the abolition of chattel slavery.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Which seems like a part of the problem here. Also, since they're an expense, not an asset, why would you want to invest in them? After all, you wouldn't pay for a paint job on a car you're just leasing. And then companies are surprised people job-hop :).
  - TheHegemon 8y ago
    As someone who has tried that in the past: it doesn't work. I would kill myself trying to get certain people up to speed and also trying to do my own work. The problem is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the most part, people are less competent because they don't put in the effort to get more competent. Trying to force people to give more effort is not a fruitful endeavor unfortunately.
- umvi 8y ago
  > Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? It's called the "dead sea effect" and it can be a tough problem to solve. I think every company has a certain percentage of low-productivity, low-competence employees that are hard to get rid of. Doubly so if the employees are unionized. We have dead-sea effect to some extent in our company and honestly it seems our solution is to just wait until the underachievers retire and then be more rigorous and diligent when hiring their replacement.
- jppope 8y ago
  they aren't wrong, low attrition usually means that people aren't pushing themselves out of their comfort zone... this is incredibly bad for a company (ESPECIALLY a company that uses a hierarchal structure). Loosing a little fat is a sign of good health for a company... the issue is when you stop cutting "fat" and start cutting into the meat. Amazon is just taking advantage of all the devs that want to work for a big name, its a fair deal for both sides. They work you to death for 18 months, you get "Amazon" on your resume.
  - jshowa3 8y ago
    Comfort is not bad for a company period. Its what keeps the lights on, but it depends on how you define it. Most projects have horrible deadlines and they happen often so there isn't a lot of time to play R&D on a lot of things. I haven't worked for many companies that are fine with breaking what works. In fact, it often results in discipline because you were trying something that wasn't normal operating procedure mostly because the risk couldn't adequately be measured or realized (i.e. trying a new framework for example). I for one, would not look too fondly on Amazon precisely because of the way they treat their workforce and because their product is not very good because of it.
    - chosenbreed37 8y ago
      > ... and because their product is not very good because of it. Their revenues would suggest otherwise :)
      - jshowa3 8y ago
        Revenue isn't the only factor in determining a good product. Especially with monopolies.
- drugme 8y ago
  Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? Probably because they can't tell the good from the bad.
- tboyd47 8y ago
  Because "easing out less competent people" a fool's errand. There will always be high performers and low performers on a team, both in a relative and absolute sense. Good managers don't make it their responsibility to close that gap; they just make it clear what the goals are, fill the team with self-motivated people, and provide the tools and environment to get the work done. And yes, you fire people if they don't meet a clear minimum level of performance, but don't make that an expectation out of the gate. Even if you cut all the "low performers" and double the "high performers'" pay, those people can burn out or get sick and suddenly turn into low performers. "First, Break All the Rules" is a great book on this topic.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    There will always be high performers and low performers on a team, both in a relative and absolute sense. Yeah, although the more heterogeneous the tasks, the trickier it even is to define these terms. Many years ago I was on a small (2-3 people) team with a truly genius-level coder. He was close to what you'd call a savant. He was (despite being a sweet guy at heart) incredibly difficult to work with - he was unfiltered and abrasive, and would write reams of code to solve pet problems that didn't really need solving in the context of whatever the hell it was that we were trying to do at the moment, because they were "fun" coding challenges that captured his imagination. The end result was that while he could do the work of several engineers, you also... needed an engineer or two to work with him nearly full-time just to keep him on the rails and actually working towards the project goals, and to act as a buffer between him and people outside the team. So who was the high performer on our team, and who was the low performer? Well, I didn't suck, but he was certainly the better engineer! But was I really a "low performer" when I did some of the equally crucial work of keeping him on the rails? Was he really the "high performer" when he required lots of people-hours from others just to keep him on task? Those terms really lose all meaning when you're all engineers but are contributing different things to a team... the high/low performer stuff really only works when people are working in true isolation under identical circumstances. Like maybe for ditch-digging or weightlifting competitions or whatever.
    - pjc50 8y ago
- ignoramous 8y ago
  > Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? Dan Pink wrote a book and gave a took about this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en I think the issue systemic and might need an overhaul.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  > That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave easily when things go south.) That is such an obvious outcome. When it seems layoff/low-morale seems to be coming, people who will leave for new jobs on their own are usually ones with the initiative, right skillset, youth, good with people, etc, which is why they can get a new job with ease. And these are the very people a company wants to hold on to. So the other option to achieve attrition rate is to have lay offs. But of course that is not good for reputation of the company. > Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. I have a suspicion the CIO was specifically brought in by higher ups to force higher attrition rate.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  > That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers Engineering (especially software engineering) seems like a particularly bad field in which to have "forced attrition" or stack ranking since so much of a team's success depends on the engineers' ability to work together directly on an interpersonal level, and for their code to be easily maintained/extended/tested by others. I suppose there are partial ways around this, such as factoring rankings from one's peers into the forced attrition. But overall it's very difficult to imagine any engineering environment that would benefit from incentivizing engineers to compete with one another rather than cooperate. (Lot of engineers are already good at playing the game in which they look like team players, but are really autocrats of their own little silos and knowingly make themselves hard to replace & keep others down)
- michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  These things get really weird really quick. I worked for a hardware startup that (of course) had just brutal delays in shipping their product. This included scrapping an entire product line and shipping a less ambitious, but somewhat orthogonal one. So 3 times in two years there was a big push for the marketing, customer success, developer relations, and support etc teams to get ready for a launch that never happened. How exactly is a customer success person supposed to be judged as a high performer if there are no customers? Support people sitting by a phone that never rings? This is an obvious example, but I find the same thing really often in engineering groups: "I was asked to do X. I killed myself to make X happen. Turns out X wasn't relevant to the business and now it's all being shut down and I'm a lower performer."
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Because management is difficult and proponents of stack ranking and other data-driven approaches think there's a way to automate management. It turns out -I believe anyways- that for many kinds of jobs you can't really automate management. If you want to know who your best and brightest are, and who the chaff is, you need to get down and dirty and get to know them.
  - gadders 8y ago
    That's true, but it also lets poor people keep the team members they like, rather than the good ones.
    - cryptonector 8y ago
      Maybe, but you can always rotate managers around to deal with that problem. And you can have dotted-line relationships. There are more good ways to deal with people problems as such than there are good ways to deal with people problems as data problems.
      - gadders 8y ago
        Yeah, it's an analogue problem and not easy to solve. Hopefully, a manager that did that would get found out when his team was full of incompetent cronies.
- TheBobinator 8y ago
  There are systems of operating that are ridiculously profitable; I know the engineering executive of a Forge Shop that implimented a Scanlon plan some 50 years ago. Company is employee owned with the original company ownership serving as chairboard members. The janitor, working there some 40 years, retired with $28 million in his pocket. All it took was management and labor deciding on what it cost to run the business, and savings over that, they put some into an expansion\risk fund, and the rest they split. That technology came out of the 1930's where people were starving, there was no capital and debt to work with, riots were commonplace, and people were looking at the management as food. Funny thing, when everyone is watching out for one another and helping eachother, really awesome results tend to happen. Sure there's a personell mix issue, but personalities can grow and change. Realistically, all corporations should be run this way. We give the executive management immunity and then we allow them to abuse the staff. That's a recipe for disaster. The majority of company stock ought to be owned by the employee's doing the work. There's this fatalistic romanticism that goes on with being the top dog, alpha male, name your price, et-cetera. This comes from rich people who never came out of their terrible 2's. They grew up leading isolated lives and never spent time with normal human beings, so they develop this superiority complex and go on tantrums. The reason you see so much advertising that makes no sense for executives is, there are so many of these "VITO's" out there and they all sell emotionally because they are literally box-of-rocks stupid. The funny part of the joke is people, to their own peril, give respect to these people. We've managed to dress it up with modern marketing\psychological warfare, and we've managed to let the pack of grifters get so large they're now fighting over the scraps. A City of thieves produces no bread. Fertility rates are 1.72 in the US, USSR during its collapse was 1.2. We're halfway there. We need a term to define cannibalistic management; the kind of management there that figures out ways to literally eat people by entangling them in this web of socioeconomic corporatism. We already have "trap" music so we aren't far off, culturally, from defining it conceptually. Accountants understand risk and cost, MBA's understand Risk, Cost, and Process. It takes someone with specialized experience and skills to figure out how to build an efficient process, or to do R&D because you need to understand bottlenecks and how to cheat at gambling; effectively it takes that kind of person to understand oppertunity, of which the other 2 don't. So you get into these ridiculous situations where an accountant or MBA is put in charge, with no real understanding of the actual systems at play and its revealed to the staff executive management is really just a bunch of permanent vacationers or grifters. The really great engineers make up excuses based on prior, painful experience as to why they should leave and do so; the existing staff figure no matter where they go, they'll have to deal with the same BS. Accountants and MBA's always strangle companies, so if you see a new executive manager who's resume doesn't have "line" experience, it's always time to leave for greener pastures.
- mavelikara 8y ago
  This is called "Dead Sea Effect".
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? All metrics-driven systems that try to collapse complex effects to a single metric without intelligent human supervision tend to produce dystopian or at least spectacularly unintended effects. In this case, the problem is trying to have a single axis of competence. Quite apart from the range of technologies and circumstances people might find themselves in, there are also the interpersonal skills and meta-competences that matter. Then there's the company context: were they supported or let down? By their managers or colleagues? Were they working on something that failed for unrelated reasons? Or on something that succeeded despite their involvement? In many ways it's the same as the hiring problem, it's just less concentrated on a single day. Competence is a transitive property: people are competent at things, not as a global property of their personality.
- arkh 8y ago
  Why fire low performers? Why not try to make them become average performer? Maybe they have children to care for at home and doing remote work would help? Maybe they don't like some of their colleagues and a team change is in order. Maybe after months of year of being proactive but being shutdown by management they decided to stop caring? Maybe it's more serious and they should be encouraged to see a therapist.
foobaw 8y ago
Netflix and Facebook definitely have something similar too especially for newer grads (although the former rarely hires new grads). Amazon just does it in the worst way possible.
- 40acres 8y ago
  The interesting thing about Netflix is that they are very upfront about their hiring culture: no internships and no hiring of developers without at least five years experience. They are upfront in the fact that they are liberal when it comes to letting people go and pay way above market rate to compensate for it. I'd rather deal with a company that puts all of its cards on the table like Netflix does rather than an implicit forced attrition process that is described here.
auiya 8y ago
I thought most companies have figured out Jack Welch's rank-and-yank system doesn't work by now? Surely Amazon isn't that naive are they?
- czbond 8y ago
  So I think it depends on the organization. I have tended to work in more aggressive, competitive fields. Different versions of "rank and yank" (as you call it) or "up or out" or other types. BigCorps need to do it to keep the average talent bar from trending down (A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players). Startups need to do it generally because the pool of applicants tends to be either "great", "good" or "can't get a job elsewhere" and it needs to weed out. I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    This doesn't make sense. "A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players" If B:s hires C:s than in analogue A:s would hire B:s since it's a bell curve-ish distribution not digital buckets. Who hires the A:s? A, B and C:s by accident? "I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game." You probably want people to improve their skills in their craft, not players to improve their skills in the a management game.
- johan_larson 8y ago
  My impression is that stack ranking with forced attrition can, if applied for a short period, shake a sleepy low-performing organization out of its lethargy. But if you try to run things that way long-term you get problems. People stop thinking of the team and start acting too selfishly.
juli1pb 8y ago
HN at its best: making conclusions based on one data point gathered randomly on the internet... happy Wednesday!
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Flagged - not because I think this doesn't happen, but because, at the time of writing of that comment, no other comment actually made any kind of "conclusions". Or, in other words, the above comment is making broad-brush conclusions out of zero data points. sigh
  - Eire_Banshee 8y ago
    Flagged - for being pretentious douche.
cheeze 8y ago
Isn't this common throughout the industry? I love to bash on Amazon as much as the next HN'er, but is this really news?
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  This is Amazon, Netflix, and, in the past, Microsoft.
scottlegrand2 8y ago
As a former Amazon manager, I don't have a problem with forced attrition so much as the proportion of my time that was put into finding the candidates for that forced attrition. There are a tremendous number of low achievers in every industry and if you keep them around they are toxic, every bit if not more toxic than Amazon's culture in 2019. That said, I would have liked to have seen most of the time dedicated to this task allocated to developing the careers of my direct reports because I think that is of much higher value to any organization. Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this problem, but that now seems intractable. It seems there's a real temptation to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill positions these days.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- benj111 8y ago
  Really? Do you not think such a culture is actively detrimental? How can you ask anyone to give 110% if they might be getting sacked next year? If you have a tremendous number of low achievers, maybe its because the only people you can retain are people who can't find jobs elsewhere fast enough. I know I wouldn't be waiting around for my turn.
  - czbond 8y ago
    I disagree with this. Every organization, and every department has a bell curve of talent. Average and low-average people hire sub-par and poor talent because everyone thinks they're rockstars, but statistically that cannot be true.
    - benj111 8y ago
      "everyone thinks they're rockstar" Exactly, but knowing that, even if you think you're safe, you might not be, so what do you do? Plus you're saying below average people hire below poor talent. This just means that really the good manager is sacking good people, whereas the poor manager is sacking just 1 of his limitless supply of poor hires. So as an average employee what do you want, good manager and be bottom of the bell curve, or poor manager and be top of the bell curve?
maximilianburke 8y ago
If only forced attrition were so enthusiastically applied to Amazon’s recruiters.
czbond 8y ago
A lot of companies do this - without it being known. I see nothing wrong with the practice. Some companies I know of rotate each quarter to cut the bottom people or % that just don't make it. (eg: Q1 might be operations, Q2 finance, Q3 development, etc). It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving it higher.
- quotha 8y ago
  If you try a bit harder, maybe you might be able to think of something that's wrong with this practice.
  - czbond 8y ago
    An acceptable variant that I've seen implemented well is "the pass". Where a competent leader, decides to "pass" (one or many rotations) because of hiring rates or current team excellence. Just my experience.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Then it is not forced?
- conistonwater 8y ago
  > It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving it higher. You seem to think that this desirable goal is actually achieved by this method.
renholder 8y ago
Another big technology corporation has forced attrition rates because their previous CTO came from Wal-Mart (yeah, that works-out well). Managers are told that, even if everyone on the team does the same amount of work, they either have to pick someone to lose or find themselves "lost", instead. Forced attrition is bad for morale but it's an especially shit situation every review-cycle, when people are on edge because someone has to go, no matter what, and it's either going to be themselves or someone that they work with.
johan_larson 8y ago
Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers, because those coworkers are also competitors. Could Amazon really be falling into the same trap so soon?
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  The actual number of really bad hires is actually quite low give my experience at BT (15 years) and I only knew two cases of really bad performers.
edelans 8y ago
mandatory quote : CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?
drugme 8y ago
Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year) What Amazon fails to consider is the number of high-caliber engineers who would never consider applying to work for companies that have policies like this.
dba7dba 8y ago
When Toyota US HQ moved from CA to Plano, Texas, there were rumors that part of the reason was to purge out employees with low/no energy, initiative, output, etc. Employee with no output at work will most likely not bother with the whole enchilada involved in relocating to another state. Apparently the US HQs of Japanese motor companies follow Japanese corporate model and do not lay off employees. So they end up with quite a bit of low performing employees. Just rumors I heard.
- denimnerd46 8y ago
  wouldn’t desperate people who have low skills move instead of people who can get a job anywhere
  - dba7dba 8y ago
    From what I gather, some were old employees near retirement and really did not want to pick up and move to Texas, leaving family/friends/CA behind. And then there were those who really really did not generate output at work and apparently management hoped(?) they would do the same in their personal life and not bother moving to another state.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
This is one should reconsider hiring anyone from Amazon. They came from a culture of backstabbbing, distrust, and a cutthroat ideology. How can they be a good cultural fit anywhere that relies on trust?
- hopler 8y ago
  For juniors: because they left Amazon. For seniors: yes be wary.
cryptonector 8y ago
Is stack ranking something Bezos wanted, or something other executives brought in that Bezos thought might be a good idea?
megaman8 8y ago
the reason has nothing to do with the ones being let go. It's about the people who remain: they're gonna be working a lot harder when they see their colleagues laid off. No one wants to be next. It's like running away from an alligator. You don't have to be faster than the alligator, you just need to be faster than your friends.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Are there any proof of this, that it's making people work harder? If there is, does it offset the potential tendency of workers to not want to help new hires getting up to speed in fear of being eaten by the alligator? What about teams that turn around and beat the alligator to death with sticks. It sounds like the foundation of civilization. Maybe cooperation is not for co-operations. Who knows.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Is this that surprising? In my experience it's less prevalent/institutionalized in tech consulting, banking, etc. where the "up or out" philosophy is much more transparent e.g. if you aren't promoted in a certain window of time (say 2 years) to the next level then you're expected to leave.
throwaway98121 8y ago
How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous. The forced attrition is no surprise. I’m in Seattle and considering the thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.
- apacheCamel 8y ago
  > How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? ... The forced attrition is no surprise. I believe because people do not see forced attrition as a surprise, they also believe this post. I agree that we shouldn't take every Reddit post as truth but it makes sense in the culture Amazon portrays. Also there hasn't been anybody that offers a counter perspective into the inner workings (that I have seen). True or not, it would be interesting to see the companies that do practice this and what kind of workplace culture they put forward. Edit: Formatting.
misiti3780 8y ago
Im not trying to be a dick, but it seems to be working for them pretty well. Why is forced attrition rate a such a bad thing?
ensiferum 8y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
jmull 8y ago
If I have to push out X number of low-performing people every year, I'm going to damn well make sure I have X low-performing people around to push out so I don't have to get rid of anyone I value. The first one or two times a manager is asked to do this, there may be adequate dead-weight around that has accumulated "naturally". After that, a significant number of managers will game the system -- they'll attract and retain people for this very purpose. Meanwhile, general employees will realize what's going on and you're going to have political games. I don't see how this works for a company as a policy. It's too rigid. Meanwhile, a great way to get your attrition rate up is create a generally miserable environment. I can see executives patting themselves on the back for achieving their attrition goals even as their better employees are leaving for greener pastures. This makes so little sense I would doubt it could really be true. Except I've see it myself, and worse (not at Amazon).
ex_amazon_sde 8y ago
Ex Amazon here. The attrition rate is much higher than what most people expect. Yes, the company does stack ranking... unofficially. Even in team with very skilled and productive engineers managers will still set expectations so high that someone will be put on dev plan.
lordnacho 8y ago
Marginalism. As someone who's managed teams for many years, I think it's really odd to do this stack-rank thing. A team is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts. People on the team do different things that are complementary. If you've ever watched sports, you know what this means. Not everyone is scoring the goals, someone needs to make critical passes, someone needs to get the ball out of defence, and so on. That's not to say everyone should be paid the same. Clearly some roles are more rare than others and need to be compensated thus. But it is also true that your star needs someone to carry water for him, and that having the star and the water carrier makes the team more effective than two of either. So when it comes to letting go of people, it rarely makes sense to try to decide who is productive and who isn't. A lot of businesses wouldn't even operate without juniors on the lowest grades. For instance junior investment bankers make powerpoint slides and financial models. Senior investment bankers, who have long forgotten how to use PowerPoint, take these to customers and get business. The only times I've let people go is when I've thought the team really doesn't need this person. It's not a question of being inherently productive, it's a question of whether the marginal productivity of the team goes up. And as in sports, sometimes you find it's a star player who needs to go. Sometimes a bit-part player. But in no sense is there a magic score from which the bottom can be removed.
bb88 8y ago
I've seen managers game this kind of system out. 1) Reserve 5%-10% of your staffing for people going to be laid off. 2) Hire people that won't make the cut after 1 year. 3) Fire them 4) Rinse and repeat In other words the only reason they were being hired was so that the manager could protect the performers of this team. Basically if the manager's view is the only one that matters, he can pretty much get away with it.
- hopler 8y ago
  How do I apply for that job? :-) I want to be an SRE: Scapegoat Redundancy Engineer
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    You have to make a career out of it! Charge by the month and rotate in different companies to be hired and fired yearly!
    - bb88 8y ago
      God, the pain of interviewing.
jkingsbery 8y ago
Current Amazon employee here (Senior Software Engineer) - I don't speak officially for the company obviously, but I wanted to share my experience. I am not a manager, so I don't know the particulars of what goes on during the process referred to in the linked post, but I can offer a few things: My experience has been that people at Amazon are generally pretty willing to help each other in various different ways, whether helping a teammate on a project or helping someone new to a technology on one of our internal mailing lists. Many on the reddit thread take it for granted that Amazon is, as one person called it, a "hellhole." That is not at all my experience - I know others in different orgs or different roles may of course have a different experience. Amazon has been significantly less stressful than almost everywhere I've worked (and the one exception was not less stressful in a good way). At least among people I know, most of the people who leave our team join another team at Amazon. I've known a few people who have left Amazon, but we haven't had 5% of our team leave Amazon every year as this thread would indicate.
qbaqbaqba 8y ago
That's nothing compared to what is going on in their warehouses. Buy hey, who cares.
mempko 8y ago
Competition undermines any form of cooperation. Presumably Amazon is a company of people cooperating, otherwise they would all just be individuals under competitive contracts right? Competition undermines cooperation but we do it anyway because some must be good right? Just like some amount of child abuse must be good right? Or a small amount of lead in your body is good right? Sometimes moderation is not a good answer. There is no safe level of competition in a cooperative organization.

152 points by avinassh 8y ago

Here is one of many articles on Microsoft's stack ranking debacle: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretive-cynical-and-paranoid-20130827-2snei.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretiv...

chasingthewind 8y ago

I once worked at a company where the new CIO came out and said very plainly that the attrition rate was too low. The implication under the circumstances was that there were too many low competence long-timers. This was followed up with a ham handed campaign of making everybody miserable by dramatically increasing the sense of stress and "urgency" that everyone assumed was designed to increase the attrition rate. That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave easily when things go south.) Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. The company still has a ton of long-timers that they seemingly can't get rid of. Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare?

salawat 8y ago
Because at the end of the day, the human brain is wired to recognize "that could have been me", no matter how hard you try to rationalize it away. And at a certain point, it's guaranteed to be you. Not today maybe, but it will be your head on the chopping block.
rightbyte 8y ago
Low precision systematic sacking of colleges is a dystopian nightmare no mather what the pretext is. You can't fire people and keep the morale up unless the sacked have anti-social behavoiur. Further more, if you can't trust management to hire people you can't trust them to fire people.
panzagl 8y ago
Maybe focus on making the less competent more competent?
- zhengyi13 8y ago
  Nonono, that would require actually investing in your people^Wresources. You're supposed to minimize CapEx, man. Human resources are a fixed asset; depreciation is expected, and good for taxes.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Human resources are a fixed asset Human resources are rented, and thus an expense not an asset; I mean, since the abolition of chattel slavery.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Which seems like a part of the problem here. Also, since they're an expense, not an asset, why would you want to invest in them? After all, you wouldn't pay for a paint job on a car you're just leasing. And then companies are surprised people job-hop :).
- TheHegemon 8y ago
  As someone who has tried that in the past: it doesn't work. I would kill myself trying to get certain people up to speed and also trying to do my own work. The problem is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the most part, people are less competent because they don't put in the effort to get more competent. Trying to force people to give more effort is not a fruitful endeavor unfortunately.
umvi 8y ago
> Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? It's called the "dead sea effect" and it can be a tough problem to solve. I think every company has a certain percentage of low-productivity, low-competence employees that are hard to get rid of. Doubly so if the employees are unionized. We have dead-sea effect to some extent in our company and honestly it seems our solution is to just wait until the underachievers retire and then be more rigorous and diligent when hiring their replacement.
jppope 8y ago
they aren't wrong, low attrition usually means that people aren't pushing themselves out of their comfort zone... this is incredibly bad for a company (ESPECIALLY a company that uses a hierarchal structure). Loosing a little fat is a sign of good health for a company... the issue is when you stop cutting "fat" and start cutting into the meat. Amazon is just taking advantage of all the devs that want to work for a big name, its a fair deal for both sides. They work you to death for 18 months, you get "Amazon" on your resume.
- jshowa3 8y ago
  Comfort is not bad for a company period. Its what keeps the lights on, but it depends on how you define it. Most projects have horrible deadlines and they happen often so there isn't a lot of time to play R&D on a lot of things. I haven't worked for many companies that are fine with breaking what works. In fact, it often results in discipline because you were trying something that wasn't normal operating procedure mostly because the risk couldn't adequately be measured or realized (i.e. trying a new framework for example). I for one, would not look too fondly on Amazon precisely because of the way they treat their workforce and because their product is not very good because of it.
  - chosenbreed37 8y ago
    > ... and because their product is not very good because of it. Their revenues would suggest otherwise :)
    - jshowa3 8y ago
      Revenue isn't the only factor in determining a good product. Especially with monopolies.
drugme 8y ago
Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? Probably because they can't tell the good from the bad.
tboyd47 8y ago
Because "easing out less competent people" a fool's errand. There will always be high performers and low performers on a team, both in a relative and absolute sense. Good managers don't make it their responsibility to close that gap; they just make it clear what the goals are, fill the team with self-motivated people, and provide the tools and environment to get the work done. And yes, you fire people if they don't meet a clear minimum level of performance, but don't make that an expectation out of the gate. Even if you cut all the "low performers" and double the "high performers'" pay, those people can burn out or get sick and suddenly turn into low performers. "First, Break All the Rules" is a great book on this topic.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  There will always be high performers and low performers on a team, both in a relative and absolute sense. Yeah, although the more heterogeneous the tasks, the trickier it even is to define these terms. Many years ago I was on a small (2-3 people) team with a truly genius-level coder. He was close to what you'd call a savant. He was (despite being a sweet guy at heart) incredibly difficult to work with - he was unfiltered and abrasive, and would write reams of code to solve pet problems that didn't really need solving in the context of whatever the hell it was that we were trying to do at the moment, because they were "fun" coding challenges that captured his imagination. The end result was that while he could do the work of several engineers, you also... needed an engineer or two to work with him nearly full-time just to keep him on the rails and actually working towards the project goals, and to act as a buffer between him and people outside the team. So who was the high performer on our team, and who was the low performer? Well, I didn't suck, but he was certainly the better engineer! But was I really a "low performer" when I did some of the equally crucial work of keeping him on the rails? Was he really the "high performer" when he required lots of people-hours from others just to keep him on task? Those terms really lose all meaning when you're all engineers but are contributing different things to a team... the high/low performer stuff really only works when people are working in true isolation under identical circumstances. Like maybe for ditch-digging or weightlifting competitions or whatever.
  - pjc50 8y ago
ignoramous 8y ago
> Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? Dan Pink wrote a book and gave a took about this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en I think the issue systemic and might need an overhaul.
dba7dba 8y ago
> That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave easily when things go south.) That is such an obvious outcome. When it seems layoff/low-morale seems to be coming, people who will leave for new jobs on their own are usually ones with the initiative, right skillset, youth, good with people, etc, which is why they can get a new job with ease. And these are the very people a company wants to hold on to. So the other option to achieve attrition rate is to have lay offs. But of course that is not good for reputation of the company. > Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. I have a suspicion the CIO was specifically brought in by higher ups to force higher attrition rate.
JohnBooty 8y ago
> That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers Engineering (especially software engineering) seems like a particularly bad field in which to have "forced attrition" or stack ranking since so much of a team's success depends on the engineers' ability to work together directly on an interpersonal level, and for their code to be easily maintained/extended/tested by others. I suppose there are partial ways around this, such as factoring rankings from one's peers into the forced attrition. But overall it's very difficult to imagine any engineering environment that would benefit from incentivizing engineers to compete with one another rather than cooperate. (Lot of engineers are already good at playing the game in which they look like team players, but are really autocrats of their own little silos and knowingly make themselves hard to replace & keep others down)
michaelbuckbee 8y ago
These things get really weird really quick. I worked for a hardware startup that (of course) had just brutal delays in shipping their product. This included scrapping an entire product line and shipping a less ambitious, but somewhat orthogonal one. So 3 times in two years there was a big push for the marketing, customer success, developer relations, and support etc teams to get ready for a launch that never happened. How exactly is a customer success person supposed to be judged as a high performer if there are no customers? Support people sitting by a phone that never rings? This is an obvious example, but I find the same thing really often in engineering groups: "I was asked to do X. I killed myself to make X happen. Turns out X wasn't relevant to the business and now it's all being shut down and I'm a lower performer."
cryptonector 8y ago
Because management is difficult and proponents of stack ranking and other data-driven approaches think there's a way to automate management. It turns out -I believe anyways- that for many kinds of jobs you can't really automate management. If you want to know who your best and brightest are, and who the chaff is, you need to get down and dirty and get to know them.
- gadders 8y ago
  That's true, but it also lets poor people keep the team members they like, rather than the good ones.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Maybe, but you can always rotate managers around to deal with that problem. And you can have dotted-line relationships. There are more good ways to deal with people problems as such than there are good ways to deal with people problems as data problems.
    - gadders 8y ago
      Yeah, it's an analogue problem and not easy to solve. Hopefully, a manager that did that would get found out when his team was full of incompetent cronies.
TheBobinator 8y ago
There are systems of operating that are ridiculously profitable; I know the engineering executive of a Forge Shop that implimented a Scanlon plan some 50 years ago. Company is employee owned with the original company ownership serving as chairboard members. The janitor, working there some 40 years, retired with $28 million in his pocket. All it took was management and labor deciding on what it cost to run the business, and savings over that, they put some into an expansion\risk fund, and the rest they split. That technology came out of the 1930's where people were starving, there was no capital and debt to work with, riots were commonplace, and people were looking at the management as food. Funny thing, when everyone is watching out for one another and helping eachother, really awesome results tend to happen. Sure there's a personell mix issue, but personalities can grow and change. Realistically, all corporations should be run this way. We give the executive management immunity and then we allow them to abuse the staff. That's a recipe for disaster. The majority of company stock ought to be owned by the employee's doing the work. There's this fatalistic romanticism that goes on with being the top dog, alpha male, name your price, et-cetera. This comes from rich people who never came out of their terrible 2's. They grew up leading isolated lives and never spent time with normal human beings, so they develop this superiority complex and go on tantrums. The reason you see so much advertising that makes no sense for executives is, there are so many of these "VITO's" out there and they all sell emotionally because they are literally box-of-rocks stupid. The funny part of the joke is people, to their own peril, give respect to these people. We've managed to dress it up with modern marketing\psychological warfare, and we've managed to let the pack of grifters get so large they're now fighting over the scraps. A City of thieves produces no bread. Fertility rates are 1.72 in the US, USSR during its collapse was 1.2. We're halfway there. We need a term to define cannibalistic management; the kind of management there that figures out ways to literally eat people by entangling them in this web of socioeconomic corporatism. We already have "trap" music so we aren't far off, culturally, from defining it conceptually. Accountants understand risk and cost, MBA's understand Risk, Cost, and Process. It takes someone with specialized experience and skills to figure out how to build an efficient process, or to do R&D because you need to understand bottlenecks and how to cheat at gambling; effectively it takes that kind of person to understand oppertunity, of which the other 2 don't. So you get into these ridiculous situations where an accountant or MBA is put in charge, with no real understanding of the actual systems at play and its revealed to the staff executive management is really just a bunch of permanent vacationers or grifters. The really great engineers make up excuses based on prior, painful experience as to why they should leave and do so; the existing staff figure no matter where they go, they'll have to deal with the same BS. Accountants and MBA's always strangle companies, so if you see a new executive manager who's resume doesn't have "line" experience, it's always time to leave for greener pastures.
mavelikara 8y ago
This is called "Dead Sea Effect".
pjc50 8y ago
> Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare? All metrics-driven systems that try to collapse complex effects to a single metric without intelligent human supervision tend to produce dystopian or at least spectacularly unintended effects. In this case, the problem is trying to have a single axis of competence. Quite apart from the range of technologies and circumstances people might find themselves in, there are also the interpersonal skills and meta-competences that matter. Then there's the company context: were they supported or let down? By their managers or colleagues? Were they working on something that failed for unrelated reasons? Or on something that succeeded despite their involvement? In many ways it's the same as the hiring problem, it's just less concentrated on a single day. Competence is a transitive property: people are competent at things, not as a global property of their personality.
arkh 8y ago
Why fire low performers? Why not try to make them become average performer? Maybe they have children to care for at home and doing remote work would help? Maybe they don't like some of their colleagues and a team change is in order. Maybe after months of year of being proactive but being shutdown by management they decided to stop caring? Maybe it's more serious and they should be encouraged to see a therapist.

foobaw 8y ago

Netflix and Facebook definitely have something similar too especially for newer grads (although the former rarely hires new grads). Amazon just does it in the worst way possible.

40acres 8y ago
The interesting thing about Netflix is that they are very upfront about their hiring culture: no internships and no hiring of developers without at least five years experience. They are upfront in the fact that they are liberal when it comes to letting people go and pay way above market rate to compensate for it. I'd rather deal with a company that puts all of its cards on the table like Netflix does rather than an implicit forced attrition process that is described here.

auiya 8y ago

I thought most companies have figured out Jack Welch's rank-and-yank system doesn't work by now? Surely Amazon isn't that naive are they?

czbond 8y ago
So I think it depends on the organization. I have tended to work in more aggressive, competitive fields. Different versions of "rank and yank" (as you call it) or "up or out" or other types. BigCorps need to do it to keep the average talent bar from trending down (A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players). Startups need to do it generally because the pool of applicants tends to be either "great", "good" or "can't get a job elsewhere" and it needs to weed out. I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  This doesn't make sense. "A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players" If B:s hires C:s than in analogue A:s would hire B:s since it's a bell curve-ish distribution not digital buckets. Who hires the A:s? A, B and C:s by accident? "I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game." You probably want people to improve their skills in their craft, not players to improve their skills in the a management game.
johan_larson 8y ago
My impression is that stack ranking with forced attrition can, if applied for a short period, shake a sleepy low-performing organization out of its lethargy. But if you try to run things that way long-term you get problems. People stop thinking of the team and start acting too selfishly.

juli1pb 8y ago

HN at its best: making conclusions based on one data point gathered randomly on the internet... happy Wednesday!

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Flagged - not because I think this doesn't happen, but because, at the time of writing of that comment, no other comment actually made any kind of "conclusions". Or, in other words, the above comment is making broad-brush conclusions out of zero data points. sigh
- Eire_Banshee 8y ago
  Flagged - for being pretentious douche.

cheeze 8y ago

Isn't this common throughout the industry? I love to bash on Amazon as much as the next HN'er, but is this really news?

kevin_b_er 8y ago
This is Amazon, Netflix, and, in the past, Microsoft.

scottlegrand2 8y ago

As a former Amazon manager, I don't have a problem with forced attrition so much as the proportion of my time that was put into finding the candidates for that forced attrition. There are a tremendous number of low achievers in every industry and if you keep them around they are toxic, every bit if not more toxic than Amazon's culture in 2019. That said, I would have liked to have seen most of the time dedicated to this task allocated to developing the careers of my direct reports because I think that is of much higher value to any organization. Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this problem, but that now seems intractable. It seems there's a real temptation to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill positions these days.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
benj111 8y ago
Really? Do you not think such a culture is actively detrimental? How can you ask anyone to give 110% if they might be getting sacked next year? If you have a tremendous number of low achievers, maybe its because the only people you can retain are people who can't find jobs elsewhere fast enough. I know I wouldn't be waiting around for my turn.
- czbond 8y ago
  I disagree with this. Every organization, and every department has a bell curve of talent. Average and low-average people hire sub-par and poor talent because everyone thinks they're rockstars, but statistically that cannot be true.
  - benj111 8y ago
    "everyone thinks they're rockstar" Exactly, but knowing that, even if you think you're safe, you might not be, so what do you do? Plus you're saying below average people hire below poor talent. This just means that really the good manager is sacking good people, whereas the poor manager is sacking just 1 of his limitless supply of poor hires. So as an average employee what do you want, good manager and be bottom of the bell curve, or poor manager and be top of the bell curve?

maximilianburke 8y ago

If only forced attrition were so enthusiastically applied to Amazon’s recruiters.

czbond 8y ago

A lot of companies do this - without it being known. I see nothing wrong with the practice. Some companies I know of rotate each quarter to cut the bottom people or % that just don't make it. (eg: Q1 might be operations, Q2 finance, Q3 development, etc). It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving it higher.

quotha 8y ago
If you try a bit harder, maybe you might be able to think of something that's wrong with this practice.
- czbond 8y ago
  An acceptable variant that I've seen implemented well is "the pass". Where a competent leader, decides to "pass" (one or many rotations) because of hiring rates or current team excellence. Just my experience.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Then it is not forced?
conistonwater 8y ago
> It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving it higher. You seem to think that this desirable goal is actually achieved by this method.

renholder 8y ago

Another big technology corporation has forced attrition rates because their previous CTO came from Wal-Mart (yeah, that works-out well). Managers are told that, even if everyone on the team does the same amount of work, they either have to pick someone to lose or find themselves "lost", instead. Forced attrition is bad for morale but it's an especially shit situation every review-cycle, when people are on edge because someone has to go, no matter what, and it's either going to be themselves or someone that they work with.

johan_larson 8y ago

Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers, because those coworkers are also competitors. Could Amazon really be falling into the same trap so soon?

C1sc0cat 8y ago
The actual number of really bad hires is actually quite low give my experience at BT (15 years) and I only knew two cases of really bad performers.

edelans 8y ago

mandatory quote : CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?

drugme 8y ago

Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year) What Amazon fails to consider is the number of high-caliber engineers who would never consider applying to work for companies that have policies like this.

dba7dba 8y ago

When Toyota US HQ moved from CA to Plano, Texas, there were rumors that part of the reason was to purge out employees with low/no energy, initiative, output, etc. Employee with no output at work will most likely not bother with the whole enchilada involved in relocating to another state. Apparently the US HQs of Japanese motor companies follow Japanese corporate model and do not lay off employees. So they end up with quite a bit of low performing employees. Just rumors I heard.

denimnerd46 8y ago
wouldn’t desperate people who have low skills move instead of people who can get a job anywhere
- dba7dba 8y ago
  From what I gather, some were old employees near retirement and really did not want to pick up and move to Texas, leaving family/friends/CA behind. And then there were those who really really did not generate output at work and apparently management hoped(?) they would do the same in their personal life and not bother moving to another state.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

This is one should reconsider hiring anyone from Amazon. They came from a culture of backstabbbing, distrust, and a cutthroat ideology. How can they be a good cultural fit anywhere that relies on trust?

hopler 8y ago
For juniors: because they left Amazon. For seniors: yes be wary.

cryptonector 8y ago

Is stack ranking something Bezos wanted, or something other executives brought in that Bezos thought might be a good idea?

megaman8 8y ago

the reason has nothing to do with the ones being let go. It's about the people who remain: they're gonna be working a lot harder when they see their colleagues laid off. No one wants to be next. It's like running away from an alligator. You don't have to be faster than the alligator, you just need to be faster than your friends.

rightbyte 8y ago
Are there any proof of this, that it's making people work harder? If there is, does it offset the potential tendency of workers to not want to help new hires getting up to speed in fear of being eaten by the alligator? What about teams that turn around and beat the alligator to death with sticks. It sounds like the foundation of civilization. Maybe cooperation is not for co-operations. Who knows.

dawhizkid 8y ago

Is this that surprising? In my experience it's less prevalent/institutionalized in tech consulting, banking, etc. where the "up or out" philosophy is much more transparent e.g. if you aren't promoted in a certain window of time (say 2 years) to the next level then you're expected to leave.

throwaway98121 8y ago

How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous. The forced attrition is no surprise. I’m in Seattle and considering the thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.

apacheCamel 8y ago
> How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? ... The forced attrition is no surprise. I believe because people do not see forced attrition as a surprise, they also believe this post. I agree that we shouldn't take every Reddit post as truth but it makes sense in the culture Amazon portrays. Also there hasn't been anybody that offers a counter perspective into the inner workings (that I have seen). True or not, it would be interesting to see the companies that do practice this and what kind of workplace culture they put forward. Edit: Formatting.

misiti3780 8y ago

Im not trying to be a dick, but it seems to be working for them pretty well. Why is forced attrition rate a such a bad thing?

ensiferum 8y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

jmull 8y ago

If I have to push out X number of low-performing people every year, I'm going to damn well make sure I have X low-performing people around to push out so I don't have to get rid of anyone I value. The first one or two times a manager is asked to do this, there may be adequate dead-weight around that has accumulated "naturally". After that, a significant number of managers will game the system -- they'll attract and retain people for this very purpose. Meanwhile, general employees will realize what's going on and you're going to have political games. I don't see how this works for a company as a policy. It's too rigid. Meanwhile, a great way to get your attrition rate up is create a generally miserable environment. I can see executives patting themselves on the back for achieving their attrition goals even as their better employees are leaving for greener pastures. This makes so little sense I would doubt it could really be true. Except I've see it myself, and worse (not at Amazon).

ex_amazon_sde 8y ago

Ex Amazon here. The attrition rate is much higher than what most people expect. Yes, the company does stack ranking... unofficially. Even in team with very skilled and productive engineers managers will still set expectations so high that someone will be put on dev plan.

lordnacho 8y ago

Marginalism. As someone who's managed teams for many years, I think it's really odd to do this stack-rank thing. A team is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts. People on the team do different things that are complementary. If you've ever watched sports, you know what this means. Not everyone is scoring the goals, someone needs to make critical passes, someone needs to get the ball out of defence, and so on. That's not to say everyone should be paid the same. Clearly some roles are more rare than others and need to be compensated thus. But it is also true that your star needs someone to carry water for him, and that having the star and the water carrier makes the team more effective than two of either. So when it comes to letting go of people, it rarely makes sense to try to decide who is productive and who isn't. A lot of businesses wouldn't even operate without juniors on the lowest grades. For instance junior investment bankers make powerpoint slides and financial models. Senior investment bankers, who have long forgotten how to use PowerPoint, take these to customers and get business. The only times I've let people go is when I've thought the team really doesn't need this person. It's not a question of being inherently productive, it's a question of whether the marginal productivity of the team goes up. And as in sports, sometimes you find it's a star player who needs to go. Sometimes a bit-part player. But in no sense is there a magic score from which the bottom can be removed.

bb88 8y ago

I've seen managers game this kind of system out. 1) Reserve 5%-10% of your staffing for people going to be laid off. 2) Hire people that won't make the cut after 1 year. 3) Fire them 4) Rinse and repeat In other words the only reason they were being hired was so that the manager could protect the performers of this team. Basically if the manager's view is the only one that matters, he can pretty much get away with it.

hopler 8y ago
How do I apply for that job? :-) I want to be an SRE: Scapegoat Redundancy Engineer
- antisthenes 8y ago
  You have to make a career out of it! Charge by the month and rotate in different companies to be hired and fired yearly!
  - bb88 8y ago
    God, the pain of interviewing.

jkingsbery 8y ago

Current Amazon employee here (Senior Software Engineer) - I don't speak officially for the company obviously, but I wanted to share my experience. I am not a manager, so I don't know the particulars of what goes on during the process referred to in the linked post, but I can offer a few things: My experience has been that people at Amazon are generally pretty willing to help each other in various different ways, whether helping a teammate on a project or helping someone new to a technology on one of our internal mailing lists. Many on the reddit thread take it for granted that Amazon is, as one person called it, a "hellhole." That is not at all my experience - I know others in different orgs or different roles may of course have a different experience. Amazon has been significantly less stressful than almost everywhere I've worked (and the one exception was not less stressful in a good way). At least among people I know, most of the people who leave our team join another team at Amazon. I've known a few people who have left Amazon, but we haven't had 5% of our team leave Amazon every year as this thread would indicate.

qbaqbaqba 8y ago

That's nothing compared to what is going on in their warehouses. Buy hey, who cares.

mempko 8y ago

Competition undermines any form of cooperation. Presumably Amazon is a company of people cooperating, otherwise they would all just be individuals under competitive contracts right? Competition undermines cooperation but we do it anyway because some must be good right? Just like some amount of child abuse must be good right? Or a small amount of lead in your body is good right? Sometimes moderation is not a good answer. There is no safe level of competition in a cooperative organization.