5 ms·
Not OP but worked in one of top 10 companies for a senior role and was also involved in hiring tech team. There was no explicit "We need to get rid of x people
by ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
Not OP but worked in one of top 10 companies for a senior role and was also involved in hiring tech team.
There was no explicit "We need to get rid of x people" but there were performance reviews every year and getting the lowest performance mean being reassigned to another team and 3 consecutive lowest performance means forced attrition.
I don't even know why it's controversial (unless its a botched up execution). Most companies have dead weights that got in somehow and are toxic to the culture and a burden to the team.
- everdrive 8y agoI'm curious, though: is it not possible to have a small team of 10 excellent people? And even if all 10 are excellent, one must get the lowest score. Is it really good to always reassign or fire someone based on the lowest score?
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoIt was not a "team" or "project". This company operated on Toyota's model of dual manager (or it's variant). One for the project and one overall. The overall manager oversaw a a fixed number of people (around 200-250) and he could rank few of them the lowest. He is not obliged to and many managers never gave the lowest score to anyone. Also this manager would get the feedback from all the teams his reports worked for and make his own decision. Quite often he would even ask the employee why his project manager rated him low. Overall from what I had seen the process worked not too shabby even though it was unfair.
- everdrive 8y agoAh, so "the lowest score" means 1 out of 10 (for example) instead of "of all the scores assigned 3.5 was the lowest."
- dingaling 8y agoIt's controversial because the bar for 'dead weight' escalates over time. I worked for a company where eventually a Satisfactory rating became inadequate. Just doing your job wasn't good enough.
- badpun 8y agoLol, I wonder how that was passed down. "I am sorry, but we're not satisfied with your satisfactory performance".
- sct202 8y agoSo it would take 3 years worth of poor performances to get let go?
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoYes and three consecutive years of lowest performance. This was not set in stone or written in any emails but an HR's email about "Consistent low rating" mean the employee would be on his way out. The decision and final axing was always done by the HR and managers could only intervene if they thought it was unfair.
- int_19h 8y agoIt's controversial, because "lowest performance on the team" doesn't mean "poor performance".
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoTrue. And the rating was by a higher manager across multiple teams. And he was under no obligation to give lowest grade to anyone. Most of them got "average" and few of them exceptional or very good etc.
- int_19h 8y agoThen you're not describing the same system that Amazon does. The point of that system is that there's a certain fixed percentage of people who will get the lowest grade, no matter what.
- ex_amazon_sde 8y agoNone of my ex teammates in Amazon was literally fired (AFAIK). Many had disagreements with management over the inflated expectations and left within 3-4 years... despite being very good engineers. We are not talking about 5% or 10% attrition rate here.
- scottlegrand2 8y agoWhat I found to be the biggest problem at Amazon beyond the issue here was not so much inflated expectations but rather top-down technologically backwards micromanagement of how to get things done. The most flagrant example of this in my experience was when I was ready to hand an AWS customer a simple script that would replace their command line application and magically make it run in the cloud, uploading inputs and, and downloading results, it was blocked from release to the customer immediately because it wasn't a full web app with staffing and an on-call pager.