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At amazon, admitting to a problem will guaranteed lead to having to open a COE, correction of error, which means meetings with executives, inevitable "least eff
by one2know 6y ago
At amazon, admitting to a problem will guaranteed lead to having to open a COE, correction of error, which means meetings with executives, inevitable "least effective" rating, development plan, scapegoating, PIP, and firing.
- felixgallo 6y agoI've caused and authored many COEs at Amazon, and additionally have been involved in maybe fifty for neighboring teams. I can't recall a time it had a negative career impact for anyone, much less any of the consequences you list.
- stevepotter 6y agoI work at AWS now and can second that. Nobody is happy when things break, but COEs are looked a positively and are circulated constantly to prevent repeats.
- MadVikingGod 6y agoNot at AWS, retail Amazon, but what I saw was COEs were either normal business process or PIP material depending on which org you worked for. And sometimes just the excuse to get you gone. Where I was about 99.9% of the COEs where just a lesson learned and new process to prevent it. There was one that was basically used as a tool to remove a VERY good engineer, that didn't mesh well with new leadership. A sister org, one I worked a lot with, wouldn't COE anything. If you were the lead engineer on a product or service that had a COE you were going to get a PIP by year end review. I wasn't surprised when all the talent left that group.
- kdmytro 6y agoWhat is PIP?
- whoknew1122 6y agoPerformance Improvement Plan. Basically 'this is what you need to improve if you want to keep working here.' Lots of people bad at their jobs blame the PIP system for their failure at Amazon.
- parthdesai 6y agoMost likely, Performance Improvement Plan
- one2know 6y agoAmazon fires between 5-15% of engineers per year. PIP is to get you to quit. Amazon hires a TON of entry level SDE 1 engineers to sacrifice at the altar of Bezos so more shitty employees get to stay. Lifespan of a SDE 1 whipping boy/girl at Amazon, as a result is 3-6 months.
- mikeryan 6y agoPerformance Improvement Plan, they are not unique to Amazon, most places have them though the process may differ. Not to be too cynical but ultimately they’re a way to document that you’re not meeting expectations - before being fired. Should there be any sort of employment claim later its a mechanism by which an employer can show documentation that any issues related to your being let go were performance related and not some sort of protected status or prejudice. Outside of someone protected by a labor union, I’ve very rarely seen anyone recover from a PIP and not be eventually let go. Most commonly employees see them as a 30 or 60 day window to proactively find a new job before they’re terminated.
- smithza 6y agoPIP : Performance Improvement Plan I assume this to mean that it is an element of an individual's PIP, a formal process to set guides for getting someone to commit to a higher level of achievement.
- LegitShady 6y agoWhile on its face PIP is a guide to getting someone to commit to a higher level of improvement, for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go.
- owenmarshall 6y ago> for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go. Patently incorrect. A PIP is management telling you that you need to seek alternative employment, now. Joking/sarcasm aside: I’ve never seen or heard someone who is placed on a PIP successfully “exit” the PIP. They exit the company or they’re exited from the company. PIPs seem to mark the start of the “we are building formal documentation to fire you” phase of losing a job.
- LegitShady 6y agoya i agree.
- jschwartzi 6y agoI got PIP'ed and actually fixed the problem I had and resolved the PIP. The problem was that I would mis-ship items sometimes in a warehouse. I figured out that I couldn't reliably read some of the product labels, so I went to go get an eye exam. Apparently I had 20/100 vision in one eye due to astigmatism. Getting glasses meant that I quit fucking up, so they dropped the PIP and moved me into another part of the company. I guess I'm the poster child for having vision insurance as a company benefit.
- jugg1es 6y ago
- patch_cable 6y agoSame. If anything, a well written COE has had positive career impact.
- cheeze 6y agoHah. I don't work for AWS (anymore) but a COE I wrote was literally on my promo doc
- Jabberwock12 6y agoI too have caused and authored many COEs at Amazon. I have also been involved in 50 to 100 COEs written by other teams and have also observed no instances of this having a negative impact on anyones career. COEs are core to Amazon's learning experience and you can be assigned to write one for simply being unlucky enough to be oncall when the incident occurred.
- hyperdimension 6y ago>a negative career impact Nothing against you personally of course, but I just have to congratulate whomever it was who came up with this gem of an euphemism. It's definitely going up there next to 'career-limiting move'.
- uji 6y agoThis is very true. It doesn't lead to PIP always but whole amazonian culture makes it difficult for the person to stay in team/company. Writing COE is kind of admission of guilt and I have definitely seen promotions getting delayed. During perf-review, lot of times managers of other teams raise COE has a point against the person going for promotion.
- ayberk 6y agoThis is complete opposite of my experience at AWS. I'm one of the biggest critics of how we do "software" (just ask any of my managers), but in none of the orgs I've worked at COEs were ever used against you. On the contrary, a good COE is usually applauded.
- Aperocky 6y agoHaving authored COEs before, none of your sentence after 'which means' was true at least in my case, nor are they true for COEs that I know of.
- calcifer 6y agoWhat the hell is a COE? I hate that nobody seems to bother defining their acronyms anymore.
- ShroudedNight 6y ago(cause|correction) of error, though 'CoE' is the much better known identifier (like IBM vs International Business Machines). They are a formal, in-depth retrospective on customer-impacting service degradations or outages. They include a thorough functional description of how the state of your service evolved into failure, a exhaustively recursive review of the operational decisions and assumptions that contributed to that failure, and a series of action items the team will take to ensure that the service will never fail again for the same reason. Edit: This list is incomplete, and the link included in the sibling provides a better, more thorough description.
- ttam 6y agohttps://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html
- draw_down 6y agoThe acronym was literally defined immediately after it was used! Come on!
- tanilama 6y agoCOE won't lead to inevitable LE, it only means your manager wants you to be the scapegoat or you are indeed responsible for it. Resolving COE can be a positive even if you know how to spin it, at least that was the case when I was there. But not sure whether things had changed
- TheHydroImpulse 6y agoIf anyone notices a problem you'll likely need to write a COE, there's no way to get around that. Not updating the status page absolutely doesn't get you out of that task. COE also doesn't lead to negative marks on anyone at AWS that I know of. It's a learning experience to know why it happened and action items so it doesn't happen again.