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Amazon has a quota for the number of employees it would be happy to see leave

• throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Seems like a classic case of "show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome". You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    It's the natural outcome of stack-ranking systems. If managers know that the bottom 10% of their direct reports are going to be shown the door, protect the whole team by hiring people just to rank them in the bottom. If a manager oversees 200 people, is more likely ~20 of them will be bad hires and can be let go, but if a manager only has five direct reports, losing just one, even if that one isn't all the great, means losing 20% of the team. On that note, I wonder how these forces might work to fix ideal team size to align with these flawed incentives.
    • procombo 5y ago
      Genuine question. Who in their right mind has/wants more than 10 or 20 direct reports? Any more than that seems like absolute chaos. Most I ever had was 8. When it got larger than that I had people step up to active leadership roles. Eventually they did the same.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Depends on the nature of the work. In a tech workplace 20 is probably a real handful.
      • jfrunyon 5y ago
        There are plenty of teams at Amazon which could be significantly larger than that. How many employees do you think they have in every warehouse, and how many managers? ;)
        • procombo 5y ago
          True. :) There is definitely a difference in how Amazon scales management for warehouses. Elsewhere, it's "everyone a leader". My first true corporate experience was with big-four Deloitte. The culture there is "up or out". May sound sketchy to outsiders but it was actually a really supportive environment.
    • kilroy123 5y ago
      I would be furious if I got hired at a place for this reason. I already feel very uncomfortable if I'm "the dumbest person in the room". Equally, I don't want to be the smartest.
  • duxup 5y ago
    I worked at a company where each manager was given a set of percentages they could give as raises. Something like 15%, 10%, everyone else 5%. He decided his team was good enough so he submitted the paperwork for 15% for everyone. It worked, he never heard back and everyone got their raise. This went on for years. Then one day I'm in a meeting with a bunch of management and some small talk comes up about the set raises. My manager notes he doesn't follow the 'guidance' and all the other managers gasp. For years these guys just did what they thought was expected, didn't even try anything different. The managers at that company were more drones than anyone else... needless to say eventually all innovation slowed and the company feel into process hell.
    • caseysoftware 5y ago
      At my last company, I found out they'd print any title on your business card and as long as it didn't include Director, VP, or Chief. Those triggered approval from higher up. I chose a different title every time I had cards printed. Outside of regulatory or compliance requirements, in many cases, "policies" are simply suggestions which can be ignored.
      • duxup 5y ago
        I did the same. I was a 'support ninja'.
    • JBlue42 5y ago
      I find it really interesting. I had a great manager at my last company. Very good people person, would read on his own time to try and improve himself, etc. He had also been in our department the longest - upper management was always coming and going every 2-3 years. I asked him one time why he didn't want to go for one of those higher level positions and would rather stay at this sort of stressful one after a decade. He said he didn't want to deal with all the headaches at that level (more meetings with C-level people). He just wanted to keep his head down, take care of his team, and go home (a 1-2 hr commute each way). Given the precarity of much existence in the US, and the ability to be fired on a whim, it's no wonder the 'drone' mentality, of not bucking the system, is pretty normal. Suck up the BS until you can retire. I guess at least these days most of us don't have to deal with hot tar.
• WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  Just curious since I'm not too close to that world, how hard is it generally to get fired from say Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or generally other big tech companies?
  • Afton 5y ago
    Speaking for Microsoft in the 2010's: pretty hard. First you get pip'ed and have lots of uncomfortable discussions with your manager. You'll be encouraged to leave on your own. Eventually you'll be told to leave. They want a pretty iron-clad case to reduce the chance that you'll sue, since keeping you on for another year or two while they super-document your shortcomings tends to be cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit. I saw it first-hand, I wasn't pip'ed myself. :D
  • nixass 5y ago
    Depends on the country, really. I work for one of these in the EU country with excellent labor/employment laws and I have it much easier than my US counterparts.
• nineplay 5y ago
  This sadly isn't surprising since it's been happening in one form or another at least since Jack Welsh, and probably earlier. He was probably just the first one to give it a name. It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports. It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
  • twiddling 5y ago
    As a people manager, I have encountered this issue of managing "to the curve". Regardless of the composition of the team and the fact that they could be all high performers, I have had to make decisions that fit to a curve which senior mgmt is imposing. As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
• orange_joe 5y ago
  Idk if it’s Bezo’s roots in finance, but Amazon seems a brutal workplace for all levels of employment (I don’t know anything about the lives of senior managers). The company outright abuses its blue collar employees, and routinely mistreats its engineering staff. Stories of its toxic practices have been spread for at least a decade now. What’s especially baffling to me, and I admit this is merely rumor, is that they’ll actually adjust your raise schedule to take into account the price of the stock, so it’s hard to imagine it being highly lucrative. Of all the big tech companies, I think Amazon is most likely to unionize.
  • s5300 5y ago
    For what it's worth though... To my knowledge, they give damn good benefits. I don't think there's any other company in the U.S. where the lowest tier laborers get the same medical benefits as their best SWE's. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked into it as much as I should have to make this statement. Just going off what a friend who worked there most recently told me.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      Starbucks Coffee, perhaps? But really, having good health care shouldn't be tied to having a job. That's a peculiarity of the US that's done long-term damage over decades.
  • boulos 5y ago
    > Idk if it’s Bezo’s roots in finance Bezos graduated from Princeton in the mid-80s, and while he did do a stint at some networking company (but for Finance), he ended up in finance directly. He was at D.E. Shaw when the web exploded, and he left to start Amazon.
  • mytailorisrich 5y ago
    The most successful companies are always brutal in at least two aspects: (1) they are demanding and (2) they do not tolerate mediocrity. Go to any of the top players in a given industry and it will be the same. That actually makes sense because competition in the marketplace is brutal. You won't succeed (or not for long) if you don't aim high and let people take it easy.
• mdavis6890 5y ago
  I didn't read any evidence that this actually happens, and I read the incentives differently. If I was a manager I would feel that this lowers the risk for me to hire a person - if they perform well and it really works out, then great. And if not, then I know they'll just be part of the "unregretted attrition" number that I have to hit. Basically I can just hire a bunch of people and see how they work out, keeping the ones that nail it and allowing the others to go find jobs they are better suited to. In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
• cratermoon 5y ago
  Goodhart's Law as generalized by Marilyn Strathern: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
  • zamalek 5y ago
    For many reasons, I typically do better with qualitative performance reviews, and I'm usually more critical of myself than my manager. I have first-hand experience with exactly the kind of point I believe you might be trying to make, because I've been lucky enough to be managed by people who are genuinely passionate about managing people (and have therefore used qualitative reviews). The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever. Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
    • dbt00 5y ago
      I like the quantitative review for one reason -- people need to know if they're a 2 or not. Too many managers soft pedal concerns about perf and then people get fired 6 months later not ever knowing they were at risk.
    • lumost 5y ago
      The problem with this approach is that for any individual who says "I don't deserve a 3 this quarter" there is someone who says "I'm a 4 this quarter or I'll look elsewhere". Managers optimize for the (polite) squeaky wheel and have finite promotions/resources too allocate in a given quarter.
      • zamalek 5y ago
• silicon2401 5y ago
  This type of practice is what makes me not even consider FAANG jobs. I've (tactfully) told their recruiters I'm not interested; you'd have to pay me 500k minimum to even consider having to live on the west coast, dealing with their terrible work life balance, and having to worry about firing on top of everything else. Per this article, you could unknowingly have an expiration date on your employment. From personal contacts at Facebook, they specifically want you to get "needs improvement" on performance reviews to show that you're really pushing yourself; if you're doing well, you're not being pushed hard enough. I'm definitely not masochistic or interested in money/tech enough to work at a place like that.
  • wheybags 5y ago
    I don't think it explicitly said it in the article, but I'm pretty sure the hiring-to-fire is happening in warehouses, not dev offices.
    • cyrialize 5y ago
      IIRC Amazon has a fairly high PIP rate, it's something like 10%. Although what this article is talking about is probably separate from this. https://www.viamaven.com/blog/amazon-pip-what-is-it-what-to-do https://www.viamaven.com/blog/amazon-pip-what-is-it-what-to-...
      • cratermoon 5y ago
        How interesting that a 10% PIP rate aligns so closely with the bottom distribution of stack-ranking: https://lattice.com/library/what-is-stack-ranking-and-why-is-it-a-problem https://lattice.com/library/what-is-stack-ranking-and-why-is...
      • bpodgursky 5y ago
        Is 10% actually fairly high? I read that as "if you hire two teams of 5 people, on average one person on one of them ends up not performing and getting PIP'd. That seems... not crazy to me?
• mytailorisrich 5y ago
  > "They're expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year." This sounds like a re-hash of Jack Welch's Vitality Curve [1] where you're expected to fire the bottom 10% every year. This is a crazy practice and of course the consequence is that managers will find a way to meet the targets they are assigned, however nonsensical these targets might be, for fear of getting the chop themselves. From that perspective "hire to fire" is actually the only logical (if crazy) option to both keep your people and meet your target. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    It's stack ranking, with a dose of "whatever you measure will become a target" thrown in.
    • mytailorisrich 5y ago
      It is a target from the start (which is what makes it crazy to me). That's the purpose of stack ranking in the Vitality Curve, for instance, and it seems to be the same here.
  • sitkack 5y ago
    > Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has long been a controversial practice due to its negative effects on employee morale and potential for bias and discrimination. Lovely. I have only seen stack ranking from the sidelines. One guy who was on a high performing team didn't get the promo since others had already received theirs so they were 'out of promos'. He kinda had a nervous breakdown as he punched his office door for like 15 minutes while crying about wasting his life and being stupid. I remember him putting in a solid 3+ hours every day after work. I was contractor and got paid for my extra time, there was no promo I was after. Decimating your workforce is some seriously messed up behavior.
  • DonHopkins 5y ago
    If they fire the managers who weren't able to fire enough of their underlings, then at least they're firing people who weren't meeting their goals. ;/
• adolph 5y ago
  [Managers at Amazon are] expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year. Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA). Basically, it's the number of people you wouldn't be sad to see leave the company. Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
  • macksd 5y ago
    That's not even the only way it defeats the business goal: you're now intentionally paying people that you have no intention of getting a long-term return on, or that you know aren't worth what you're paying them. To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      It advances the business goal by preventing some bullshit HR process from disrupting the business.
    • mypalmike 5y ago
      It so strongly defeats the business goals that maybe the source of the reporting (the super high quality publication, Business Insider) might be full of it.
      • macksd 5y ago
        Might be, indeed - but it's definitely not unusual or incredible for a large organization to have misaligned incentives, ignorant executives making some of them up, and then being reluctant to admit they weren't as good of an idea as they thought.
  • 5y ago
• gcanyon 5y ago
  Well that puts a new and disheartening spin on having gotten an offer from Amazon :-(
  • CoastalCoder 5y ago
    Maybe you can make a deal with the hiring manager. If he'll admit that you're the sacrificial lamb, you'll alleviate his guilt by lining an alternative job up for the date he has to fire someone. Win, win, lose. (Amazon loses.)
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      Yup. Definately ways of benefiting from this. And usually you get a decent severance so if they fire you after a year, you can basically learn cool stuff on the job, only do a little work, and then get a nice paid vacation afterwards.
• leoedin 5y ago
  You'd hope that the people being hired to be later fired are at least given a chance to prove themselves. There's a world of difference between "We're not sure about this person, so let's hire them and we can always fire them if they're bad" vs "This person is definitely terrible at their job (or obnoxious) and I'm only hiring them so I don't feel bad about definitely firing them later". The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
  • svachalek 5y ago
    Possibly they could outdo someone already on the team who would be fired instead. But the metric demands blood.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      The new hire could outdo someone else but management favoritism for that someone else means the new hire is sacrificed.
  • gojomo 5y ago
    Indeed - there are extreme limitations of interviews & other evaluations pre-hire. They'll rank some good candidates "below the hire line", and some charismatic bad candidates, who temporarily present well, as hires. Given that, a policy of "we're going to hire X% more people than we need, but fire fast" could be seen as a generous, progressive, error-correcting process. It's better than leaving those people who interview poorly always just short of the real, compensated, supervised employment situations where they could prove themselves. The grounds for judging the practice should be based on whether it's done honestly. Is the practice, and actual attrition-rates/risk-of-short-tenure, explained up-front? Are hires paid for all hours worked? Do those fired receive clear feedback for why they're not continuing?
• burlesona 5y ago
  I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and coach them up - and sometimes, over time, they improve enough that it works out! The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future. I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go. “Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top. Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    > they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer
    • 99_00 5y ago
      I agree with the counter argument in that link. The programmer is net negative, true, but better management and appropriate tasks would fix that. edit: downvoted for an opinion presented with a neutral tone?
• christkv 5y ago
  Somebody make a website to hire people with the purpose to fire them (faangcannonfodder.com). If the deal is straight forward I'll take a big paycheck for a year.
  • runnr_az 5y ago
    Presumably, one wouldn't know if they were properly incompetent.
    • tux1968 5y ago
      You would still have to fail the interview in order to get hired.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  Absurd goals defeated by Goodhart's Law seems to be common for large organizations. It is easy to see the limits of the so called invisible hand of free market, it might be more efficient than state-driven bureaucracy but it is still far from optimal. Is it even possible to avoid for large organizations?
• rrauenza 5y ago
  Back in the 2000's I heard Cisco also was like this. You'd hire your "cannon fodder" for the next round of mandatory layoffs.
• tqi 5y ago
  This article is pretty light on what evidence this is actually happening, or how often. To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time. EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
  • mypalmike 5y ago
    Yeah this article is garbage. I never saw any of this when I worked at Amazon (up to around a year ago). Post-interview panel meetings always focused on the candidate's strengths and weaknesses and their ability to raise the bar. It would have been absurd in those meetings for a manager to advocate hiring a "throwaway" candidate. I can't see it happening at all at Amazon, particularly with the requirement of having a bar raiser on each panel.
• wnevets 5y ago
  Stories like this and the politics of rankings make me so glad I never even attempted to work at Amazon. It sounds like such a miserable dystopia.
  • marssaxman 5y ago
    I wonder why I never hear any good stories about working for Amazon?
    • Afton 5y ago
      Meh. I had a friend go to Amazon. He loves it there, and he's an IC, not a psychopath, just a genuinely nice guy. He doesn't deny the stories we hear, they just don't happen to/near him. And of course, he's done very well there over the last 5 years or so. So it definitely happens.
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• jvanderbot 5y ago
  So, when they say Amazon, what do they mean? Its not just a web development company any more, and these turnover rates should be wildly different in their call centers, distribution chain, last mile delivery, server farms, ops, management, marketing, legal, design, executive suite, retail, robotics R&D, main web developers, blah blah. One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
• w_t_payne 5y ago
  I don't think having an unregretted attrition rate 'target' is necessarily a bad thing, but *if* you are going to go down this sort of route, then the "hiring manager" and the "firing manager" should be working to competing objectives, and not colluding in this way. The hiring manager could, for example, be incentivised to meet a lower UAR rate than the firing manager, and the decision to fire should be made based on some sort of objective measure which is difficult to game without actually impacting productivity (Maybe a metric which is hard to predict by virtue of being complex, compound and nonobvious -- which sounds like a perfect fit for a neural network of some sort -- of course, this seems all perfectly horrendous and dystopian - neural networks trained to decide who to fire? ... creepy.)
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  > something seems off about hiring someone just so you can fire them later. It just seems wrong. It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
• stadium 5y ago
  Amazon has many tech workers on visas, and it can be extremely anxiety inducing around performance review time. Once a manager puts a target on your back, it's a major uphill climb to remove that target. And for someone on a visa you don't just lose your job, you get repatriated back to your home country unless you can quickly get rehired somewhere else. Edit: And not just you, your wife and kids too, even if your kids were born here and it's all they ever knew. The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
  • jedberg 5y ago
    Much like tying insurance to employment, tying immigration to employment is an awful system. It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here, but that requirement should disappear quickly. Make the employer guarantee to pay them for a year, and allow them to stay once that year is up. That would be a humane way to do it. It's so terrible that immigrants to this country have to live in constant fear of deportation if they don't have a job.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here For very special jobs of critical need perhaps. For broader economic immigration I’d rather have a visa categories requiring initial (and in some categories periodic subsequent) payment than a job requirement, either for initial entry or conitnued residency.
      • jedberg 5y ago
        So instead of requiring a job you want to require the immigrant to pay to stay? That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay and also using it as a shortcut to immigration.
        • dragonwriter 5y ago
          > So instead of requiring a job you want to require the immigrant to pay to stay? Mostly, no, for immigrant economic visas I’d prefer “pay to enter”. For non-immigrant including dual-intent economic visas (e.g., replacing things like H-1b), periodic payment makes sense. > That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay Visa categories gated on high-need, high-education job categories, especially when they also come with prevailing wage requirements, also only allow rich people to come or stay. Allowing payment (which can be subsidized by friends, family, or other supportive community) actually weakens the tie to personal wealth, though it does not (nor does it intend to; this is, after all, a proposed reform of economic visa categories, not family-based, refugee, etc. ones[0]) remove it entirely. > and also using it as a shortcut to immigration. I don’t see this as a problem. [0] though to the extent those are capped, i support allowing otherwise-qualified immigrants to pay to skip (and not take up space in) the queue, through a bidding system where the cost per supernumerary immigrant in a category is higher the more are admitted in a year. It serves the purpose of the limit (mitigating social costs of level of immigration) by an alternate means, and reduces the adverse impact of the limit, not just for the people paying but also for the people not paying. It’s a win-win-win change. (A loss for thr source countries, in many cases, though.)
• throwaway743 5y ago
  > People leave, either because they move on to new opportunities or because they aren't able to perform at a level the company deems acceptable. That happens in every company. Or it could be that people are treated like a dogs and would be better off not being in that environment regardless of having a plan b.
• avmich 5y ago
  So now you can have a line in your resume that you worked in Amazon - one of FAANG - and it's easier to get there. Good. And also you're not incentivized to make particularly good work there, as you'll be fired soon. Great. /s
• coding123 5y ago
  I don't know if this is somewhat similar to other companies I won't name, but there's a practice of hiring contractors that work for a "contracting company" as a W2, but then works "in the office" at another company. I did this a couple times. One thing I would say is that even though my contract was 6 months, the contacts you get is incredible through doing this. It also offers people a way to get a job at more stable companies without the insane interview process. Definitely helps open doors for people that would otherwise not have a chance at getting a job at the place. That all being said, if this is different from what I described, ok.
• albertTJames 5y ago
  I have hard time imagining how this "unregretted attrition rate" (URA) works for very specialised position like research scientists. If you expect to lose even 1 of those per year it seem like the interview process could be a bit lighter.
• varispeed 5y ago
  The UK made it very easy this year. They created a concept of "deemed employee". Basically a worker is an employee for all intents and purposes except that they don't have any worker's rights. It's currently being adopted mainly in the IT sector that requires flexible work force. The main problem is that the worker needs an intermediary to be hired through - currently it must be a worker's own company and then a fee payer that collects tax on the worker's behalf. This all can be automated though and probably it will take a year to be implemented and streamlined. Currently this system is being exploited by the so called mini umbrellas - instead of worker having its own company, they are hired by someone else's company set up specifically for the engagement, except that they likely pay wrong tax and pocket the worker's money through various fees. It's crazy, but it looks like this is some sort of an incentive for big companies to come here after Brexit. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 (these mini umbrellas are nothing new, but this year they got more power, so it will only get worse and MPs decided to ignore all proposals to fix this)
• theonlybutlet 5y ago
  What an insane measure, how do people think this is normal? I can imagine having a staff retention ratio whereby you need to keep it above a certain level (an indirect measure of staff happiness and thereby retaining expertise, know-how). But to think that you should be constantly firing people in a growing business is perverse.
• ruined 5y ago
  these comments are full of (presumably) tech workers explaining it's probably only happening to the warehouse workers, and thus ok do yall understand that things like this are directly causative of the great frustration and antagonism against "techies" nationally and particularly in every city that has been changed by this industry? it is understood by everyone else that tech workers bear some responsibility for this culture and these behaviors, but tech workers themselves seem to deny it or not believe it.
  • marktangotango 5y ago
    > directly causative of the great frustration and antagonism against "techies" nationally and particularly in every city that has been changed by this industry? I'm not familiar with any examples of this, does anyone have references?
    • avgDev 5y ago
      A good example is housing market in San Francisco. The tech boom caused many poorer individuals to lose housing because of the costs going up. People with full time jobs no longer were able to afford housing. https://www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom https://www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom
• hownottowrite 5y ago
  Management gaming the system? I’m so shocked. But how else do you manage a mill system where talent is the grist? You don’t. You just hire them all and let HR sort it out.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ragona 5y ago
  I don’t know anyone at Amazon who would hire someone they were sure they’d fire. I’ve never heard of it. It’d honestly even be sort of difficult, given the hiring process and the involvement of a bar raiser (veto vote) on the hiring committee who is not on the team. Now, might you take some additional risks, considering URA? Sure. But I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. You want hiring managers to sometimes hire higher risk/reward candidates, otherwise you get a whole bunch of identical low risk hires. This article is an overblown bit of hearsay. Also, new hires aren’t even eligible to be PIP’d out of the gate, so you’d have to set it up quite a bit in advance. Source: was an Amazon hiring manager for several years.
  • hourislate 5y ago
    I would imagine this is more geared toward warehouse employees. Anecdotal but a friend who works for AMZN (warehouse), who during his first 6 months thought it was pretty good gig has soured on the company. They have some metric (time off task) where bathroom breaks and things like that can easily get you fired. A simple bout of diarrhea that causes you to spend some extra time in the bathroom is enough to warrant termination. He says that it is basically modern day slavery and people are worked like machines. There are two people he recognizes that are still there after a year, everyone else has left. It would be interesting to learn what the turn over rate is for AMZN (warehouse work). Probably quite high I would imagine. One interesting thing he did say is there is still a huge want to Unionize at their level and it's going to happen sooner or later.
  • ttam 5y ago
    This needs to be upvoted a bit more. The article is clickbait, and most comments in this thread reflect how effective it is at it. The hiring process for corp employees makes the practice the article is claiming very, very, very hard to do. There's bar raiser, there are 2-3 additional interviewers, and the hiring manager. The initial voting process is blind. The HM would need to be very very good at convincing the BR+others in order to hire a candidate that they don't want (this is assuming no one wants the candidate). Plus, there are a bunch of other incentives countering you to hire someone that you don't want - it costs money, it eats up your allocated headcount, and it's going to take a while for you to onboard the new hire, which is going to eat up your team's bandwidth.
• dexen 5y ago
  The article paints a needlessly bleak picture. The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate". Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  The article is a little thin on evidence this is actually happening, and not just a clickbait article so they could describe Amazon as "brutal".
  • Grim-444 5y ago
    But they know that the clickbait they wrote will generate clicks, views, and discussions, so they've done their job, that's all they care about. There's not even any facts in the article, they're just supposedly summarizing what someone else wrote in another article, which I can't view because of a paywall. The text I do have access to, the linked article, doesn't contain a single verifiable fact.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Why is this still news? Amazon is renowned in the industry as a place not to ever work for, isn't it?
  • nova22033 5y ago
    Maybe for warehouse work. AWS and other tech jobs seem to be well regarded.
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  Sun used to get rid of overpaid useless executives by promoting them to "Vice President Of Looking For A New Job".
• cryptonector 5y ago
  Performance metrics gamed yet again! Even managers will game their own performance metrics. Amazon: we want to hire you. Candidate: uh, put it in writing that you won't fire me for 18 months minimum.
• whatever1 5y ago
  It’s all fun when you are growing. It becomes hunger games contest when you are shrinking and you end up putting at the bottom people that previously were your average employee.
• tinyhouse 5y ago
  This seems very strange. Amazon has a serious hiring process. Hiring managers cannot just hire people as they wish. There's a bar raiser and all interviewers provide their feedback. The bar raiser's job is to prevent hiring someone who didn't perform well in the interviewers. Internal transfers are different, the hiring manager has all the freedom.
• yuppie_scum 5y ago
  Anybody grinding leetcode to try and get into a FAANG just “because FAANG” should read this article. There are thousands of other well-paying, respected companies that don’t treat their employees like shit.
• oh_sigh 5y ago
  I was involved in some hiring decisions at Amazon many years ago. When I asked people, including my director, why we didn't do post mortems for when someone was fired for underperformance(and see where the interview process failed to pick up on that info, if it was available), all I got were strange looks.
• mabbo 5y ago
  I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs. In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview. When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision. > Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs. If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.
  • rattray 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing that context, it's helpful. Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
    • sib 5y ago
      In my org, we did a lot of hiring (I was in hundreds of interview debriefs) and we saw mostly the same set of ~10 bar raisers for the debriefs, with occasional fill-ins to make scheduling easier.
  • treesrule 5y ago
    Is this how it works in the non-tech parts of amazon?
  • zamadatix 5y ago
    Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then... If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
• hintymad 5y ago
  I really like Netflix's metaphor that they are like a sports team. You don't stack rank your team and fire the bottom 15% of your team every year, especially when the team members work well together.
  • KittenInABox 5y ago
    Doesn't Netflix practice cutting the bottom 10% every year?
    • hintymad 5y ago
      Nope. The management, at least to the director level, does not even discuss this. The company's culture stack makes it clear that it's okay for someone to be content and just to do her job. Stack ranking damages team trust, promotes unnecessary in-fight, and incentivized teams to focus on short-term goals. To quote some director's words: if you want to compete, compete with our competitors instead of your coworkers.
      • KittenInABox 5y ago
        Oh weird, I heard Netflix offers the best base salary around because they make annual workplace cuts of 10%. Sounds awesome if they don't do that!
• sjg007 5y ago
  Seems weird. Amazon has this whole bar raiser concept which means that there's a few folks who ensure that new hires basically exceed the standard. It should be the sort of program that filters out this type of hiring. Separately, I think companies in general are doing performance management all wrong anyway. We focus on individuals; not on teams and we ask the wrong questions.
• rsj_hn 5y ago
  Bottom line is that you can be very selective in hiring and then very slow to fire, or you can be very accepting in hiring and very fast to fire. Amazon has a reputation of being a company that is relatively easy to get into and thus it will always be a company that is quick to let people go. Now that doesn't mean you need official targets of firing X% each year, you can implement "fast to fire" badly, but even the best possible implementation of "fast to fire" is going to be more unpleasant for employees than those in a slow-to-hire, slow-to-fire company.
• mlcrypto 5y ago
  I just ignore all FANG recruiters in my inbox lol. The time & emotional investment is not worth it just to get declined with no feedback
• SilurianWenlock 5y ago
  How is Amazon in Europe?
• bitshiftfaced 5y ago
  I know we're supposed to reflect on how this is some commentary on today's society and whatnot, but I can't help but think about how you'd go about fixing this perverse incentive. Let's assume that 95% of hires are "good" and 5% are "bad." Let's say a manager hires 3 people a year, and currently oversees 100 people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the point of URA is to make sure managers fire the portion of that 5% who don't quit voluntarily. If the voluntary portion is 2%, then we'd expect the manager to fire 3%, or 3 people in our example year. If 100% of those fired were of the 3 that were most recently hired, then obviously there's a problem. We'd expect each of new hires to only have a 5% chance of being "bad." The thing to do is to track what percent of the manager's hires within, say, the last year were part of that URA. If it passes some threshold, then either the manager is doing a poor job of hiring or they're trying to game the system.
• bestcoder69 5y ago
  For those asking “where is the source that managers are actually doing this”: it’s linked but behind a paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20210511140314/https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-managers-performance-reviews-hire-to-fire-internal-turnover-goal-2021-5 https://web.archive.org/web/20210511140314/https://www.busin... BI talked to managers who admitted to doing this. It’s odd to me to deny it. We have the motive, means, and the opportunity. And not to mention the admission! Amazon is large so it’s unsurprising that some people here haven’t seen it. One thing that I find interesting is that Amazon PR denied the existence of even URA rates, but I’ve heard managers IRL admit they exist.
• antattack 5y ago
  What's brutal is that healthcare tied to employment.
• alexfromapex 5y ago
  What a terrible company, working on divesting from them in my personal life
• bg24 5y ago
  Not so much as hire-to-fire from my limited experience. When they hire you, they want you to succeed. However, the pressure to deliver is there and it is real, good is many ways. And firing typically is totally unrelated to hiring. Firing decisions are for typical bottom X%, or product not doing good and actions need to be taken. It is easy to say that leaders do it to save their ass, but there is more to it and almost in every organization.
• dang 5y ago
  Url changed from https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to-fire-practice-reveals-a-brutal-truth-about-management.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to..., which points to this.
• dafty4 5y ago
  Click-bait headline, much?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/URMIs#selection-2397.0-2397.77 https://archive.is/URMIs#selection-2397.0-2397.77
• throw345hn 5y ago
  I was at the receiving end of this. Not at Amazon but at another similar Silicon Valley tech company. When I was hired I thought it was a great opportunity and moved my family to SV. First day I go in, I realized that just about couple of months before my hire date about half the team was laid off. A few months in there were lots of red flags — 1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code) 2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on. About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do. I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again. I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.
• mataug 5y ago
  Here are some unintentional consequence of this policy, - Due to the URA targets managers have to keep getting rid of people. If everyone on a team gets a "A+" grade, they have to get rid of the person getting "A-". Many times the "A-" person had a difficult period in their personal lives such as a medical emergency, depression, anxiety, pandemic induced anxiety, birth of a child, death of a family member. - This has a detrimental impact on team morale. - The people who stay long enough realize that its every person for themselves. - So code isn't written with maintainability or customers in mind, its written with promotion and impact metrics in mind. As long as one can hit those metrics targets, it doesn't matter what was compromised in the process. Ask anyone at amazon about the internal tooling. - Tech debt, and bugs are the problem of the person who's on-call, they can write Correction of Error document if things go terribly wrong. - There are metrics for the number of comments / revisions on a code review, if someone receives too many comments, or has too many revisions on their code review, then its counted against them. On the other hand senior engineers have figured out that putting out nitpick comments, and getting a junior engineer to go through multiple revisions results in the senior engineer having a better chance at being at top of the stack rank during OLR season. Too many isn't a clearly defined metric, its arbitrarily applied based on the manager's judgement. - PMs get the same treatment on their documents; nitpicks, frivolous comments, spending hours and hours fine tuning every single word in a document. - In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, and has to operate in fear of being put on their manager/skip-level's hit-list, people are merely working towards their ultimate goal of staying long enough to see their vesting schedule complete, or their Permanent Residency approved.
• krinchan 5y ago
  Gotta love how the Amazon astroturfs are already here.
• gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  Isn't this basically stack ranking?
• cloudedcordial 5y ago
  I'd take the article with a grain of salt, too, like many others replying to this thread. Even with a grain of salt, the topic sounds like stack ranking being re-packaged: There is a metric to let go of a certain percentage of employees per quarter or year. When I worked for a US company in Canada, the upper management was open the fact that stack ranking was used. They said the bottom 2% should be gone every year. There would be a quarter every once a while that looks pretty "bleak". Then the office was allocated with "less" budget. At this point the managers picked a few people across different departments to fire. In a larger office, it's not a difficult task. The ones who regularly stole stationary for personal use, conduct side business during regular business hours or has outdated behaviours were picked. At the beginning of the next quarter, the job postings for those openings went up to the company's career page. From the grapevine, over half of those people who were let go in this situation had difficulties finding comparable employment. The percentage sounds like a backdoor to get rid of the people who got hired because of some false positives. For that particular site of the company, these people would be let go even without stack ranking formally stated explicitly.
• theknocker 5y ago
  The wealthy elite are all full on communists when it’s time to pander to liberals in front of a camera, but when it comes to a balance sheet, they exercise the greed that non-gullible people expect.
• chrledntsurf 5y ago
  BI has become a go to for semi-factual insidery tech gossip/hit pieces. 80-90% of what they post is bullshit.
• Schwolop 5y ago
  Is this a measure, or a target? If it's a measure, _shrug_, I see it as fairly inevitable in a big enterprise. Some people will leave for good, bad, and miscellaneous reasons. 6% turnover at a big enterprise seems pretty low IMHO. If it's a target - wtf? Actively forcing out satisfactory staff to hit an arbitrary number is a bizarre way to operate. I know the media loves to suggest Amazon has horrible work practices, but seeing as one explanation of this number is sensible enough and the other is batshit crazy, I choose to assume they're applying it in the sensible way.