7 ms·

The article somehow embraces tracking and targeting attrition yet acts surprised that the natural result is planned attrition. This "stuffing the deck" used to

• optimiz3 5y ago
  > any fresh hire could never truly know if they passed interviews Always get large a signing bonus.
  • R0b0t1 5y ago
    A lot of places claw back signing bonuses. They're also not that large.
    • JTbane 5y ago
      Could you sue if you get fired within a year and have to give back the signing bonus?
      • R0b0t1 5y ago
        Highly doubtful. Typically one agrees to the clawback. People tend to not know they can ask for this to be waived, but some smaller companies won't waive it. Practically it may cost them more to get the money back than just letting it go if you refuse to pay. Also, typically, if you get fired early and the bonus was for relocation, the money doesn't unspend itself so I'm not sure what they expect.
  • vkou 5y ago
    Amazon solves this problem by only having 5% of your 4-year stock grant vest in your first year. Every engineer that quits or gets fired in the first year thus saves their employer tens of thousands of dollars.
• option 5y ago
  I have an open secret for you - they never dropped stack ranking. It is just called differently and less transparent now but they still grade on the curve. The only real change is that you, as a manager, don’t have to have 5% on “possible fire list”. But larger teams will, on average, have about 5% of people whom they don’t care about and/or prefer to lose.
  • paxys 5y ago
    I was at Microsoft when the switch happened, and can confirm this. The only thing that changed after they dropped stack ranking was that employees were no longer told which performance bucket they fell under, and any comp changes/stock grants were now fully opaque with zero justification given.
    • Wistar 5y ago
      And wasn't that just a wonderful change?
      • H8crilA 5y ago
        I don't know what assumptions/mindset you'd have to start with to think it's a great change. You simply get less information.
        • ignoramous 5y ago
          GP was being sarcastic, from what I can tell.
          • Wistar 5y ago
            Yes. I was there at the time. Only time in my life I was consumed by near crippling anxiety was dealing with ranking/review process at MS. It all seemed so pointless to me. And toxic.
  • ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
• kelnos 5y ago
  > The article somehow embraces tracking and targeting attrition yet acts surprised that the natural result is planned attrition. That doesn't strike me as odd at all. Companies should track attrition. It's a metric that should be watched, and if it goes up over time, that should be alarming. The problem is that managers are apparently graded on this metric: > Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA). ... which is just completely bizarre. Basing part of a manager's performance review based on whether or not they fired enough people to match a company-wide expected attrition rate is completely bonkers. Managers should possibly be penalized if they fire (or lose) too many people (it shows that either they are really bad at hiring, or that their people hate them and leave), but being below that number shouldn't generally be cause for alarm. Certainly it could mean that a manager is keeping dead weight around, but that shouldn't be the default assumption.
  • usgroup 5y ago
    Presumably they've identified that under performance is spread uniformly amongst managers with a large enough number of indirect reports. Presumably the target URA is arrived at via other independent measurements. Presumably they control for negative feedback loops like hiring people just to preserve your team by stratifying the URA target, or subjecting new hires to other measures too. Etc. Its cut-throat no doubt, but if its also well rewarded, why shouldn't there be a place for this kind of practice?
    • nindalf 5y ago
      > why shouldn't there be a place for this kind of practice Here's an article that explains why - 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...
      • tomnipotent 5y ago
        Where does it explain it? There's a lot of words in this op-ed with almost zero actual substance. It's a pure play on emotions, without even the effort to talk to past or present employees potentially affected. Just more lazy "journalism".
• toast0 5y ago
  Separate from dumb attrition goals, you'd think they'd also be tracking hiring vs reviews metrics. Hiring takes a lot of time and resources, and so does training new employees, so if you're firing a lot of the people you hire within a year (or whenever), you need to do better hiring.
  • nsonha 5y ago
    maybe that's as good as it gets with hiring, you never know how people truly perform until they work in the intended invironment.
    • usgroup 5y ago
      From personal experience, I think this is accurate. I think that at best interviews correlate with candidate performance but most of the information is gained at the earliest stages of the interview, and as you progress further, the process becomes less and less informative. I'd suspect a success rate of 50-60% - meaning you don't regret the hire and the hire didn't leave - is probably quite good.
  • orangepanda 5y ago
    > Hiring takes a lot of time and resources, and so does training new employees Not if you dont care about finding the best candidate or them succeeding
    • bluGill 5y ago
      In fact they care about finding the worst candidates, so they will fail. Getting someone great means they need to fire someone already on the team who is "only" very good.
• ignoramous 5y ago
  > Asking everyone to churn their teams means a healthy team of power players is just not allowed. It does creates what we called a "Mafia". Amazon orgs do have untouchables and stack ranking affords them that status.
• aetherson 5y ago
  Okay, apparently once every year or two I try to do real talk with HN about attrition, and tonight's that night. Firing people is unpleasant and emotionally draining. Everyone likes to talk about the failure mode where someone is overly quick to fire, but the truth for large orgs is that it's far more common to be overly slow to fire people. Absent other incentives, for every one person that you fired overly aggressively, you'll have 10 people sitting around drawing salaries despite being low-productivity or zero-productivity or negative-productivity and their managers are just avoiding conflict. There are no perfect hiring practices, and no perfect ways to turn around failing employees -- as soon as your org gets to be a certain size (much, much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft), you'll have bad hires and/or employees who used to be productive who no longer are who you need to fire. And if you don't fire them, you get more of them -- they drain the morale of people around them. People say, "Why should I work hard if Bob is transparently doing nothing and still getting his paycheck?" When you're a smallish org, maybe 100 people or fewer, you don't need processes for this, you just need the ultimate leaders of the company to demand accountability. If I'm the CEO of a 100 person company, I can tell my managers that it's really important that we have a high-performing team, that that means firing sometimes, and then do some spot checks to make sure that they're taking me seriously, and that's fine. And not having a process is preferable to having a process at this size. But at some point in the triple-digit employee numbers, that falls apart. Once you have people 4 or more levels from the CEO, it starts getting really hard to make sure that everyone is just holistically doing what they're supposed to, and you start to need a process. And once you've got, you know, high 4 digit numbers of employees or more, you also have to start being realistic about what value having a really high-performing team of 10 or 20 people somewhere deep down in your org chart really gets you: not that much. Ignore gaming the system for a minute, let's just talk about first order effects. Just say, "Okay, in some kind of system that forces attrition, stack ranking or something similar, you remove the possibility of recognizing the reality of a team that has 10 members who are all high-performing." If Amazon sacrifices the ability to have some random engineering team having 10 high performers, in return for getting a hundred teams to get off their ass and remove their low performers, that's a great deal for Amazon. Teams of 10 high performers are rare. They happen, sure. But they are rare. And at Amazon's size, they don't move the overall fortunes of the company much. In contrast, teams that accumulate deadweight are common, and because they are common, in aggregate they do move the fortunes of the company. Any smallish team of high performers that is actually in a position of high-leverage that it can affect Amazon's overall fortunes is going to be some weird exec-created team that's insulated from these kinds of performance metrics anyway. But of course we can't ignore gaming the system, not entirely, and that's where the rubber hits the road. What's worse than 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating is 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating but also the managers are hiring to fire. But I guess the question is: is that actually a failure mode that happens relatively frequently? Are there enough cynical managers who have low enough empathy to hire someone just to fire them, but high enough empathy that they want to do that in order to protect the tenured deadweight on their team? I don't know the answer, but it seems like a bit of a snowflake situation. I'm sure someone is out there is basically a psychopath who'll hire someone just to fire them, in order to protect their buddy. But it doesn't sound like a common pathology. There's no perfect system here, clearly. One of the real competitive advantages that smaller companies have -- a big reason why we all don't just literally have only five companies in tech -- is that people hierarchies get inherently less efficient as the org scales. But HN commenters, especially anyone here who aspires to one day run an org, whether as a founder or just a manager, should get past this whole business of, "the only failure mode we'll think about is being overly fast to fire."
• Telemakhos 5y ago
  The cynic within me wants to know how diversity initiatives interact with hire-to-fire practices that protect valuable team members from churn. The former eschews meritocracy in favor of alternative hiring criteria; the later protects meritocracy by sham hires that will be shed like ablative armor to protect the core team members.
  • carlmr 5y ago
    It just means the non-protected class of employees has to have a higher than nominal churn rate.