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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

508 points by flowerlad 5y ago

habibur 5y ago
So what's the problem? Is that unethical or illegal?
- Traster 5y ago
  The issue with it is that if your performance isn't up to scratch managers are more incentivized to force you out than to work with you to get your performance up.
  - flowerlad 5y ago
    Not just that. They can be more lax in their hiring processes. That is unethical.
- safog 5y ago
  Have you heard of hire to fire? When there's an incentive to game a metric, the metric gets gamed.
  - habibur 5y ago
    Valid point. The system can be gamed.
    - arkitaip 5y ago
      Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that people - except himself of course - are lazy so they need to be terrorized into being productive by firing a certain percentage of the employees. Ultimately, it damages not just Amazon's brand as a employer, it reflects poorly on Amazon employees and managers for going along with this charade.
      - danuker 5y ago
        > you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end, whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a manager has no incentive to do bad hires.
        mxvzr 5y ago
        My understanding is that even once the manager has filled their team with top performers they'll keep hiring every year for the sole purpose of firing them later in order to meet the quota
        A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        Uhh.. no. I don't know if you ever hired or fired anyone, but, in US at least, if you don't want your unemployment insurance to go up, you want to be able to prove that it was a firing for cause. Perversely, in Amazon case what this means that manager has to hire an employee just bad enough that the 'for cause' firing will be ready for him and he/she just needs to document it. I fail to understand how people do not see how this simple metric can be gamed. Am I the only person thinking in those weird terms imposed by the system?
- DesiLurker 5y ago
  no problems unless you are willing to be upfront about it and pay a premium for this 'feature'. Its highly unethical otherwise, especially for immigrants who may be putting their legal status in jeopardy. Cynical part of me suspects they want to use this kind of engineers to create work-slave like culture for everybody.
the_jeremy 5y ago
I don't think this is news to anyone. Yes, Amazon has an "unregretted attrition" target. The only surprising thing was this: > The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show I assumed it was much higher.
- breput 5y ago
  85% - 100% is technically "more than one-third".
- everdrive 5y ago
  I was under the impression that a PIP was nearly always a "here's your chance to get another job" warning, and never really an earnest chance to improve. Does anyone understand differently?
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    I was put on a PIP at Google and kept my job afterwards, they basically put massive training wheels on you. I had a director checking in with me 2-3 a week to put the pressure on, even doing some pair programming which was interesting. They really are trying to figure out why you aren't working well and see if you are a lost cause.
    - todd_t 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on the "interesting" aspect of pairing with the director?
      - birdyrooster 5y ago
        I guess it shows that they weren't just going to take a manager's word it and that multiple levels of management engaged in a PIP. Especially with how busy this director was typically, it was a use of their time that I didn't expect. Also, having a director be competent enough as an IC to pair program was something I hadn't experienced or expected.
ladyattis 5y ago
I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of constant churn on what seems like baseless theories. If it's your immediate boss that's tired of one particular slacker that's one thing but it's a wholly different situation when HR comes down on your boss demanding they fire 6% of their team whether or not they're doing great. It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.
- xibalba 5y ago
  A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.
  - retrocryptid 5y ago
    By what measure of productivity?
    - xibalba 5y ago
      Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.
kleiba 5y ago
No worries - in academia, the number is a lot higher.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  True - 7 years at my university as a grad student and I've been here longer than at least three or four of their new junior faculty hires (including replacements for some I used to work for)
retrocryptid 5y ago
This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want. It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it. Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants. Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you? About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting. About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved. Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company. It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  > you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter Unless it's in writing, you should never, ever, ever take a statement like this at face value.
retrocryptid 5y ago
Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 5y ago
  Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only the best"?
  - weimerica 5y ago
    Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was stated explicit in the interview.
    - TheHypnotist 5y ago
      Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - crackercrews 5y ago
      I once heard it said: government jobs are welfare for the middle class. IMO it's not 100% accurate but it's better than 50%.
julianeon 5y ago
This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.
- retrocryptid 5y ago
  There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Seems like there must be so much effort wasted in getting new people spun up on corporate culture, development style, internal tooling, etc... only to have half of them gone in less than a year. Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?
  - nunez 5y ago
    Amazon hires at an insane clip.
  - ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
    I used the same tool an the numbers were very similar 7-8 years ago. The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs. The 6% in the article is incredibely underestimated.
- Sevii 5y ago
  Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  It is possible that you are missing the point of this. While it works, it is saving company millions in compensation and keep internal upward pressures low. It is absolutely not sustainable, but it ever comes to the point that it has to be adjusted, it can be. And changing those policies will be so much easier with extra cash in hand to 'attract' new workers.
LatteLazy 5y ago
My mother worked at a UK state school. They had this over a decade ago.
joshe 5y ago
The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have been moved/retrained/let go. The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker. There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
- paxys 5y ago
  It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more). Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
intricatedetail 5y ago
It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at the same time company is boasting about making billions and avoiding taxes. They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce. This is despicable. These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.
- astrange 5y ago
  When the number of houses is fixed, the price of a house is infinite, so of course you can't save for it. The solution is to build more houses, not give everyone a raise. Also Amazon is not dodging state income taxes because Washington doesn't have a state income tax.
nkssy 5y ago
If you can get fired because of some messed up policy like this then you don't need to take ownership for being fired anymore. Also, why show initiative if you're going to be fired randomly anyway? Why even work hard at all? Why show loyalty or goodwill? Just show up, do the work, participate in the general workplace nonsense purely for appearances and have your parachute always ready. Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations. On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way. I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I understand your argument and it is an interesting given the technical source of demoralization. What I submit to you that this level demoralization already happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that is merely a 7 letter word with little to no meaning. I guess what I am saying it is not a new trend. Just a stepping stone in corporate America. The only difference is now, we don't get Mr. Burns choosing this, this and this one ( keep the egghead ); this time is a blackbox algorithm that won't ever touch the real decision makers ( cuz someone with enough forethought will add an exclusion list :P ).
  - nkssy 5y ago
    I definitely agree this isn’t a new trend. What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain about retention and skills shortages and a host of other problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so temporary visas for acquiring talent. Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a dark pattern.
- 5y ago
plank_time 5y ago
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price. If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rkalla 5y ago
    Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.
    - _rs 5y ago
      Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.
jasonladuke0311 5y ago
With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.
- kevstev 5y ago
  I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity, and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just focused on filling this one specific role, but the process spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had already committed to another job, but figured I would see the process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you are interested I can dig it up. But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but its much more recent that those stories started coming out from the engineering side of things.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Also wondering if the creation of platforms like Glassdoor, Blind, even r/CSCareerQuestions have allowed these issues to come to light.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Ironically, those are all the same platforms that made me want to contemplate ending it all because I work at Amazon. After I blocked them at the router level I started to feel better, until I realized people think I’m inferior no matter if I see them say it or not.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/M2p1Z https://archive.is/M2p1Z
w0mbat 5y ago
So what is the percentage of people that must be purged every year at Amazon? Does that goal vary by country? I've seen people quote 5%, 6%, 15% and even 30%. The 30% number was in the Amazon India post that was high-ranking here yesterday.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
While this is not the most popular imaginable method of selection, at least every hire gets a reasonably good chance to survive and will have the prestigious entry on the cv. As for the 6 percent, most companies have more than that in every department. Usually people who only survive by brown nosing the right people or being friends with a manager.
aranchelk 5y ago
I recently reread The New Economics. Deming talks about a factory worker screwing up on the production line, ruining a large quantity of product, and getting punished for it. He makes the argument that the design of the line, company policy, etc, have a far greater impact on workers’ productivity than the intrinsic qualities of those workers. I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer. Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  It depends entirely on what you're doing. I've worked in shops were I helped setup a golden way of building software.. and it worked great. We could take in junior engineers with no clue how to code and have them writing really good stuff in like two weeks, basically impossible to screw up. The tradeoff was that all of our tasks were.. basically the same kind of task. It was rare to do "revolutionary" work. I work now in a situation where every single case that comes across my desk is actually unique. I still have a toolbox, but I need a really big variety of tools and picking the wrong tool is very easy. Suddenly instead of a golden way I'm actually focusing on testing designs quickly and in isolation to make sure we're picking the right tools for some given design.
lakevieew 5y ago
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to complete. I was shocked and tried hard to not cry during my review. I had never been told earlier that there were any issues with my performance. This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job. I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    I wonder if people who are hired are being told about that before signing their contract.
    - Scramblejams 5y ago
      Amazonian here, I speak only for myself. FWIW, 4+ years in as an SDE and I've never been judged on that metric. If I had a manager like that, I would do what's best for my career. :-)
  - testing_1_2_3_4 5y ago
    they don't
  - VRay 5y ago
    To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled. Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.
myroon5 5y ago
Highly Valued 1 (HV1): we expect 35% of Amazonians are HV1 Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  That doesn’t sound right, I was HV after promotion and still got 2%.
  - myroon5 5y ago
    To clarify, HV1? There are 3 levels to HV
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Ah, I see. Perhaps it falls under the new “needs improvement” bucket while hv2 does not.
  - eyjafjallajokul 5y ago
    That 2% is putting you slightly higher to the new bottom of band. So to clarify, if previous years bottom of band was 100K, and this years bottom is 110K, your base bump + your projected stock value (current year + 15% increase planned YoY) will be 110K. Source: Former Amazon Manager.
giantg2 5y ago
20% of the curve is ranked top tier? I'd like to work there. It's 8% at my company. Of course company also says they evaluate against a standard, but it's really stack ranking behind the scenes. It think it's always going to be stack ranked in IT since the standards/metrics are so vague.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  20% sounds high, I thought it was 15%. Getting ranked TT usually means you are ripe for promotion but haven’t gotten it that year for whatever reason.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Yeah, at our company it means you can get promoted onto most teams (have your choice). I feel like they specifically keep some people below that so they can't leave as easily. They also have a "critical man" policy where each department can designate one or two people as critical so they can't leave there.
SMAAART 5y ago
OK, give me some latitude when reading this comment, while I have been thinking about it for a while, it's still a bit raw. For starters Amazon's policy is similar to GE's in the 90's, where every year they would let go the bottom 10% of the workforce. Either way, we need to decide whether the part of the workforce that is let go are bad workers or a mismatch with the company. I want to believe that there are very few bad workers, and that the majority of cases are a question of mismatch. If that's the case, parting way is the best outcome for both the company and the workers; so that they can both move on and seek metter match. Maybe we need to embrace more this practice, and - AT THE SAME TIME - fix the hiring process that is broken beyond belief.
alpha_squared 5y ago
A friend with a background in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology was hired at Amazon a few years back and was shocked to discover the 10% turnover rate. As they shared, they took it upon themselves to find a better way to manage turnover and have a better performance assessment system. They implemented it and brielfy reduced turnover to 3%; until Bezos intervened and explicitly asked for at least 6% turnover. For someone with a background in I/O psych and interest in improving worker well-being, it was soul-crushing and they soon left. It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Is setting internal attrition rates uncommon in the industry?
mathattack 5y ago
6% per year isn’t that high for an “Up or out” culture. Seems par for the course for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, GE and (in the past) Microsoft. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that it’s par for the course for white collar work. (Overall attrition at these firms is even higher)
venkat223 5y ago
They delay if money 8s received in advance for floatand pipeline funds in India.If COD they deliver quickly.But they sometimes return the stuff without delivering.Funny and cranky in India.Many stuff don't confirm to the pictures and standards mentioned.Important household stuff delivery wantonly delayed.
silexia 5y ago
This whole article is framed as if Amazon is doing bad things. My impression is that this is a fair and pretty easy on the employees way to manage employee reviews.
- qigtyofhp 5y ago
  It's not. Managers lie about performance of their employees in order to either save themselves or save their favorites in the group. I'm a current Amazon employee.
retrocryptid 5y ago
Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams. The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses. Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses. We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention. Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.
madrox 5y ago
As a former Amazon manager, I don’t like how this characterizes management as a mustache twirling Machiavellian. I don’t know what they saw, but I totally believe they predict a third of people on pips to fail. I’m actually surprised it’s that low of a percentage. It’s been my experience from more than Amazon that pip failure is higher than that. I was never encouraged to do anything that would contribute to something that looked like stack ranking. However, maybe this practice was not in place with engineers. I don’t really know, but it wasn’t my experience. However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.

508 points by flowerlad 5y ago

habibur 5y ago

So what's the problem? Is that unethical or illegal?

Traster 5y ago
The issue with it is that if your performance isn't up to scratch managers are more incentivized to force you out than to work with you to get your performance up.
- flowerlad 5y ago
  Not just that. They can be more lax in their hiring processes. That is unethical.
safog 5y ago
Have you heard of hire to fire? When there's an incentive to game a metric, the metric gets gamed.
- habibur 5y ago
  Valid point. The system can be gamed.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that people - except himself of course - are lazy so they need to be terrorized into being productive by firing a certain percentage of the employees. Ultimately, it damages not just Amazon's brand as a employer, it reflects poorly on Amazon employees and managers for going along with this charade.
    - danuker 5y ago
      > you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end, whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a manager has no incentive to do bad hires.
      - mxvzr 5y ago
        My understanding is that even once the manager has filled their team with top performers they'll keep hiring every year for the sole purpose of firing them later in order to meet the quota
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        Uhh.. no. I don't know if you ever hired or fired anyone, but, in US at least, if you don't want your unemployment insurance to go up, you want to be able to prove that it was a firing for cause. Perversely, in Amazon case what this means that manager has to hire an employee just bad enough that the 'for cause' firing will be ready for him and he/she just needs to document it. I fail to understand how people do not see how this simple metric can be gamed. Am I the only person thinking in those weird terms imposed by the system?
DesiLurker 5y ago
no problems unless you are willing to be upfront about it and pay a premium for this 'feature'. Its highly unethical otherwise, especially for immigrants who may be putting their legal status in jeopardy. Cynical part of me suspects they want to use this kind of engineers to create work-slave like culture for everybody.

the_jeremy 5y ago

I don't think this is news to anyone. Yes, Amazon has an "unregretted attrition" target. The only surprising thing was this: > The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show I assumed it was much higher.

breput 5y ago
85% - 100% is technically "more than one-third".
everdrive 5y ago
I was under the impression that a PIP was nearly always a "here's your chance to get another job" warning, and never really an earnest chance to improve. Does anyone understand differently?
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I was put on a PIP at Google and kept my job afterwards, they basically put massive training wheels on you. I had a director checking in with me 2-3 a week to put the pressure on, even doing some pair programming which was interesting. They really are trying to figure out why you aren't working well and see if you are a lost cause.
  - todd_t 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on the "interesting" aspect of pairing with the director?
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      I guess it shows that they weren't just going to take a manager's word it and that multiple levels of management engaged in a PIP. Especially with how busy this director was typically, it was a use of their time that I didn't expect. Also, having a director be competent enough as an IC to pair program was something I hadn't experienced or expected.

ladyattis 5y ago

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of constant churn on what seems like baseless theories. If it's your immediate boss that's tired of one particular slacker that's one thing but it's a wholly different situation when HR comes down on your boss demanding they fire 6% of their team whether or not they're doing great. It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.

xibalba 5y ago
A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.
- retrocryptid 5y ago
  By what measure of productivity?
  - xibalba 5y ago
    Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

kleiba 5y ago

No worries - in academia, the number is a lot higher.

selimthegrim 5y ago
True - 7 years at my university as a grad student and I've been here longer than at least three or four of their new junior faculty hires (including replacements for some I used to work for)

retrocryptid 5y ago

This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want. It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it. Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants. Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you? About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting. About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved. Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company. It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
> you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter Unless it's in writing, you should never, ever, ever take a statement like this at face value.

retrocryptid 5y ago

Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."

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jandrese 5y ago
Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only the best"?
- weimerica 5y ago
  Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was stated explicit in the interview.
  - TheHypnotist 5y ago
    Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - crackercrews 5y ago
    I once heard it said: government jobs are welfare for the middle class. IMO it's not 100% accurate but it's better than 50%.

julianeon 5y ago

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

retrocryptid 5y ago
There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Seems like there must be so much effort wasted in getting new people spun up on corporate culture, development style, internal tooling, etc... only to have half of them gone in less than a year. Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?
- nunez 5y ago
  Amazon hires at an insane clip.
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
  I used the same tool an the numbers were very similar 7-8 years ago. The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs. The 6% in the article is incredibely underestimated.
Sevii 5y ago
Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It is possible that you are missing the point of this. While it works, it is saving company millions in compensation and keep internal upward pressures low. It is absolutely not sustainable, but it ever comes to the point that it has to be adjusted, it can be. And changing those policies will be so much easier with extra cash in hand to 'attract' new workers.

LatteLazy 5y ago

My mother worked at a UK state school. They had this over a decade ago.

joshe 5y ago

The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have been moved/retrained/let go. The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker. There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.

paxys 5y ago
It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more). Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.

intricatedetail 5y ago

It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at the same time company is boasting about making billions and avoiding taxes. They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce. This is despicable. These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.

astrange 5y ago
When the number of houses is fixed, the price of a house is infinite, so of course you can't save for it. The solution is to build more houses, not give everyone a raise. Also Amazon is not dodging state income taxes because Washington doesn't have a state income tax.

nkssy 5y ago

If you can get fired because of some messed up policy like this then you don't need to take ownership for being fired anymore. Also, why show initiative if you're going to be fired randomly anyway? Why even work hard at all? Why show loyalty or goodwill? Just show up, do the work, participate in the general workplace nonsense purely for appearances and have your parachute always ready. Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations. On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way. I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
I understand your argument and it is an interesting given the technical source of demoralization. What I submit to you that this level demoralization already happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that is merely a 7 letter word with little to no meaning. I guess what I am saying it is not a new trend. Just a stepping stone in corporate America. The only difference is now, we don't get Mr. Burns choosing this, this and this one ( keep the egghead ); this time is a blackbox algorithm that won't ever touch the real decision makers ( cuz someone with enough forethought will add an exclusion list :P ).
- nkssy 5y ago
  I definitely agree this isn’t a new trend. What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain about retention and skills shortages and a host of other problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so temporary visas for acquiring talent. Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a dark pattern.
5y ago

plank_time 5y ago

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price. If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.

renewiltord 5y ago
That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rkalla 5y ago
  Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.
  - _rs 5y ago
    Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.

jasonladuke0311 5y ago

With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.

kevstev 5y ago
I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity, and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just focused on filling this one specific role, but the process spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had already committed to another job, but figured I would see the process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you are interested I can dig it up. But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but its much more recent that those stories started coming out from the engineering side of things.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Also wondering if the creation of platforms like Glassdoor, Blind, even r/CSCareerQuestions have allowed these issues to come to light.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Ironically, those are all the same platforms that made me want to contemplate ending it all because I work at Amazon. After I blocked them at the router level I started to feel better, until I realized people think I’m inferior no matter if I see them say it or not.

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neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/M2p1Z https://archive.is/M2p1Z

w0mbat 5y ago

So what is the percentage of people that must be purged every year at Amazon? Does that goal vary by country? I've seen people quote 5%, 6%, 15% and even 30%. The 30% number was in the Amazon India post that was high-ranking here yesterday.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

While this is not the most popular imaginable method of selection, at least every hire gets a reasonably good chance to survive and will have the prestigious entry on the cv. As for the 6 percent, most companies have more than that in every department. Usually people who only survive by brown nosing the right people or being friends with a manager.

aranchelk 5y ago

I recently reread The New Economics. Deming talks about a factory worker screwing up on the production line, ruining a large quantity of product, and getting punished for it. He makes the argument that the design of the line, company policy, etc, have a far greater impact on workers’ productivity than the intrinsic qualities of those workers. I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer. Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.

vorpalhex 5y ago
It depends entirely on what you're doing. I've worked in shops were I helped setup a golden way of building software.. and it worked great. We could take in junior engineers with no clue how to code and have them writing really good stuff in like two weeks, basically impossible to screw up. The tradeoff was that all of our tasks were.. basically the same kind of task. It was rare to do "revolutionary" work. I work now in a situation where every single case that comes across my desk is actually unique. I still have a toolbox, but I need a really big variety of tools and picking the wrong tool is very easy. Suddenly instead of a golden way I'm actually focusing on testing designs quickly and in isolation to make sure we're picking the right tools for some given design.

lakevieew 5y ago

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to complete. I was shocked and tried hard to not cry during my review. I had never been told earlier that there were any issues with my performance. This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job. I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.

ferdowsi 5y ago
I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  I wonder if people who are hired are being told about that before signing their contract.
  - Scramblejams 5y ago
    Amazonian here, I speak only for myself. FWIW, 4+ years in as an SDE and I've never been judged on that metric. If I had a manager like that, I would do what's best for my career. :-)
- testing_1_2_3_4 5y ago
  they don't
- VRay 5y ago
  To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled. Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.

myroon5 5y ago

Highly Valued 1 (HV1): we expect 35% of Amazonians are HV1 Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY

rejectedandsad 5y ago
That doesn’t sound right, I was HV after promotion and still got 2%.
- myroon5 5y ago
  To clarify, HV1? There are 3 levels to HV
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Ah, I see. Perhaps it falls under the new “needs improvement” bucket while hv2 does not.
- eyjafjallajokul 5y ago
  That 2% is putting you slightly higher to the new bottom of band. So to clarify, if previous years bottom of band was 100K, and this years bottom is 110K, your base bump + your projected stock value (current year + 15% increase planned YoY) will be 110K. Source: Former Amazon Manager.

giantg2 5y ago

20% of the curve is ranked top tier? I'd like to work there. It's 8% at my company. Of course company also says they evaluate against a standard, but it's really stack ranking behind the scenes. It think it's always going to be stack ranked in IT since the standards/metrics are so vague.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
20% sounds high, I thought it was 15%. Getting ranked TT usually means you are ripe for promotion but haven’t gotten it that year for whatever reason.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Yeah, at our company it means you can get promoted onto most teams (have your choice). I feel like they specifically keep some people below that so they can't leave as easily. They also have a "critical man" policy where each department can designate one or two people as critical so they can't leave there.

SMAAART 5y ago

OK, give me some latitude when reading this comment, while I have been thinking about it for a while, it's still a bit raw. For starters Amazon's policy is similar to GE's in the 90's, where every year they would let go the bottom 10% of the workforce. Either way, we need to decide whether the part of the workforce that is let go are bad workers or a mismatch with the company. I want to believe that there are very few bad workers, and that the majority of cases are a question of mismatch. If that's the case, parting way is the best outcome for both the company and the workers; so that they can both move on and seek metter match. Maybe we need to embrace more this practice, and - AT THE SAME TIME - fix the hiring process that is broken beyond belief.

alpha_squared 5y ago

A friend with a background in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology was hired at Amazon a few years back and was shocked to discover the 10% turnover rate. As they shared, they took it upon themselves to find a better way to manage turnover and have a better performance assessment system. They implemented it and brielfy reduced turnover to 3%; until Bezos intervened and explicitly asked for at least 6% turnover. For someone with a background in I/O psych and interest in improving worker well-being, it was soul-crushing and they soon left. It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Is setting internal attrition rates uncommon in the industry?

mathattack 5y ago

6% per year isn’t that high for an “Up or out” culture. Seems par for the course for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, GE and (in the past) Microsoft. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that it’s par for the course for white collar work. (Overall attrition at these firms is even higher)

venkat223 5y ago

They delay if money 8s received in advance for floatand pipeline funds in India.If COD they deliver quickly.But they sometimes return the stuff without delivering.Funny and cranky in India.Many stuff don't confirm to the pictures and standards mentioned.Important household stuff delivery wantonly delayed.

silexia 5y ago

This whole article is framed as if Amazon is doing bad things. My impression is that this is a fair and pretty easy on the employees way to manage employee reviews.

qigtyofhp 5y ago
It's not. Managers lie about performance of their employees in order to either save themselves or save their favorites in the group. I'm a current Amazon employee.

retrocryptid 5y ago

Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams. The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses. Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses. We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention. Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.

madrox 5y ago

As a former Amazon manager, I don’t like how this characterizes management as a mustache twirling Machiavellian. I don’t know what they saw, but I totally believe they predict a third of people on pips to fail. I’m actually surprised it’s that low of a percentage. It’s been my experience from more than Amazon that pip failure is higher than that. I was never encouraged to do anything that would contribute to something that looked like stack ranking. However, maybe this practice was not in place with engineers. I don’t really know, but it wasn’t my experience. However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.