9 ms·

I never understood the secretive nature of these Amazon "devplan" / "FOCUS" lists. If an employee has a performance issue, they should know. Period. If they are

• temp8964 5y ago
  Not really. The management team can make mistakes too. In those cases, it is not clear whether it is better for the employee to know. There is no clear cut obvious answer to this, unless you assume everyone is an emotionless robot.
  • potatolicious 5y ago
    I didn't read OP's comment as "performance issues should be publicized within the workforce" and more "performance issues should be known to the individual employee" If management thinks you're doing a bad job, it's not needed to make it known to the entire team - but you should know.
    • temp8964 5y ago
      I don't think you should always know. I also updated the language.
      • lazide 5y ago
        Doing something about a problem generally requires someone is aware that a problem exists right? Otherwise it’s just marking them for future termination without telling them, which seems like a waste of everyone’s time.
        • temp8964 5y ago
          No. The management team can make honest mistake. After preliminary investigation, they find they are wrong. No need to tell the employee in this regard. I did not say they should never tell the employee. I think sometimes it's unnecessary.
          • lazide 5y ago
            Shouldn’t that investigation happen before they are considered a performance problem and put on the list? Giving the employee a chance to rebut any performance problem assumptions would be an important part of this, and would also require they know.
            • temp8964 5y ago
              Yes. At some point the employee should know. But there is a process, and I don't think they should inform the employee right from the start.
              • lazide 5y ago
                How much experience do you have managing people? In my 15+ years doing so, I’ve never heard or seen a situation in a reasonable organization where someone gets on a list like this (intentionally, as compared to their manager screwing up by not having a conversation with them before it is clearly a huge problem to everyone else) without knowing they are going to get on a list like this if they don’t improve. I have heard it at many places that are flogging employees or using scare tactics to get every cent worth of value they can put or people before they burn out and get thrown on the rubbish bin.
  • underwater 5y ago
    It's not like management will just let the employer keep underperforming. They'll secretly PIP them, let them continue on their course, and then fire them with no warning.
    • temp8964 5y ago
      No. Sometimes the employee didn't underperform at all. Why do you assume the manager always know the truth?
      • CamTin 5y ago
        Management effectively does know the truth, for the trivial reason that they get to decide what the truth is. They are the ones who get to decide what counts as performing and underperforming. It's not as though there is some objective way to determine who is and isn't a desirable employee.
        • temp8964 5y ago
          Not sure what you mean "truth". There is a discovery process, before they form their opinions.
          • CamTin 5y ago
            Yes, I was mirroring your own use of the word "truth." My point is that performance reviews are simply the result of management's opinions. You asked the question "Why do you assume the manager always know the truth?" and the answer is that truth is irrelevant (or perhaps even nonsense as a concept) in this context. Only opinions matter, specifically the opinions that make up your performance review, which are the opinions of management. There is no objective way to measure your performance or, if there is, management likely is not doing so unless you work in a field with very easily measurable output (billable hours or something like that). As in many or most aspects of social activities like work, objective reality effectively does not exist. Only the consensus reality matters.
• handmodel 5y ago
  It doesn't seem crazy to me on the surface. You say you are worried about "toxic culture which breeds stress" but I think you could equally say that constantly getting notes that you are a below-average performer would be just as bad.
  • chris11 5y ago
    Discovering that I misunderstood the seriousness of an issue is more stressful than being told something explicitly. And a major misunderstanding decreases trust. It would be much better to explicitly be told I'm on a pre-PIP plan than to assume it's a less serious issue and find out when I try to change teams.
    • lazide 5y ago
      I’m pretty sure they won’t let someone change teams, and many of the people on this list aren’t expected (and for some managers, maybe not even allowed) to improve.
      • pseudalopex 5y ago
        That's the point. They don't want a blocked transfer to be the first sign they could lose their job.
• mataug 5y ago
  A toxic culture of fear is the intended effect here. People at amazon love to discuss the flywheel effect[1]. The flywheel here is the culture of fear that keeps employees on their toes. Bezos believes that employees are inherently lazy[2], and it seems like fear is tool the S-team have chosen to solve the problem of lazy employees. This has a lot of unintended consequences[3], but the executives with the power to change this don't care as long as they keep getting rewarded with a higher stock price, and fresh college grads who are willing to sacrifice themselves at the altar. [1]https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-flywheel-explained/ https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-flywhee... [2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-bezos-belief-all-workers-are-lazy-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be... [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786829
  • UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    Do you think that this culture will shift with his retirement, or do you think that this culture is so embedded within the fabric of Amazon itself, that there is no separating this kind of behavior from the company without a dismantling of the corporate structure itself?
    • mataug 5y ago
      Andy Jassy used to lead AWS before becoming Amazon's CEO. AWS has a reputation of being a difficult place to work, even more so than Amazon's other divisions. So no, I don't think anything will change. https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/he-leads-fear-and-pressure-former-amazon-employees-andy-jassy-companys https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/he-l...
      • traskjd 5y ago
        Yes, those poor AWS employees sure have it tough vs that warehouse division.
        • 5y ago
• bostonsre 5y ago
  Maybe they are just trying to hide their unspoken requirement of firing a given proportion of their workplace for managers to be considered good. It should help give them plausible deniability when they need to fire someone that wasn't on the list as well.
• opportune 5y ago
  I have spent a lot of time on Blind where this is discussed often and I think I have an idea what is going on. At a high level, Amazon orgs have Unregretted Attrition (URA) targets/quotas for orgs. Not every manager needs to hit the exact target but under a certain level of middle management they do. Because of this built-in churn they need to have a pipeline of low performers - because once the current set of URA targets get managed out or leave you will need to still hit that quota next quarter/half/year/whatever. So maybe your quota is 5% but you have another 5-10% extra in earlier stages of your pipeline so you can sacrifice them later. In the later stages when you’re actively getting managed out they put you on a formal PIP. In theory it’s possible to “get out” of it but because of the quotas it’s pretty much a lost cause. So on Blind the most common suggestion for people on PIP is to do the absolute bare minimum and start interviewing elsewhere, expecting to fail the PIP. I imagine the reason Amazon doesn’t want people to know about Focus/Dev plans is that once you know you’re in the earlier stages of the pipeline, you may come to a similar conclusion. Basically if a target is painted on your back and you know there’s a high probability you’re going to get managed in the next 6 months, it’s better to do the bare minimum at work and focus as much as possible on getting a new job. But from Amazon’s perspective that’s a lot of lost work/time/money, and they’re not even sure yet that they want to get rid of those people. And further, if employees don’t know about the performance plan there is less chance they will deliberately sandbag and may actually improve their ranking enough to move off the early stage pipeline. In my opinion the root of all this disfunction is the quota system. If managers were not forced to manage out so many people and being on a “low performance plan” at any stage were seen as an actual opportunity to identify issues and improve performance, there would be much less incentive to sandbag by doing the bare minimum, and also much less need for secrecy about the process. But this is Amazon, I am sure they have thought deeply about this. My guess is that they have done the math on many alternatives and this is the least-worst. For example by managing out so many people they can be less selective in hiring which may be better overall (eg an overall acceptance rate of 20% with 10% of those being false positives fills more roles than an overall acceptance rate of 10% with a 0% false positive rate). Of course managing people out also has a cost in creating an unpleasant/toxic work environment that itself increases churn, which they may or may not account for. Keep in mind due to their vesting models, a good performer burning out and quitting after 2 years is actually good for their bottom line. As long as they continue to fill roles I doubt they will be incentivized to change this model.
• tlogan 5y ago
  I bet this FOCUS list is used by managers to prevent good engineers moving to a different team. Also my experience tells me that all these mega corps have very similar culture.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• comfysocks 5y ago
  Amazon is the company that created a button you can push to reorder toilet paper. It takes all of the friction out ordering from them, and gives you the option to purchase right at the moment of greatest need. FOCUS is a "button" managers can push to fire employees. Once you push the button, the employee is on track for termination and all of the CYA for-cause documentation happens automatically. From my reading of the article it sounds like the part where the manager is to "... tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve." is completely optional and in fact requires that the manager take the initiative to actually do this. I could be wrong about this, but why would these instructions be in a FAQ if they were baked in to actual procedures? To me it seems like FOCUS is a dark pattern meant to encourage managers to implement stack ranking. It also seems like a tool that could be abused to make arbitrary firings seem like they are for legitimate cause.
• alanlovestea 5y ago
  It's a government regulation. An employee can perform terrible for many reasons one cannot control. For example, intro team communication. In order to avoid future lawsuit, Amazon has to set up an independent project without any external dependency for the person under PIP and document all the progress. So that the person being PIP cannot sue his employer inthe future.