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> The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they have a stated goal of cutti

by xienze 5y ago

> The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they have a stated goal of cutting the bottom 10% every year? I gotta think that can't go on forever without hitting the "capable talent" unless managers are hiring sacrificial lambs on purpose. Hmm, I feel like I've heard about that somewhere... https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-managers-performance-reviews-hire-to-fire-internal-turnover-goal-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-managers-performance-...

greedo 5y ago
GE was famous for this under Jack Welch?
- kergonath 5y ago
  That is not really an excuse, though. “But Jack did it before” wasn’t even an excuse in pre-school.
  - greedo 5y ago
    And? I was pointing out who was one of the first to pioneer this business practice.
ozzythecat 5y ago
I’ve only read about that online. I’ve never seen this happen in my six years at Amazon. In my experience we have the opposite problem. There are a lot of folks who are extremely talented in interviewing and whiteboard elegant solutions. But they fundamentally can’t or won’t deliver results. And what I’ve seen on Amazon is it’s really difficult to let go of someone once they are hired. But in my experience a lot of managers struggle at having hard and difficult conversations. And so you’ll see an engineer on the team who doesn’t pull their weight but the rest of the team picks up their slack. I fundamentally don’t believe that Amazon is letting go of talented engineers. Can some individual manager be terrible at their job and screw up? Yeah absolutely. But as a company, it’s extremely hard to find talented individuals. And then once you bring them in you have to invest in them and ramp them up. Having said that I worked on really hard problems at Amazon. Not everyone can or wants to solve those kinds of problems. I was successful because I enjoyed it. That’s where my priorities were. And there were other times where I struggled. Sometimes trying to solve a particular kind of problem or sometimes not having enough clarity, or realizing that we haven’t broken down a problem. But then there are individuals who just don’t have the ownership. If you have a not my problem kind of attitude, I don’t think you’ll last at Amazon very long. Eventually you’ll be let go and then you will be bitter about it. As an aside, you won’t ever hear about all the engineers at Amazon who enjoy doing their work, who enjoy the teams that they’re on, who have a really good relationship with their leadership teams. But you’ll hear the most loudest and vocal feedback from the people who are the wrong hires or they had a bad manager who messed them up. In the latter case I don’t think it’s a systemic issue. And to be honest, the positive stories don’t get the Readership or drive the outrage

by xienze 5y ago

greedo 5y ago

GE was famous for this under Jack Welch?

kergonath 5y ago
That is not really an excuse, though. “But Jack did it before” wasn’t even an excuse in pre-school.
- greedo 5y ago
  And? I was pointing out who was one of the first to pioneer this business practice.

ozzythecat 5y ago

I’ve only read about that online. I’ve never seen this happen in my six years at Amazon. In my experience we have the opposite problem. There are a lot of folks who are extremely talented in interviewing and whiteboard elegant solutions. But they fundamentally can’t or won’t deliver results. And what I’ve seen on Amazon is it’s really difficult to let go of someone once they are hired. But in my experience a lot of managers struggle at having hard and difficult conversations. And so you’ll see an engineer on the team who doesn’t pull their weight but the rest of the team picks up their slack. I fundamentally don’t believe that Amazon is letting go of talented engineers. Can some individual manager be terrible at their job and screw up? Yeah absolutely. But as a company, it’s extremely hard to find talented individuals. And then once you bring them in you have to invest in them and ramp them up. Having said that I worked on really hard problems at Amazon. Not everyone can or wants to solve those kinds of problems. I was successful because I enjoyed it. That’s where my priorities were. And there were other times where I struggled. Sometimes trying to solve a particular kind of problem or sometimes not having enough clarity, or realizing that we haven’t broken down a problem. But then there are individuals who just don’t have the ownership. If you have a not my problem kind of attitude, I don’t think you’ll last at Amazon very long. Eventually you’ll be let go and then you will be bitter about it. As an aside, you won’t ever hear about all the engineers at Amazon who enjoy doing their work, who enjoy the teams that they’re on, who have a really good relationship with their leadership teams. But you’ll hear the most loudest and vocal feedback from the people who are the wrong hires or they had a bad manager who messed them up. In the latter case I don’t think it’s a systemic issue. And to be honest, the positive stories don’t get the Readership or drive the outrage