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> The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank the

> The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics. Of course every org/VP has some latitude, but this is a common principle adopted by many VPs to appease the "bar raiser" standards as well as giving enough motivation to axe employees with considerable equity despite how good they may be on an absolute scale. This was the policy at a number of orgs when I was there 5 years ago, and I have heard similar stories as recently as 2019 pre-covid.

the_snooze 5y ago
>Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.
- qqtt 5y ago
  > That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team. I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad. It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists. It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly. Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    And all these sounds to me that devs at Amazon needs unionization rather faster than the poor workers in their warehouses.
    - Edman274 5y ago
      As bad as it is for any developer at Amazon, I have to say that I'm going to feel more sympathy for the people in the warehouse who are told to get back to work when a line worker dies of a heart attack in the middle of their shift due to stress than any developer who can always leave and get a fine job somewhere else. The precariat in those warehouses need collective bargaining more than any developer, anywhere (except for maybe game developers).
      - unnouinceput 5y ago
        A dev's work is mental, a warehouse work is physical. I agree that the worker on warehouse have it tough, no denying there. However mental recovery takes longer that physical one. I have a joke for you, goes something like this: "Big rich guy goes to Mexico for vacation. There he meets Julio, a simple worker who after work is drinking in the bar with his friends and enjoys a simple life. Rich guy asks why Julio doesn't work longer & harder to make more money. Why? So when you grow older to have time, like me, to enjoy life and party with friends. I can party with my friends right now and enjoy life just as well"
        BoorishBears 5y ago
        You've never seen Amazon warehouse work if you think it's not mental and physical. A story I don't really tell people is about my 3 days working at an Amazon warehouse. The short version is, I'm a self-taught dev who didn't realize he was good enough to be a full time dev (spoiler as an L6 making >500k TC, I was!) So I applied to a few labor jobs: Amazon Warehouse, pushing carts at WalMart, etc. And a few dev jobs: Nothing fancy, a few local dev shops looking for a mobile dev. - I get a job with a local dev shop, but I'm still not sure I can actually make it there. So I still take my Amazon Warehouse job thinking I can work both somehow... I fell asleep at my computer on my first day at the office, which is why I only worked at that warehouse for 3 days. But those 3 days are permanently etched in my mind. BDL5, I still recognize it looking at random Amazon deliveries when I visit my parents. I'm not sure what it is about that place that makes me slightly sick to even recall, I think it's a mixture of: - The awful lighting. That place was lit in this sickly blue light that made you feel sleepy and wide awake at the same time, and stuck with you after you went outside - The noise: BDL5 is a sort center. It's tiny compared to a normal fulfillment center. And it was still constantly noisy. Something like 3 acres of open warehouse, miles of conveyer belts, constant truck loading and unloading. - The nature of the work: I think part of what makes me sick thinking about it is how depressingly menial the work was. Again, I was only there 3 days, but it's a nightmare to imagine standing on your feet for hours wrestling with comically large shrink wrap rolls for a living. Or packing useless crap into a truck for hours on end. I don't believe humans were meant for that kind of repetition. This was when BDL5 first opened and you could see how uneasy people seemed to get as the weight of the work landed on them. - Amazon is such a depressing company. I mean I know all of this and of course, and I still use Amazon, it's just that ubiquitous and all-encompassing (although not as much lately) It's just reached this point where something needs to give. I'm ok with not being able to place orders at 4 AM and getting them before 8PM. We'll live if 2 day shipping becomes 3 and that allows some shorter shifts for the same pay. But yeah, devs have it easy compared to all that.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy. Which is another reason I'd never touch Amazon with a ten-foot pole: it's not worth the risk of getting used and abused like that (on top of all the other issues).
- thebean11 5y ago
  Can I volunteer? I'll make it super easy to fire me and not even show up, just collect a paycheck for a couple weeks.
  - tabtab 5y ago
    Sr. Slackologist
- User23 5y ago
  Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements. I agree, but the managers are gaming the system so there's no way they could be transparent about it. As a new hire, it would be a huge punch in the gut to be setup for failure like this and not be in on it from the start.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
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ubermonkey 5y ago
Wow, I thought the horror stories out of MSFT had put an end to stack-ranking forced-PIP evaluations. It seems incredibly counter productive, and leads to things like hire-to-fire that are just indefensible. Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?
- darkwater 5y ago
  What would be the rationale behind this? In their ideal world, why do they need it?
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Lazy thinking, IMO. It's the sort of concept a child might come up with because it is so "simple". If you think about it for more than 5 minutes you see the problem, but it's too late, the lazy thinkers have mandated it.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Every company over a certain size will have stack ranking or something like it. Division leaders and VPs need an available knife to stick in the backs of their rivals. If stack ranking or URA doesn't exist, then they'll use a down quarter to create it, ("With the economy the way it is, we have to do some belt-tightening") then wield it to destroy their enemies. If all the VPs are cheerful, happy, nice guys, then someone will emerge from the lower ranks to overthrow the weakest member. From there, the bloodbath begins.
    - bogomipz 5y ago
      What is "URA" here?
      - sbierwagen 5y ago
        "Unregretted attrition", Amazon internal jargon that mandates firing 6% of all employees every year: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-attrition-rate-people-not-sad-to-lose-2021-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at... This program is obviously not applied uniformly. It's purpose is to be bent to eliminate divisions that lose internal political battles.
khazhoux 5y ago
Counter-point (and I'm a manager): Every single team I've managed, I've given the lowest performers a huge benefit of the doubt, and a long timeline for improvement. In some cases, it wound up being a PIP->firing. But more often than not, I wind up trying one thing after another with the lowest performers, because I so much want to believe in them. They're always nice people, but they don't deliver. They say "I'm working on X... I'm still working on X... Will have something ready in 2 weeks... I hit a blocker, it'll be another 2 weeks." And I try to help them, unblock them, mentor them, reassign them to some other task that might be better suited. But the harsh reality is that many many people are just not good developers, no matter how much you both want them to be. So on every team I've ever managed, if I'd been forced to put the lowest performer on a PIP, it would have been good for the whole team. And I think I'm probably not alone in this. (Of course, this applies only to a limit. At some point, you've eliminated the actual low-performers, and shouldn't ever manufacture a PIP just to meet a numbrs threshold.)
- prewett 5y ago
  As a one-time thing, sure, stack rank is likely to be fairly effective. But what would have happened on your team if you had to get rid of your lowest performer every year?
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Would suck, for sure. In fact, for a couple of quarters, I was asked to name the lowest performer on my team, and then that person got ranked as one of the lowest performers across my manager's org, and it put me in a shitty situation as a manager because the engineer wasn't actually at PIP stage yet (and we didn't ever go to PIP) but it basically soiled their chance of being promoted for however long the other managers will remember seeing that name on the "low performer" list.
- sizzle 5y ago
  How do these low performers pass the high bar for interviewing??
  - 5y ago

the_snooze 5y ago

qqtt 5y ago
> That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team. I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad. It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists. It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly. Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  And all these sounds to me that devs at Amazon needs unionization rather faster than the poor workers in their warehouses.
  - Edman274 5y ago
    As bad as it is for any developer at Amazon, I have to say that I'm going to feel more sympathy for the people in the warehouse who are told to get back to work when a line worker dies of a heart attack in the middle of their shift due to stress than any developer who can always leave and get a fine job somewhere else. The precariat in those warehouses need collective bargaining more than any developer, anywhere (except for maybe game developers).
    - unnouinceput 5y ago
      A dev's work is mental, a warehouse work is physical. I agree that the worker on warehouse have it tough, no denying there. However mental recovery takes longer that physical one. I have a joke for you, goes something like this: "Big rich guy goes to Mexico for vacation. There he meets Julio, a simple worker who after work is drinking in the bar with his friends and enjoys a simple life. Rich guy asks why Julio doesn't work longer & harder to make more money. Why? So when you grow older to have time, like me, to enjoy life and party with friends. I can party with my friends right now and enjoy life just as well"
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        You've never seen Amazon warehouse work if you think it's not mental and physical. A story I don't really tell people is about my 3 days working at an Amazon warehouse. The short version is, I'm a self-taught dev who didn't realize he was good enough to be a full time dev (spoiler as an L6 making >500k TC, I was!) So I applied to a few labor jobs: Amazon Warehouse, pushing carts at WalMart, etc. And a few dev jobs: Nothing fancy, a few local dev shops looking for a mobile dev. - I get a job with a local dev shop, but I'm still not sure I can actually make it there. So I still take my Amazon Warehouse job thinking I can work both somehow... I fell asleep at my computer on my first day at the office, which is why I only worked at that warehouse for 3 days. But those 3 days are permanently etched in my mind. BDL5, I still recognize it looking at random Amazon deliveries when I visit my parents. I'm not sure what it is about that place that makes me slightly sick to even recall, I think it's a mixture of: - The awful lighting. That place was lit in this sickly blue light that made you feel sleepy and wide awake at the same time, and stuck with you after you went outside - The noise: BDL5 is a sort center. It's tiny compared to a normal fulfillment center. And it was still constantly noisy. Something like 3 acres of open warehouse, miles of conveyer belts, constant truck loading and unloading. - The nature of the work: I think part of what makes me sick thinking about it is how depressingly menial the work was. Again, I was only there 3 days, but it's a nightmare to imagine standing on your feet for hours wrestling with comically large shrink wrap rolls for a living. Or packing useless crap into a truck for hours on end. I don't believe humans were meant for that kind of repetition. This was when BDL5 first opened and you could see how uneasy people seemed to get as the weight of the work landed on them. - Amazon is such a depressing company. I mean I know all of this and of course, and I still use Amazon, it's just that ubiquitous and all-encompassing (although not as much lately) It's just reached this point where something needs to give. I'm ok with not being able to place orders at 4 AM and getting them before 8PM. We'll live if 2 day shipping becomes 3 and that allows some shorter shifts for the same pay. But yeah, devs have it easy compared to all that.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy. Which is another reason I'd never touch Amazon with a ten-foot pole: it's not worth the risk of getting used and abused like that (on top of all the other issues).

thebean11 5y ago
Can I volunteer? I'll make it super easy to fire me and not even show up, just collect a paycheck for a couple weeks.
- tabtab 5y ago
  Sr. Slackologist
User23 5y ago
Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements. I agree, but the managers are gaming the system so there's no way they could be transparent about it. As a new hire, it would be a huge punch in the gut to be setup for failure like this and not be in on it from the start.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ubermonkey 5y ago

Wow, I thought the horror stories out of MSFT had put an end to stack-ranking forced-PIP evaluations. It seems incredibly counter productive, and leads to things like hire-to-fire that are just indefensible. Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?

darkwater 5y ago
What would be the rationale behind this? In their ideal world, why do they need it?
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Lazy thinking, IMO. It's the sort of concept a child might come up with because it is so "simple". If you think about it for more than 5 minutes you see the problem, but it's too late, the lazy thinkers have mandated it.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Every company over a certain size will have stack ranking or something like it. Division leaders and VPs need an available knife to stick in the backs of their rivals. If stack ranking or URA doesn't exist, then they'll use a down quarter to create it, ("With the economy the way it is, we have to do some belt-tightening") then wield it to destroy their enemies. If all the VPs are cheerful, happy, nice guys, then someone will emerge from the lower ranks to overthrow the weakest member. From there, the bloodbath begins.
  - bogomipz 5y ago
    What is "URA" here?
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      "Unregretted attrition", Amazon internal jargon that mandates firing 6% of all employees every year: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-attrition-rate-people-not-sad-to-lose-2021-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at... This program is obviously not applied uniformly. It's purpose is to be bent to eliminate divisions that lose internal political battles.

khazhoux 5y ago

Counter-point (and I'm a manager): Every single team I've managed, I've given the lowest performers a huge benefit of the doubt, and a long timeline for improvement. In some cases, it wound up being a PIP->firing. But more often than not, I wind up trying one thing after another with the lowest performers, because I so much want to believe in them. They're always nice people, but they don't deliver. They say "I'm working on X... I'm still working on X... Will have something ready in 2 weeks... I hit a blocker, it'll be another 2 weeks." And I try to help them, unblock them, mentor them, reassign them to some other task that might be better suited. But the harsh reality is that many many people are just not good developers, no matter how much you both want them to be. So on every team I've ever managed, if I'd been forced to put the lowest performer on a PIP, it would have been good for the whole team. And I think I'm probably not alone in this. (Of course, this applies only to a limit. At some point, you've eliminated the actual low-performers, and shouldn't ever manufacture a PIP just to meet a numbrs threshold.)

prewett 5y ago
As a one-time thing, sure, stack rank is likely to be fairly effective. But what would have happened on your team if you had to get rid of your lowest performer every year?
- khazhoux 5y ago
  Would suck, for sure. In fact, for a couple of quarters, I was asked to name the lowest performer on my team, and then that person got ranked as one of the lowest performers across my manager's org, and it put me in a shitty situation as a manager because the engineer wasn't actually at PIP stage yet (and we didn't ever go to PIP) but it basically soiled their chance of being promoted for however long the other managers will remember seeing that name on the "low performer" list.
sizzle 5y ago
How do these low performers pass the high bar for interviewing??
- 5y ago