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Amazon Pip Horror Story

• kosolam 5y ago
  What is this PIP thing?
• happywater 5y ago
  I think it is our holy duty to not be customers of such a company. Every time we pay Amazon(including AWS), we die a little inside. https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-off-company-building-seattle/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-o... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5fj9mh/amazon_employee_jumps_off_company_building_after/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5fj9mh/amazon_e...
• dreamer6 5y ago
  I was on a team at Amazon where I was in a role that had 5 peoople in and out of it within 2 years. The team had basically designated the role to be the one that they would PIP each year to help ensure that they could meet their UAR metrics.
• yakorevivan 5y ago
  Amazon is a shit company with a shit culture and a shitty founder. This company is like a virus. Wherever it goes, it kills off the local business population. Never work for such a company. Fuck you bezos!
• greatpostman 5y ago
  I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams and had a decent time at the company, but the nightmare situations are very real. You are replaceable and there’s no mercy
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > You are replaceable and there’s no mercy I don’t understand this though? Eventually someone’s head needs to roll. If you fail your project and get fired, how is your manager immune from consequence? They failed too (probably more).
  • BossingAround 5y ago
    Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot? In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in prod at the scale of Amazon. Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it's off the table and all I can do is wonder :).
    • ngc248 5y ago
      You may/may not learn, but living in situations like the OP was put in is horrible. Every day feels like hell, and if you burn out it may take years to recover.
      • BossingAround 5y ago
        This is my personal experience, which is why I'd advise people not to go through with the above thought experiment. Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this: > How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server") > Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ... > Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5 servers? > Hmm, probably write shell scripts. > How about 50 servers? > Shell scripts? > Even with 500 servers? > Hire more people..? And I keep feeling that these people don't have 10 YoE, they have 1-2 YoE times some coefficient. I feel like if you're in a "successful rut", that's what it will do to you. You feel like you're successful, but in fact, you have fallen horribly behind, without even knowing it. Your quality of life is probably fine, until you're laid off one day.
• goldenkey 5y ago
  Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle "Leadership Principles" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like "Be right a lot" or "Frugality." Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.
  • tobinfekkes 5y ago
    I logged in simply to comment a huge "thumbs-up" to any Brian Cantrill reference. I've got an entire playlist of all his various talks around the interwebs, just to listen (and re-listen) in the background while coding. It checks off all the education, tech, history and, critically, humor boxes.
  • tandymodel100 5y ago
    > Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There Still making more money than GCP and Azure (both of which are worse to use, IMHO) so...who cares?
    • Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
      When you're running a world wide service with lots of moving and connected parts this dramatically increases the danger you'll have catastrophes that will cost much or most of that market share. As a thought experiment, suppose all of AWS was down for a full week? What would happen after that? More realistically, how many times can us-east-chaos-monkey bring down various global services before a lot of its users start making moves to mitigate or eliminate their exposure to AWS? For a more concrete example, I'm working on a project that has an easy but critical use of cloud services. The more I read about Amazon following Microsoft into Ballmer era stack ranking madness, and the most AWS fails objectively fails, the lower the priority it gets for which cloud platform to support first and best.
• dedoussis 5y ago
  > I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective". $ npm update
  • dininski 5y ago
    Funnily enough Amazon has its own internal repo, including NPM. And it can be a pain in the ass to add anything to it, especially npm packages. So sometimes you would have to spend 5 minutes, or sometimes an hour, to import a single existing public NPM package into the internal repo.
• transitory_pce 5y ago
  This is a phenomenon common to all low grade/incompetent dev managers: When a dev asks for a team change they view it as a slap in the face because it has happened to them so often in the past and they take it as a personal offence. The fact is they are lousy managers and usually incompetent and nobody wants to work in their team. So they go on the offensive and try to manage the dev out before senior management realises that yet another dev doesn’t want to work with them.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Then senior management should be wondering why so many low performers are ending up with certain managers...
    • jonathankoren 5y ago
      Instead they’ll be wondering why these managers are so good at identifying poor performers. /s
    • pm90 5y ago
      It’s difficult to not feel empathy for people you have a relationship with. Even if a manager is incompetent, they will get the benefit of the doubt from vs a lowly engineer whom the Senior Manager does not have a personal relationship with. There are very few Senior Managers who take the time to look beyond what’s immediately presented to them.
      • drclau 5y ago
        So M2s+ are expected to have empathy for M1s, but M1s are not expected to have empathy for engineers. And, M2s+ having been M1s prior to being promoted, have to develop empathy when becoming M2s+. Have I described correctly the situation? Legend: M2 - senior management, has other managers reporting to them M1 - first layer of management, has workers / engineers as direct reports
        • pm90 5y ago
• theli 5y ago
  I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • bodge5000 5y ago
    Never worked for AWS, but I'd imagine its different depending on division/team. Before starting a job once I had an ex-colleague warn me against the company, saying he had friends there and it was brutal (none in the team I was joining, but its a big company). Turned out to be the opposite for me, and in fact was far nicer than the company I worked for when I was working for him. Big companies are often far less consistent across teams than you'd expect/they'd like it to be, for better or worse
    • Moru 5y ago
      It can even be different in the same team. It's about who wins the bully lottery just like in school. Some will go through school totally oblivious to the fact that some people gets so bullied that they decide to end their lives a few years down the road. Once I came in to work in the evening, I had forgotten to bring my phone with me. There I find one of my coworkers crying his heart out because the women treat him like shit. I had not noticed a thing until then. They thought he was sent there to optimize them away and was making his life hell. He had sold his appartment and moved to our little town to work but couldn't take it and moved back again.
      • deltaonefour 5y ago
        The women treat him like shit? What was he optimizing?
        • 5y ago
• yrral 5y ago
  Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right? Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?
  • freewilly1040 5y ago
    People don’t get friendlier up the food chain. It’s highly likely the line manager is reacting to pressure coming from above themselves.
    • mistyislands 5y ago
      Agree. It is unlikely the manager did this out of pettiness. He probably got pressured by his L7/L8 to fire someone for his org to meet the URA goal. He made the obvious choice and picked the guy applying for internal transfer. Why lose two people when you could just lose one?
  • goldenkey 5y ago
    HR at Amazon is a shit show. I had $100 of pizza stolen from the fridge at Amazon and I mentioned it casually to HR, as something notable but not too important. And HR then decided to tell my manager without my knowledge. The manager then berated me over communicating about a "trivial matter." So yeah, wouldn't put much stock in HR at Amazon.
    • rendall 5y ago
      Maybe manager stole the pizza.
      • goldenkey 5y ago
        Well, I left because of him. He stole my dignity.
• trhway 5y ago
  >I submited 51k lines of code in January that is well beyond real.
  • Mandatum 5y ago
    Who tracks that?
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      I had a manager who wanted to track it weekly and put it on a dashboard besides dev names. Thankfully he realized the idea was terrible/other events made it irrelevant, but it was discussed and code written to support doing it.
    • cerved 5y ago
      the version control system?
      • oblio 5y ago
        You still to do extra legwork to extract the info. It's not just: git contrib --linecount jdoe
    • slt2021 5y ago
      IBM and Microsoft used to do that a little bit more than a decade ago. Not surprisingly it turnes out that counting LOC leads to shitty spaghettincode and copy paste all over the place and complete ignore of DRY principle
      • 2sk21 5y ago
        I mostly worked in IBM research but once spent a few months on assignment in a product developed group in the mid 1990s. At the weekly group meeting, each developer would mention throw many lines of code had been reused. Turned out that there was a big monetary incentive to reuse code so developers would randomly include enormous libraries to pad out their numbers!
• treyfitty 5y ago
  People say that working for Amazon for a year is enough “training” to serve as a resume badge. However, I’d like to provide a counter to that: when I see Amazon on a resume, I actually discount the candidate. In my opinion, the branding has suffered tremendously and I view the candidate as a compensation maximizer beyond all costs- why else would you join Amazon despite the well known horror stories, as well as their complete disdain for human life in the name of “customer obsession?”
  • qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Um, you realize people need a job to put a shelter over their head and food in their mouth--right? For everyone below vice president Amazon is just a J-O-B to them. It's not their lifestyle, it's not their worldview. You're missing out on an unbelievable amount of good candidates with that view.
    • bodge5000 5y ago
      I have noticed on HN a weird idea that most programmers are insanely rich and can pick and choose any job they like (I even saw one person say "lets be honest, none of us need a job..."), so I guess they're going by the logic that if you work for them you either endorse their worldview or don't care, which as you say I doubt is true for the majority of us
      • qbasic_forever 5y ago
        You can look up the average salaries for Amazon folks on sites like glassdoor. They're known for being competitive but not particularly larger or better than any other tech company. They pay well enough to live in a high cost of living area like Seattle but that's about it. Someone who spends a couple years at amazon is not going to be 'insanely rich'.
      • pm90 5y ago
        Well, not insanely rich. But let’s not pretend that the profession doesn’t compensate way above average and lots of options to choose from. definitely favorable for labor in this market, which is unlike most other labor markets.
• Mandatum 5y ago
  I personally wouldn't choose to get blackballed by every MAGMA/MAAAM if I was living in the US and taking that sort of career path. Glad some folks are making this decision.
• deltaonefour 5y ago
  Why are people who do this never named? They should be named. This type of behavior perpetuates because despite this employee revealing a company issue.. the individual perpetrator can still hide behind anonymity. CALL these ass holes out.
  • hhmc 5y ago
    It's possible (although maybe not likely) that this guy really _did_ deserve to be put on PIP, and the team transfer request is completely incidental. Unless we can know for sure, or at least from a less biased source, we probably shouldn't doxx the manager?
    • deltaonefour 5y ago
      Yeah that's true. We really need some service like blind where people can anonymously review and score managers. We need votes to prove that a manager is an ass hole. One anecdotal story isn't enough. Maybe the service leaves the manager anonymous until the review amount crosses a certain threshold... 3 to 4 guys calling him out? Submit this to ycombinator!
      • deelly 5y ago
        Honest question: how to prevent abusing this system?
        • KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
          Hey we've come full circle to PIP again. But seriously: there isn't a way. This is why sites like Glassdoor are garbage and teacher rating sites have ruined careers over minor issues.
        • deltaonefour 5y ago
          So one email per company is allowed one vote. Similar to how blind allows one account per email. That prevents abuse. You don't like the guy, you can vote once because you have an email address at the company. If 3 or 4 people don't like the guy then the system assumes there is genuinely a problem with him and it reveals itself. That means one person can't run a smear campaign. At least 2 or 3 other people have to agree with you, and if they do then it's legit. The system masks the persons negative reviews until that manager has accumulated greater than 3 or 4. Three or four negative reviews from people in the company is NOT a minor issue.
• ABeeSea 5y ago
  Same thing happened to me. After 8 years working at amazon including multiple raises and promotions, I got piped. I was trying to transfer to a new team led by a new senior manager who was a peer of mine at one point. Exiting the pip requirements were vaguely defined and included tasks with dependencies I knew wouldn’t be fulfilled. So I took the 50k they offered me to leave and I left. There are some great directors and executives at Amazon. I enjoyed my time there. There are also some toxic, toxic people with too much power and ambition.
• slt2021 5y ago
  How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423 https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423
  • tgv 5y ago
    That first post, is that the acceptance speech for a Nobel prize?
    • oblio 5y ago
      I would like to thank my cat, Mr. Freckles, for being there for meow.
    • udbhavs 5y ago
      I'm also curious about that. I'm just starting out in industry and am confused if most people are expected to do that. Do future recruiters go through your old linkedin posts for stuff like this? Or is it just a general update for their personal circle - basically the corporate version of instagram stories.
      • MattGaiser 5y ago
        Recruiters won't even read my programming languages. I have gone to so many interviews where they didn't even check that the skills they wanted were on my resume.
      • ljm 5y ago
        It's just people being happy about something that's happened for them. Given how capricious a company like Amazon is, though, the professional speech is probably to avoid giving Amazon a different reason to complain. It's gonna be a different situation for someone taking their first programming job out of college, and someone who's been doing it for long enough that they don't care (and would probably fire a company like Amazon before being fired themselves).
      • freewilly1040 5y ago
• cozzyd 5y ago
  And I thought this would be another Python package management horror story.
  • qbasic_forever 5y ago
    pip needs to be put on a PIP (although to be fair pip and the python package ecosystem has come a long way in the last few years)
    • malkia 5y ago
      Python needs to be put on PIP :)
      • AaronFriel 5y ago
        It was fired in macOS 12.3, but you can bring it back as a contractor with the xcode installer.
      • forgingahead 5y ago
        Python might actually need to be sacked and blacklisted from the industry.
        • amelius 5y ago
          Only after the entire ecosystem has been ported to a different language.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
    • amelius 5y ago
      Yeah, the message "your version of pip is out of date" doesn't make sense, and no amount of pip install will fix it.
    • sgt101 5y ago
• helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  > Since it is performance review season at Amazon, he quickly sent me into a dev plan (PIP) I think the lesson of this story is to apply for another role after the performance review season.
  • trenchgun 5y ago
    > I expressed my intention for an internal transfer to my manager at my current AWS team. Or to not express intention to transfer to current manager?
    • helsinkiandrew 5y ago
      He’d accepted an offer from another team so he had to eventually
• slt2021 5y ago
  • sage76 5y ago
    As an Indian, I am starting to notice a pattern of terrible Indian managers from all the stories I hear from my friends. I really hope that these stories make up a biased sample.
    • deltaonefour 5y ago
      I'm from China, I've had only good experiences with Indians. Most of the people I would deem as ass hole level on the scale of Ganesh were in fact white. It would be idealistic to think that all races have an equal portion of ass holes though. I will say that a large portion of SDM's are Indian so your sample is indeed biased.
      • sage76 5y ago
        One reason might be that Indian managers are sometimes ass holes to Indian subordinates in particular, maybe because they are aware that Indians are stuck in perpetual H1B status so they can be abused.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ngc248 5y ago
      There are bad managers from all regions and races. On blind they were asking if it was an Indian. It does not matter if it was Indian or not. It only matters that it is an "Amazon" manager.
    • pm90 5y ago
      There are pretty terrible managers from all races tbh. You tend to have a lot more Indians in tech so it’s statistically more likely you’re gonna run into quite a few bad ones.
    • ed_balls 5y ago
• xorandor 5y ago
  (dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check... Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved. PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatisfactory results. It's a few months long plan where you got assigned some tasks you should complete. If you are not able to complete them in time, you are fired.
  • chronogram 5y ago
    Performance improvement plan. Either a manager writes a plan of measurable goals focused on improving, or a manager and the target employee both work on the plan together. It can be used for actual performance improvement or it can be used as something the employee cannot meet as a way to fire them or get them to a different team.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      You would be nuts to treat it as anything other than loading the bullet into the gun that terminates you. All it is is to make sure that the bullet is legal.
      • sofixa 5y ago
        I don't get this. From what I've heard, in the US, you don't need an excuse to fire anyone. Why bother documenting an excuse then?
        • cerved 5y ago
          I suspect it's partially a way to protect from lawsuits so it's difficult to file a suit you were fired for idk, your religious views, refusing romantic advances, refused to do something illegal etc. etc.
        • chronogram 5y ago
• adomanico 5y ago
  As much as I feel sorry for this person and their experience, it seems to me this wasn't the best way to handle this situation. It would have been more pragmatic to fire up leetcode, take a few interviews, and leave the job professionally. This probably would have come with a small pay bump, even with this persons limited professional experience. Maybe I'm just lucky and I've never had a bad experience like this, but I couldn't see myself posting something like this professionally.
  • Areading314 5y ago
    100% agree. Everyone knows Amazon is toxic but I sure as hell wouldn't hire someone who posted this
    • matsemann 5y ago
      100% disagree. I mean, working for some of the FAANGs is already a red flag of moral character, speaking up at least redeems them somewhat. But seriously, I'd rather have a coworker that speaks up when they feel things are wrong. Nothing unprofessional about that.
    • deltaonefour 5y ago
      I get where you're coming from. But I have to tell you, even though both you and I would never hire (I'm not a technically a "never hire", but definitely less likely) this guy has balls of steel and speaks his mind and the truth. I "won't hire" him for selfish reasons, but this guy is a patriot and speaks out against bully's. I hate to admit it, but people like us perpetuate the behavior.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      Then you're contributing.
  • oblio 5y ago
    You're lucky. The rest of us are just (well paid) cowards.
  • t-writescode 5y ago
• nickm12 5y ago
  I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).
  • deltaonefour 5y ago
    He's the hero we don't deserve. Nobody wants to hire him because every manager is sort of afraid they themselves are sort of ass holes and will get called out. I think a good number of people who think this are right on themselves being ass holes.
  • Jasp3r 5y ago
    His job history agrees with you. It has been less than 2 years since he graduated, in which he has held 4 jobs. 3 months at his first job, then 4 months, 5 months and 10 months at Amazon. I would not take his given statement at face value.
    • vletal 5y ago
      This is a relevant insight, I do not understand why it got downvoted. Even though Amazon has a history of such events, we should care about the bigger picture, yet be skeptical about the individual claims anyway!
      • gitfan86 5y ago
        Agreed, from my personal experience, I think the criticisms of Amazon are valid. But at the same time, if you have switched jobs 3 times in 18 months, you need to do some research and take some time to understand that you have a responsibility to find a job that is a good fit for you. If you think lines of code is the most important metric in how good someone is as a developer, then great, look for a job where management feels the same way.
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• murderfs 5y ago
  Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true: > The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package. > 50% of his CRs are merged without approval. > So, yeah, there you go !
  • Hokusai 5y ago
    > no one's challenged it so presumably it's true Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. Aren't you being too generous with an anonymous comment that you provide no link to? Is not possible that is just Amazon propaganda?
    • murderfs 5y ago
      https://www.teamblind.com/post/The-guy-got-PIPed-VBvKiiXu https://www.teamblind.com/post/The-guy-got-PIPed-VBvKiiXu 90% of the point of blind is to shit on your own company anonymously (at least, that's what I use it for). I find it hard to believe that it's false, given that probably hundreds of amazon employees have seen that post and no one's refuted it. If Amazon is astroturfing blind, they're doing a spectacularly bad job at it, the general consensus (from Amazon employees even) is that it's a hellhole compared to its peers.
      • hellogoodbye 5y ago
        I think he took down the post on blind
    • mijoharas 5y ago
      > Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. I left amazon 5 and a half years ago, but never heard anything while I was there about defending the company online. Could you elaborate on this?
      • Hokusai 5y ago
        "After years of ridicule and harsh press coverage, Amazon has finally disbanded its Twitter army. Part of a perplexing guerrilla PR campaign, the Amazon FC Ambassadors were a group of Twitter accounts belonging to employees who were paid to respond to posts criticizing the company." https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/amazon-fc-ambassadors-twitter-fulfillment-centers.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/amazon-fc-ambassadors-t... - https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ambassadors https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ambassadors
• stevenhuang 5y ago
  Getting a 403. Is there a mirror?
  • phgn 5y ago
    https://archive.is/pdYHy https://archive.is/pdYHy
• sgt101 5y ago
  This comment killed me : Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story… I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down! However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment? It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue. But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away. Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?
  • cvs 5y ago
    You had me at first, haha.
  • danjac 5y ago
    That's Linkedin level quality.
    • snalty 5y ago
      I remember seeing this as a shitpost on linkedin
      • belval 5y ago
        I like that we've come to a point where people are shitposting on LinkedIn as a counter-point to these insipid: > "TODAY I interviewed a SINGLE mom that had her BABY on her lap and apologized when it started crying. I gave her the JOB on the spot because motherhood is HARD. Let's all give single mom a break and be more human in the process! :clap: :clap:" I've unfollowed so many people at this point because I use it as an address book for coworkers and recruiters and these virtue signalling posts are not even trying to look human.
• amrocha 5y ago
  And in case anyone thought this was an isolated incident, I have heard from 3 different people about this happening to them. As soon as they try to transfer they get put on a PIP.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    It seems like a loophole if there's a PIP quota. Doing a PIP on someone leaving means you don't have to use a quota slot for someone staying. Though it may also be common to request a transfer when you sense your boss doesn't value you.
    • ldiracdelta 5y ago
      "Rank-and-Yank" always produces this kind of outcome. A system that rigid can never handle a team that has no losers.
• dininski 5y ago
  Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far. One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders. The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
  • dorianmariefr 5y ago
    Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far. One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders. The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
• flr03 5y ago
  This echoed so much what my girlfriend is experiencing at Amazon (London) that it is scary. She was not put on pip but one of her co-worker was last week. According to her the guy is competent and hard working. Everything about the toxic culture, the (unpaid) on call every 4 weeks, management doesn't care about estimations they just set you impossible deadlines, lots of turnover in the team, custom, unstable not documented tools, the "customer first" narrative to make you work overtime and feel guilty. I hear about this everyday. Even me not working at Amazon I have sev2 PTSD.
  • melzarei 5y ago
    Oncall is paid in Amazon Europe
    • dot1x 5y ago
      Amazon EU here. Not it's not.
      • jaromir_ 5y ago
        I think it depends on the country; in Germany you have to be paid by law
  • _fat_santa 5y ago
    I remember first reading about this a few years back. I was getting recruiters in my inbox wondering if they can poach me to AWS. Back then I thought Amazon was just like the other FAANG companies, but to be safe I searched `r/CSCareerQuestions` on Reddit and found stories similar to this one. Never replied to those recruiters, and honestly at this point I try to stay away from FAANG's in general, they have the cash and prestige but I'm sure it's like any other F500 once you're working there. I don't need the stress of being a cog in someones megamachine.
• i_love_limes 5y ago
  I have a question for other former/current employees of Amazon. I worked there for 4 years on the AIV / Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn't hear my colleagues talk about it either, "under-performing" laid off employees were rare (and unsurprising). Was I ignorant of what was going on around me? From my perspective, the 'bar raising' in Amazon worked through the hiring process, of which I did many interviews. You only hired someone if you thought they were better than average either technically or on leadership principals. Did this PIP quota thing always go on? Does this go on now to the same effect as people are talking about, or is this an echo chamber magnification of something that happened within a subset of one org?
  • shikharraje 5y ago
    It's definitely possible that you were, as you put it, "ignorant of what was going on around you". I think you were at Prime Video at a time when it was really taking off, 2012-2016 was definitely a strong time for Prime Video, especially with the Twitch acquisition. However, I was part of the Retail org between 2018-2020. I strongly back the PIP horror stories here. I don't want to share more details, because I'm still not brave enough to publicly bash an employer on the net. But I want to emphasize what I think others have also mentioned here, which is that, due to Amazon's size, there was definitely no one "Amazon culture" to speak of. The variance between orgs (and sometimes, between teams in the same org) was bafflingly huge.
  • minxomat 5y ago
    It's pretty much standard practice: https://www.teamblind.com/search/amazon%20pip https://www.teamblind.com/search/amazon%20pip
    • i_love_limes 5y ago
      This unfortunately didn't answer any of my questions.
• denysvitali 5y ago
  Kind of OT: is it just me or the archive.TLD domains aren't working sometimes? I can't reach the websites, but sometimes they work
  • Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
    Who you using for DNS? iirc archive.today had a falling out with Cloudflare DNS because of a way they passed the requests onto archive.today so they stopped answering requests from Cloudflare DNS. EDIT: See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204 for more info and https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-does-not-resolve-with-1-1-1-1-works-fine-on-other-resolvers/71315 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-does-not-re... from a few years ago. They may of "made up" since, but I've not been using CF for DNS for a while now.
    • denysvitali 5y ago
      Oh yes, that's it. It seems like Google DNS is blocking it too for some reason: https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.fo https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.fo Weird. I have now switched to my provider's DNS to overcome the issue :)
      • Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
        > Google DNS is blocking it too for some reason iirc, its not CF blocking the domain, its archive.today returning "bad" info when queries come from CF because disagree with the data CF give them. For me, (I just checked) I get a valid ip for archive.today when I dig via CF however the server it returns is hosted in Hong Kong but a query via my ISP's DNS servers returns a server in the Netherlands.
• praptak 5y ago
  The pip quota is a HUGE perverse incentive here. Choosing someone to put on pip is hard because it is in manager's best interest to protect their core team from pip. So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team. The other pathological result is hiring dummies just to put them on pip, again protecting the core team from it.
  • abirch 5y ago
    This was the way for Microsoft in the late 90's. Hire to fire.
    • cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Aka, sacrificial lambs
  • ctvo 5y ago
    > So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team. This sounds like a lie people tell themselves after being PIP’d. Engineers have an average tenure of 1.8 years. You can’t guarantee you’ll hold together anything. No manager PIPs someone for just being TOO good. It’s already difficult enough to find competent people. Contrary to some other comments, the folks I’ve seen PIP’d did have performance issues. And I doubt they were hired to be fired. Teams are consistently understaffed and fighting for head count is a blood sport. During review, PIP candidates come from all managers under a section of an org. There could be 3 from one team and 0 from another. The incentive is then to hire people who are actually good and defend your team’s performance. Engineers lack visibility into cross team performance and this leads to thinking this system works differently.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      > Engineers have an average tenure of 1.8 years. You can’t guarantee you’ll hold together anything. No manager PIPs someone for just being TOO good. It’s already difficult enough to find competent people. Source?
• gitfan86 5y ago
  While I feel bad that this guy didn't understand what he was getting into when joining Amazon, it is the middle manager at these companies that have the worst jobs. I interviewed for an Engineering Manager job at MSFT and they looked like they had about 35 hours of meetings a week. On top of that they are expected respond to urgent issues from their direct reports and respond from urgent issues from upper management. Then there is the corporate politics of other middle managers. The kicker was that most of the interview they were wanting me to do leet code. Really, I'm going to take this job and spend 50 hours a week of dealing with management tasks AND you think that I'm going to be keeping up my coding skills?
  • titanomachy 5y ago
    EM isn't a "middle manager" job, it's "line manager". Middle management manages other managers, e.g. a "director" is usually middle management. But I agree, I've been considering the shift to management (I like people) but the schedule seems punishing. As an IC only 20% of my time is scheduled, which is hard to give up.
  • blueplanet200 5y ago
    > it is the middle manager at these companies that have the worst jobs. Uh. Seems like folks being potentially unfairly pushed out are the ones with the worst jobs?
• dschuetz 5y ago
  PIP?
  • danesparza 5y ago
    Performance improvement plan. Or Polynesian infrastructure project. It's all a matter of perspective in planning.
• giantg2 5y ago
  "Being oncall every 4 weeks for a team that lost 50% developers over one year? Piece of cake!" At least it's not every other week like it was for my team for a while. Now we're up to every 6 weeks.
• hk1337 5y ago
  I honestly thought this was going to be a development post on hosting a python package in AWS.
• wizwit999 5y ago
  Somewhat controversial opinion but from my experience most people at Amazon who got pipped deserve it. Especially with new grads, they've lowered the bar and stopped doing interviews since it's so hard to hire, that there's a lot of people not cut out for the job so they rely on pip to calibrate quality.
  • b3lvedere 5y ago
    Great idea to use unhealthy stress to weed out the unqualified people. Should work amazingly for the morale of the qualified people. https://www.savagechickens.com/2012/05/employee-morale.html https://www.savagechickens.com/2012/05/employee-morale.html
• tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  > Since I was warned to take down this post If this happened in the US and the warning came from managers at Amazon, wouldn't this be an infringement against protected concerted activity and thus illegal?
• smoyer 5y ago
  Who in their right mind PIPs a yearling? You've barely introduced them to the real world and they're far cheaper than your seasoned contributors. As an aside, I don't see much horror in this story - this happens in many industries and is especially prevalent in companies that try to cull their lowest performers. The only sad part (and maybe illegal) is that it appears to be retaliation for requesting a transfer. To the engineer who posted this on LinkedIn, producing three-fourths of your teams code shouldn't be a metric you use to measure yourself. Communication with the computer is perhaps 20% of your job - communication with your coworkers/customers is the more important 80%.
• anshumankmr 5y ago
  I don't know why is there a concept of a PIP Quota. IMO a PIP should be used if you really f*ked up. This just seems petty and small minded.
• einrealist 5y ago
  Such stories do make me thankful for working in a job that allows me to quit one day and to start somewhere else the next day. This is a luxury for most people.
• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  PIP: "Performance Improvement Plan". Perfect example of betriebsblind
• the_amzn_race 5y ago
  I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively and how to minimize bias. Verbally, it's all about numbers and probability. The organization wants X number of people to leave this year, to do that they want Y number of people in performance improvement plans. There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn't exist, Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer. As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. Behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time advocating for my team and trying to poke holes in the performance ratings of other teams. It was exhausting. There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not. I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.
  • zelos 5y ago
    What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
    • AndyMcConachie 5y ago
      Why do masters whip slaves?
    • wongarsu 5y ago
      If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards. At the beginning your worst cards are probably below average, so any new replacement is statistically likely to be better. But even when you reach the point where all your cards are above average it can make sense to keep redrawing a small percentage, since that's the only way to get more aces. Of course teams of employees with emotions and institutional knowledge are a bit more complex than a hand of cards, but that has never stopped bad management strategies.
• mabbo 5y ago
  I spent almost a decade at Amazon. Their system for removing low performers has two key flaws. First, the mandatory minimums. If an org is full of superstars, the org still has to ensure it has at least X% turnover per year, so a superstar has to go. Usually well-performing devs whose manager wasn't skilled enough to convince the larger group that all of their people are superstars. It's cruel, unfair, and harms the company far more than it has ever helped them. The second problem is that sociopaths can and do abuse it. There isn't supposed to be a way for a manager to fire someone on a PIP when they ask for a transfer. There's also at least one manager in the Toronto office who openly brags that he does it. He's been there a long time, and the devs warn each other not to go work for that guy if you value your job. Being a sociopath is not a requirement to become a senior leader at Amazon, but the qualities of a sociopath strongly overlap with the qualities it takes to get those promotions. So naturally, the systems in place are designed to favour sociopath behaviours. There is no system to try to identify and remove such people who abuse the PIP system, because the people in charge would never want such a system. Kind of glad I left. When I chose which offer to take, I decided to turn down a much higher paying offer because "That company feels too much like Amazon".
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • mr_beans 5y ago
    Allow me to speculate that the guy’s manager is perhaps new at being a manager. Imagine going into being a manager from being an engineer not knowing you’re up against sociopaths in your own org who want to gut your team (other commenters have called it a bloodsport). I’d love to see the data correlating PIPs of reports to manager tenure. I bet there is an inverse correlation. So to prospective hires, ask your hiring manager how long THEY have been a manager AT AMAZON before you waste time going through the whole interview process. I had a manager who was one of those org-psychopaths you speak of and it was entertaining to watch him tear apart managers of other teams. Absolutely shred their OP1 docs and argue that their team was working on utter bullshit. Don’t get me wrong there was a lot of good stuff about Amazon, their operations culture is second to none, but a lot of the ways I saw people being treated and bad behavior from managers being tolerated rubbed me the wrong way. I absolutely saw PIP being used reactively to block a transfer to my team, for instance.
• coffeefirst 5y ago
  I took one Amazon interview for an engineering manager role. Literally all they wanted to talk about was PIPs. I’ve been an EM for a while. I have a lot I can discuss on a lot of different topics. Nope. All they wanted to hear about was PIPs. I said I’d never had to do that, the goal after all, is to help people improve before it comes to that. The guy explained that PIPs are a very large part of what their EMs do and are heavily emphasized in the interview process. I politely declined round two.
• yakorevivan 5y ago
• kofejnik 5y ago
  > I submited 51k lines of code in January wait wat? how is this possible? I'm not sure I would be able to even mindlessly type 51k lines of code in one month
• tinyhouse 5y ago
  I think the PIP quota is not necessarily evil. Amazon is a huge company. Like every big company, you'll have many coasters. With everyone working remotely it can get even worse. The problem however that the PIP quota is not a secret anymore, most employees know it exist (thanks to Blind). So it puts unnecessary stress on good employees who will never get PIPd . I think Amazon need to modify the plan in such a way that it's still effectove in removing coasters and bad performers, without stressing out everyone else.
• avipars 5y ago
  site is down ;(
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thehappypm 5y ago
  Does anyone have any insight into what the culture for Product Managers in AWS is? Currently interviewing with them, and it’s impossible to determine the culture from their interview process. For example, I asked how large the team was, and the interviewer responded that he couldn’t tell me that information.
  • supergeek133 5y ago
    I've been on the phone with a whole fleet of Product Managers (on the Alexa side) and they all seemed very overworked (jumping to multiple meetings within the same 30 minutes). This is all anecdotal of course, but my experience in working closely with the Smart Home side of Amazon makes me not want to work at Amazon. If you're a workaholic, you'll do well. If you aren't, you'll hate it. Again, just one guys POV.
  • mr_beans 5y ago
    You’ll have to change your username if you end up working there.
    • thehappypm 5y ago
      theburntoutpm is my fear!
• sylware 5y ago
  their captcha is not working with noscript/basic (x)html browsers, any copy of its content somewhere?
• mr_beans 5y ago
  After many years at Amazon I figured out that although managers were mostly engineers at one point and could still talk like engineers, they are first and foremost company bureaucrats playing a very different game to what you and I do.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• vorhemus 5y ago
  The idea that there are KPIs that can be used to objectively measure the performance of an SE and that the worst performers will be fired is an illusion. In reality, the direct manager has it in his hands: If he wants to get rid of one of his employees, he will find means and KPIs to do so. It is a political and human decision, KPIs only serve to justify his decision.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  A good lesson I've learned over the years: there are 2 sides to every story, and on the Internet you usually get just one. Not saying this guy is wrong, his manager is right, or vice versa. I'm saying you don't know by this post, and by many of the pitchfork comments I'm reading, a lot of folks feel an unwarranted sense of surety in their outrage.
  • deltaonefour 5y ago
    That's true, but the story is very consistent with things said about amazon pip practices.
• amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  Where is dang on this post. Why do we think so many of these comments and even this post are okay and on topic for HN. Next thing you know this place will revolve into blind. I guess dumping on amazon is on the right side of the line here but anything questioning Covid vaccine efficacy should be banned because it’s not science. This place has become a mockery of itself.
  • krapp 5y ago
    Your username suggests you originally came to HN to dump on Amazon yourself.
• donarb 5y ago
  Oh, I thought this was a story about a Python installation that had gone rogue.
  • kstrauser 5y ago
    I did too. I’m grateful my job experiences made me think of Python before a slow-motion firing.
• shepherdjerred 5y ago
  This exact thing happened to me when I tried to transfer internally.
  • cvhashim 5y ago
    What was the result ?
    • shepherdjerred 5y ago
      I applied to AWS Lambda and two days later my manager of two months (who was formerly my skip manager. My manager(s) quit and they couldn't find a replacement for several months, so my team shifted up the report chain.) told me that I had been under performing for the last year and likely put me in Focus [0] which is the precursor to being put in Pivot aka PIP. You can't transfer teams internally when you're in Focus, so I was stuck there. My team's senior engineer he told me that I was nowhere near under performing during the last org-wide performance review. I received great Forte feedback that year. All of the teammates that I had talked to, and my former manager who was now at another AWS org, told me the situation seemed suspicious especially due to the timing. I got out as fast as I could after my manager said that I was under performing. I applied to a handful jobs, interviewed, received an offer, and gave my two weeks notice all within 3 weeks of the start of events. Now I'm at RStudio [1] which pays about the same as AWS but has a significantly better culture while still being able to work on interesting projects. That experience was pretty terrible. My team and former managers had all given me consistently positive feedback. There was always something I could improve, but overall I was a good engineer. My interactions with this manager still make me question if I am competent which isn't the best feeling. I had a fairly positive experience at AWS up until this chain of events. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570579/amazon-performance-focus-plans-hidden-employees https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570579/amazon-performanc... [1] https://www.rstudio.com/ https://www.rstudio.com/
• scottious 5y ago
  "hey welcome to your first day at Amazon! We're so excited to have you. Here's your desk, and here's your PIP. Oh yeah, here's your computer too"
• netant 5y ago
• donretag 5y ago
  My new response to every Amazon recruiter that reaches out will simply be that post.
• cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Rookie mistake, internal transfers after performance review not before. Also, pretend you’re happy there and will be a loyal worker right up until the last minute.
• namelessoracle 5y ago
  With Amazon's "Hire to Fire" going on PLUS remote work, i wonder if there is a market opportunity for a recruiting firm to offer that as a service. "Here is a dev good enough to get through your screens and panels, they will be keeping their actual job, but will make enough appearances to pull the secondary salary for whatever period time you need before your team is required to lose someone to attrition"
• amazongoogle 5y ago
  I managed at Amazon and Google. One nuance to the Amazon stack ranking is that it is supposed to be only applied at org sizes > 50 or levels > 50. In theory Line managers themselves shouldn't feel too much pressure on their teams to do this. I do agree that it should be an even larger N (e.g. 200) or larger as Google has the same effective policy but their N is much much larger. The scale of the stack ranking really matters for how toxic it can be IMO.
• asdfman123 5y ago
  At this point, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to work at Amazon over other companies. What do they offer over their competitors? Same work and pay at other big tech, but you don't have to worry about potentially crazy hours or getting fired for no reason. Or any of the other great companies outside of big tech. Good pay, good impact, no PIP culture. Recruiters from AMZN are trying to lure me away from Google (as recruiters do), but why on earth would I leave my good job and risk being a sacrificial fire?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • desi_ninja 5y ago
    you are forgetting Facebook. it is Amazon culture on steroids
    • asdfman123 5y ago
      Right, I could work at Facebook, where they seem to be betting the company on an idea that Mark Zuckerberg got after watching a sci-fi movie -- that I'm not sure anyone is remotely excited about.
    • mistyislands 5y ago
      I'm suprised to hear Facebook is this way. Almost everyone in Facebook that I know is chilling 50% of the time :)
      • ingres 5y ago
        I'm at FB currently, maybe it's a problem on other orgs but my experience has been very good (2 years). It's not perfect but I haven't heard horror stories like this, and my manager and pms are happy to let eng set project estimates.
        • schrute 5y ago
          Hey so I have to ask, do you actually like what you do? I don't mean that in a rude way or anything. I just honestly don't know what people do at FB anymore. Do you work on the core platform or are you working on Mark's new idea?
• mistyislands 5y ago
  This article is pretty accurate: https://www.businessinsider.com/patrick-mcgah-quit-amazon-opaque-pip-unregretted-attrition-2022-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/patrick-mcgah-quit-amazon-op...
• ab_testing 5y ago
  I hope the guy was not on a visa. Seen many people with visa issues being played with just because they cannot easily move or are halfway down the greencard path.
• VirusNewbie 5y ago
  This particular incident seems like an easy one to solve, if someone has an offer from another team, nothing the manager does should be able to impact it? This seems like a simple HR change.
• Kharvok 5y ago
  PIPs are a courtesy most of the time. You're giving 60-90 days notice that someone needs to find a new job instead of suddenly dismissing them.
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a "performance plan" and then gone on to be successful in the company? My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it'd be time to get out. Like what's the point?
  • sparrc 5y ago
    (I work at AWS) I personally know multiple people who have been on the PIP before and are still here and happy. No idea the percent of people who accomplish this though.
    • throwaway22032 5y ago
      Are they doing well or just getting by, though?
      • sparrc 5y ago
        Personally I know examples of both, but again just anecdotal.
  • otterley 5y ago
    Yes, about 15 years ago, I went from being on PIP at Yahoo to being nominated for a Super Star award. There’s no magic; you just need to have an open mind, take the feedback you’ve been given seriously, and work hard.
• muskmusk 5y ago
  I smell bullshit > I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective" Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he works 10 hours 6 days a week. Of course he takes no bio breaks, doesn't eat or drink and is not required to attend any standups or status meetings or design reviews. This nets you 15600 minutes to code. So even under these absurd conditions he has managed over 3 lines of code per minute. What a god.
  • slopirate 5y ago
    The fact that he thinks LOC has anything to do with how effective he's been as an engineer is a huge red flag.
    • dymk 5y ago
      He didn't say exactly that, he said that he takes issue with his manager calling him the "least effective" person on his team. Which sure, there is some possibility that he wrote a lot of code, and it was all useless, but to be the _least_ effective while _presumably_ shipping at least some features... Either he's incredibly, incredibly bad at what he does, or he just had the misfortune to step into the bear trap that is the Amazon PIP machine. Knowing Amazon, he probably just got unlucky.
      • ergocoder 5y ago
        Then, he should have mentioned something that he improved ... Anything. The fact that he didn't is a huge red flag.
    • EthOptimist 5y ago
      He mentions this because LOC is an objective metric that Amazon uses to analyze performance..
  • Kevincav 5y ago
    Amazon has a way to generate a lot of infrastructure with code templates. So I can push out a ton of infrastructure code in a short amount of time by simply running the generator script. So then I just need to plug and play functionality code. He could be factoring that code in with the count.
• ok_dad 5y ago
  Last time a recruiter at Amazon messaged me, for the umpteenth time, I told them "please remove me from your recruiting databases, I am not interested in Amazon" mostly because of stories such as this one. Good luck hiring into a toxic workplace culture, Amazon recruiters!
• ctvo 5y ago
  Really what needs to happen is another New York Times story. The market for engineering talent is so tight right now that if this lands with new data points, Amazon will end this practice for another 3 years before quietly resuming it. I have friends with horror stories about Sr. SDMs going behind their back to put down names they fought to save. Imagine that SDM now having to tell that report they're at risk of being fired at a performance review. L6 SDM is the most difficult job at Amazon. --- SDM - Software development manager. L6 - Entry level for the role (L5 SDMs exist, but are more rare).
• chandrod 5y ago
  I also believe that staying long in that culture also changes your personality at a deeper level. You might start treating your personal life in a similar manner as well. So someone either exits or stays long enough to start believing in it.
• whatever1 5y ago
  Piping the tail of curve only works if you can prove that people progressively fall from the high ranks and get piped. I really doubt that companies raise the average with stacked ranking. The real reason tech companies use agrressive hiring (and firing that funds hiring) is to steal the most possible fresh IP from competitors (in a legal way).
• pardesi 5y ago
  After having worked for very long time(compared to people who wish to become managers just few years into the job) as a SDE & being managed by many different style of managers, I have found poor managers mostly are failed up engineers or those coming from non engineering background. Also, the tech rush has brought so many "managers" from outside the US who not only lack real management skills, but dont adopt to the US management style. I really worry for the future of the silicon valley if these sort of mediocre managers start to manage high performers in top tech companies.
• whoknew1122 5y ago
  Oh look, another PIP story. What is this, Blind? This may have happened, but doesn't align with my experiences at Amazon. Maybe things are different based on what org you're in.
• desperado1 5y ago
  Sadly, there is no comeuppance in this. The manager got what he/she needed, which is meeting the attrition target and thus will get a TT or HV and carry on, doing the same thing again next go-around. Amazon still carries its brand value and millions of CS grads will still be clamoring to join the company, or experienced SWEs looking to switch company and start the recruiting process. Jiawei Wang is leaving a big tech company, which happens at thousands a day, and unfortunately he is looking to join another company as a 9-5er, fading into the oblivion of corporate history, like a single blade of grass in a million square mile field. Unless of course Jiawei join/starts a unicorn and gets a couple Bs, then he will get a nice bio entry in wikipedia and do something like what Tepper did to Corzine to get his ultimate comeuppance.
• tylerdurden91 5y ago
  From a big picture point of view, I understand the original intent of PIP. However, it seems severely disconnected from the ground reality. * It promotes lazy managers who easily put engineers on PIP. I have heard so many stories where managers put engineers on PIP as soon as they apply for internal transfers and execute very shady stuff like suddenly sending MoM for 1:1 meeting 3 days later with stuff that was never discussed, etc. * It creates an environment of distrust amongst engineers for the system. I've talked to engineers who have lost trust in all internal mechanisms like Connections, Forte, etc. Blind is full of stories & have seen personally where none of these mechanisms are able to surface structural & cultural problems. Examples like: Managers putting unnecessary pressure on a smaller team due to inability to hire good talent and literally abusing them when they decide to leave. Managers not talking about growth and not doing anything & more importantly not knowing enough to be able to grow their engineers. * When faced with a bad manager or bad culture, a skilled engineer faces 2 choices, either fight the good fight, try escalating, try reaching out to HR or leave the team or leave Amazon. Even if there were no bad stories, its so hard for an employee to choose the former, but with so many stories floating around, the first choice becomes impossible. That leaves Amazon with a huge blind spot around bad managers, bad teams, and bad orgs. * In terms of impact, a bad manager has 10x more negative impact to Amazon as compared to a bad engineer, yet the PIP process is carried about when IMO Amazon should be investing in re-establishing trust with engineers, creating processes to discover bad managers, bad teams and then establishing a process to weed them out. Disclaimer: Amazonian here (soon to be ex).
  • mtlguitarist 5y ago
    Regarding your last two points, you're absolutely spot on. I don't have much in terms of data, but I want to at least offer my story so that people understand how fundamentally broken the system is and how it discourages you from doing anything other than leaving. I internally transferred at Amazon and had many internal offers to choose from - so I went with a team that had great tech survey results and where the manager seemed like an honest guy that I could trust. In < 2 years I had 6 different managers at Amazon, so I felt like I could read managers pretty well and knew what I was looking for. I joined the team and was ecstatic, up until the manager announced he was leaving 2 weeks later. I had to report to his manager who I had interviewed with and could tell I didn't work with. He had newly been hired by Amazon just a few months earlier, and he was exactly the type of micromanaging bureaucrat that Amazon gives too much power. He also clearly didn't want to manage ICs and they weren't clear to him during the interview process that he was going to manage ICs rather than managers. Things went about as poorly as you can expect. The new manager had no technical knowledge, poor leadership, and blatantly favored the people he was managing before he inherited my team. But I'm not sure if I can convey how bad he was. He would have engineers manually updating excel spreadsheets for his monthly business reviews as part of their oncall work (which was literally his job). He would gaslight engineers into telling them they'd be promoted, and then hand them a PIP. He would lie at status meetings and has numerous documented performance issues and complaints in his connections and directly to his manager and director. His performance was so dismal that our Senior Manager made his team meet together and write down ideas (anonymously) for the manager to stop being so bad. He would blatantly not pay attention in meetings and ask us to repeat whatever we went over in the previous day's meetings (which he attended himself) in standup. He would never back up his engineers on any push back, even when we would get paged to do things outside of our SLA windows and completely let our stakeholders run us over with requests and expectations. No list about all of his horrible practices could be complete, but I want to emphasize that he was so disliked that he caused 9 people to leave his team in 10 months. I don't want to say I was the best engineer, but I got positive feedback from all of the senior and principal engineers I worked with and I thought I was on a steady path to being promoted. But it turns out this manager realized he could weaponize performance ratings, and gave me and the other L4s that he inherited the lowest performance rating possible while giving his original reports promos and the highest rating possible. This wasn't an absolute shock to me and I already intended to leave Amazon because I couldn't stand him any longer, but this set my team's senior engineer off. He was absolutely livid and escalated the issue to the senior manager that this was a disaster and completely ridiculous. The senior manager met with me personally, told me it was a problem and that he'd make it right. He and the director decided to have my team report to a new (remote) manager, but for me it was too late and I decided to leave amazon. But what happened to the manager? Well, I wish I could say HR stepped in and fired him for weaponizing ratings, or his bosses PIPed him for being awful, but actually none of those things happened! He caused ~60-70% attrition, had documented performance issues, and abused tools in a documented way and still manages at Amazon! A few months ago he internally transfered and as far as I know his new team doesn't have him on a PIP yet. What is the takeaway for anyone reading? Just remember that just because you interview with a manager doesn't mean they'll be your manager forever, or even really at all. And it's okay if you underperform at Amazon, as long as your title is SDM. The last thing I wanna say is that I really liked the Senior Manager as a person, but he was too nice to the shitty manager. PIPing is inherently a bad system, but if it can't even catch someone who is so blatantly underperforming for a year straight then it doesn't even do what it says on the box. Also no matter what don't join Amazon Go Boston. Just as a heads up.
• all-hail-pip 5y ago
  I'm neither supporting Amazon or the person who got Pip'ed. But 49k out of those "51k lines of code" are just auto-generated npm package-lock.json diff
• polymerist 5y ago
  Pretty sure GE had a similar bottom slicing program and look at how that company has performed. They were once a big conglomerate and they are now a shadow of their former self. Companies are just collections of people who are delivering goods and services to customers and returning money to shareholders. The PIP story isn't even surprising based on reporting from Big Technology and even the New York Times story from a few years ago. I suspect Amazon is going to be in decline the next 20+ years and the start of that decline will be the company breaking up and selling off it's "non-core" businesses.
• amzn-throw 5y ago
  Over 700 comments, and noone questions maybe there is a little more to this story. For example: * Yes, he "submitted" >50k lines of code. Most of it is auto-generated from infrastructure generation templates. * His teammates are submitting less lines of code because they're working on business logic * Amazon doesn't let you put people on performance improvement plans because they are trying to switch teams. What is happening in these situations is that someone is ALREADY on a performance improvement plan because of a problem (and it could be technical, or it could be personal or professional), is receiving feedback for improving, decides they are not interested in working on fixing these issues, and tries to switch teams. This is when they find out that Amazon (like most companies) doesn't want you to just run away from problems by moving internally, and that you are not allowed to transfer. Then they go run to Blind or Linkedin to talk about how their manager is trying to sabotage them or hit PIP quotas. Just saying. There's always more to stories like this.