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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

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.
  - zelos 5y ago
    I kind of see that, but it completely ignores the cost of hiring (financial and in lost productivity in the team that has to onboard the new hire) and the loss of knowledge and experience from firing as well.
    - bathtub365 5y ago
      That’s why you hire to fire. Then your shortest tenure employee is the one you know you’ll be terminating and minimal knowledge is lost. The only downside is that it’s disgusting, soulless behaviour.
      - tsol 5y ago
        Also a huge waste of time, money, and other resources.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      I could imagine Amazon finding some success with that strategy for their fulfillment workers (where those costs are low and team work isn't required), leading someone to mindlessly apply the same strategy everywhere else.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      For sure. It's a good example of POSIWID: The Purpose Of the System Is What It Does. If the system ignores things like financial costs and productivity, then the purpose of the system is something else. What it is good for in my view is making managers look and feel tough and establishing a culture of fear that is so necessary for hierarchical power structures. Power/status hierarchies are a common trait for most primates. So my shorthand for this sort of it-doesn't-make-sense situation is, "Primates gonna prime."
      - vintermann 5y ago
        Amazon Primate
- matthewowen 5y ago
  The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out. By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.
  - evidencepi 5y ago
    > 1953: * Mao declared that "95 percent of the people are good," leading the party to target 5 percent in many organizations as "bad elements" who should be purged and repressed. At least hundreds of thousands died. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h... I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.
  - NhanH 5y ago
    That only applies if the bad employees are uniformly distributed amongst all teams in the company. Otherwise it makes more sense to chop the worst 10% teams.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      That actually makes way more sense. Cutting teams that don’t perform and reforming makes lots of sense
    - mjr00 5y ago
      At Amazon, the target was between 4 to 6% when I was there, but it was applied at the larger department level, not individual teams. It was perfectly fine to have a team of 10 where nobody was on a PIP (yes, such things exist!), but when it came to my entire 250-person department, all of the managers were in a room together ranking every employee they had and using "data" (peer reviews and results delivered, mainly) to fight over which employees got into the top and bottom tiers.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I think at some point, which Amazon passed a long time ago, you become too big to be able to 'notice' everyone; there's plenty of stories where there's employees, usually white-collar office workers, that do nothing for years if not decades and still get paid. This is just one (very depersonalized) approach to not keeping 'dead weight' around, or optimizing staff to always be on an upwards trend. It's like an evolutionary algorithm; trim off the worst performers and the remainder will evolve to higher levels. In theory.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  A while back, on HN, a manager commented that people do their best work in the first few years. I suspect it's a combination of novelty and hunger. After a few years, you're done contributing what your experience and perspective can to the project, and your main skill is maintaining the status quo. Now, Amazon is big, and you can transfer, so this doesn't apply in the same was as it does for smaller companies. The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.
  - hughesjj 5y ago
    > High churn improves the bus factor. High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems. Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable? I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system. However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.
- pcurve 5y ago
  It's Jack Welsh playbook and it's stupid. I remember reading an interview with a head of company long time and he said something to the effect of "In any given company, top 20% of the workers push the company forward. middle 60% maintains status quo, and bottom 20% of the workers actively drag the company down." Interviewer ask: "why not just fire bottom 20%?" His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
- efitz 5y ago
  Thank you Jack Welch (the guy who drove this insane idea in the first place). Hope it’s warm enough for you down there.
- tellitnow 5y ago
- mistyislands 5y ago
  On theory it makes sense. Any large organization experience bloat and there are lots of white collar employees who do nothing while collecting a salary. Regularly trimming the fat is good. In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you. Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.
RHSeeger 5y ago
> 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. Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear... Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.
- JJMcJ 5y ago
  It turns work into a war of all against all.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member. Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    “ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.” This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team! Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires. My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters. But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”
ziggus 5y ago
These kinds of examples are great illustrations of how damaging stack ranking (and most other performance evaluation systems) really are. Instead of focusing on improving their team's performance by reducing the friction inherent in any corporate bureaucracies, this manager is forced to spend time playing Machiavellian games that only serve to reduce effectiveness and engender an anti-productive spirit. An illustration of why these performance evaluation systems are always going to produce statistically irrelevant results was the Red Bead experiment[0] designed by the late, great W. Edwards Deming. [0]: https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm
odonnellryan 5y ago
Lazy? It seems like you were not doing the job Amazon wanted you to do but rather some other job that you decided was better to do. I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.
- thecleaner 5y ago
  Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    > As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. You can call it lazy, that doesn’t make it any less of the goal or KPI Amazon created.
    - thecleaner 5y ago
      Sure. I agree with you here. These managers were lazy and it just means that Amazon internal KPIs reward lazy and use-and-throw management over actually developing talent. How sustainable this strategy is only time will tell.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  I did that at Amazon, and it didn't help me too much, since basically my entire org got burned to the ground after our VP lost a fight with another VP. Proving I did my job for the year I got a bad performance review didn't really mean anything when 4 layers of management above me all disappeared. It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave. In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful. Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.
zerr 5y ago
Are managers also put on pip? Especially those who try to dodge their teams from stack ranking? Is stack ranking practiced for managers as well?
- schadenfriend 5y ago
  Yes. I was an L6 manager and was put into Pivot (the umbrella process that surrounds PIP), which I managed to beat. I saw two other SDMs in that org successfully PIP'd out in the same ~18 month period. I'm sure there is some magical level where you're "calibrated" but not put into Pivot, but I suspect it is pretty high up.
- wnolens 5y ago
  I would love to know this from the inside. My gut says: no. I've never seen a manager face any sort of criticism. They just lead with impunity. Often they are promoted for miserably failed projects because they took a risk, and in large tech companies with big cash cushions, risks are worth it. In my experience most of the time managers just maintain status quo. Run standup, do 1:1s, hire, and pass on orders from above. They keep their jobs forever.
- mistyislands 5y ago
  Yes they can be. Managers also get evaluated the same way. But replacing a manager is usually more hassle, so it's not as common to push them out to meet your URA quota. I've seen it happen once, and they re-org'ed and abolished the entire team (distributed everyone to other teams). Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.
mandeepj 5y ago
> 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. Is n't OP's manager actually did that?
zippergz 5y ago
And sadly most of this is not unique to Amazon. Almost every company I have worked at over the past 15 years or so claims "we don't do stack ranking" but they do calibration and then effectively force managers to change ratings to fit the "expected distribution." It has the same effect as a stack ranking, except it's less transparent and even more open to manipulation. If you have a manager who is good at playing the game, you're a lucky one. If you don't, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe not this round, but soon.
vanusa 5y ago
I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager. That's funny, because from the other things you said: There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.
- pm90 5y ago
  I read this as the manager being lazy because they were giving in to the unwritten pressure from their manager to force attrition (less work) rather than trying to help their team members by protecting them (more work).
  - avisser 5y ago
    I understand that take, but, in the parlance of our time, you're hating the player and not the game. It might very well be a "both" situation rather than an either/or. But focusing on/scapegoating this manager's behavior, to me, is the wrong takeaway.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    If the manager is "giving in to unwritten pressure" -- particularly when it comes to making decisions that they, on some level, know intuitively to be wrong; and which more to the point, harm not only other people's careers and health, but the company's reputation and prospects for long-term success -- Then by definition, it is the directives of senior management that are at fault.
mistyislands 5y ago
Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience. Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR. This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.
- allochthon 5y ago
  I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.
  - mistyislands 5y ago
    hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).
    - steveBK123 5y ago
      As soon as the C Suite has the same PIP / stack rank / % attrition forced, the policy will be ended.
      - aspenmayer 5y ago
        Why stop at C suite? Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure, and do it by shareholder vote of confidence.
        ltfey 5y ago
        Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.
anon7725 5y ago
> lazy manager. No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.
- mistyislands 5y ago
  He has to push the big red button on someone. That's the problem.
allochthon 5y ago
That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?
  - allochthon 5y ago
    Stack ranking is not my cup of tea at all. But, yes, I'm kind of leaning against performance reviews as well. It's an open question in my mind. I appreciate that big companies might have a challenge on their hands, and I don't have a lot of answers, here. But in my experience, performance reviews have not added anything obviously positive to the workplace, and they're invariably a source of friction. Which seems willfully obtuse when a company has an attrition problem. And I say this as someone who is not considered a low performer.
  - noblepayne 5y ago
    > but you're against performance reviews? It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time. > How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.
JJMcJ 5y ago
> force a certain amount of attrition each year Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP. The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said something that pissed off a Director, I'm sure we can think of many more possibilities.
- geekbird 5y ago
  That's why I told my manager at an Amazon subsidiary that performance reviews were a farce. Because they were. I was burned out, and seeing all too clearly what a shit show it was. I got a layoff in April.
argc 5y ago
I'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our VP has tried to get out of the system (there are some quotas that he didn't go into detail about) we are stuck in the system and the result is that over the entire org, people are stack ranked (or something similar to stack ranking but not explicitly called "stack ranking" and if, for example, he was able to make the case that his direct reports were all doing well and improving, then inevitably other teams in the org would somehow be forced to have more low ranked individuals. I don't know how these things are enforced but there you have it. He also mentioned that someone explicitly said that the way to think about it is to "stack rank individuals in your head". Pretty blatant and it seems to be very much built in to the system.
subsaharancoder 5y ago
> Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers. Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager
- broknbottle 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Amazon
arendtio 5y ago
Sounds a bit like Jeff asked Jack how to win. Explanation: Jack Welch wrote a book called 'Winning' in which he describes a system for rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% on a regular basis to foster a performance culture. From Wikipedia [1]: > Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
mjdude 5y ago
In my experience it was the same at Goldman Sachs.
tylerdurden91 5y ago
The stack ranking has another really bad effect for Amazon. I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org. This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve. This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.

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.
- zelos 5y ago
  I kind of see that, but it completely ignores the cost of hiring (financial and in lost productivity in the team that has to onboard the new hire) and the loss of knowledge and experience from firing as well.
  - bathtub365 5y ago
    That’s why you hire to fire. Then your shortest tenure employee is the one you know you’ll be terminating and minimal knowledge is lost. The only downside is that it’s disgusting, soulless behaviour.
    - tsol 5y ago
      Also a huge waste of time, money, and other resources.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    I could imagine Amazon finding some success with that strategy for their fulfillment workers (where those costs are low and team work isn't required), leading someone to mindlessly apply the same strategy everywhere else.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    For sure. It's a good example of POSIWID: The Purpose Of the System Is What It Does. If the system ignores things like financial costs and productivity, then the purpose of the system is something else. What it is good for in my view is making managers look and feel tough and establishing a culture of fear that is so necessary for hierarchical power structures. Power/status hierarchies are a common trait for most primates. So my shorthand for this sort of it-doesn't-make-sense situation is, "Primates gonna prime."
    - vintermann 5y ago
      Amazon Primate
matthewowen 5y ago
The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out. By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.
- evidencepi 5y ago
  > 1953: * Mao declared that "95 percent of the people are good," leading the party to target 5 percent in many organizations as "bad elements" who should be purged and repressed. At least hundreds of thousands died. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h... I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.
- NhanH 5y ago
  That only applies if the bad employees are uniformly distributed amongst all teams in the company. Otherwise it makes more sense to chop the worst 10% teams.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    That actually makes way more sense. Cutting teams that don’t perform and reforming makes lots of sense
  - mjr00 5y ago
    At Amazon, the target was between 4 to 6% when I was there, but it was applied at the larger department level, not individual teams. It was perfectly fine to have a team of 10 where nobody was on a PIP (yes, such things exist!), but when it came to my entire 250-person department, all of the managers were in a room together ranking every employee they had and using "data" (peer reviews and results delivered, mainly) to fight over which employees got into the top and bottom tiers.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I think at some point, which Amazon passed a long time ago, you become too big to be able to 'notice' everyone; there's plenty of stories where there's employees, usually white-collar office workers, that do nothing for years if not decades and still get paid. This is just one (very depersonalized) approach to not keeping 'dead weight' around, or optimizing staff to always be on an upwards trend. It's like an evolutionary algorithm; trim off the worst performers and the remainder will evolve to higher levels. In theory.
dehrmann 5y ago
A while back, on HN, a manager commented that people do their best work in the first few years. I suspect it's a combination of novelty and hunger. After a few years, you're done contributing what your experience and perspective can to the project, and your main skill is maintaining the status quo. Now, Amazon is big, and you can transfer, so this doesn't apply in the same was as it does for smaller companies. The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.
- hughesjj 5y ago
  > High churn improves the bus factor. High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems. Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable? I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system. However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.
pcurve 5y ago
It's Jack Welsh playbook and it's stupid. I remember reading an interview with a head of company long time and he said something to the effect of "In any given company, top 20% of the workers push the company forward. middle 60% maintains status quo, and bottom 20% of the workers actively drag the company down." Interviewer ask: "why not just fire bottom 20%?" His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
efitz 5y ago
Thank you Jack Welch (the guy who drove this insane idea in the first place). Hope it’s warm enough for you down there.
tellitnow 5y ago
mistyislands 5y ago
On theory it makes sense. Any large organization experience bloat and there are lots of white collar employees who do nothing while collecting a salary. Regularly trimming the fat is good. In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you. Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.

RHSeeger 5y ago

> 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. Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear... Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.

JJMcJ 5y ago
It turns work into a war of all against all.
wpietri 5y ago
Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member. Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  “ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.” This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team! Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires. My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters. But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”

ziggus 5y ago

These kinds of examples are great illustrations of how damaging stack ranking (and most other performance evaluation systems) really are. Instead of focusing on improving their team's performance by reducing the friction inherent in any corporate bureaucracies, this manager is forced to spend time playing Machiavellian games that only serve to reduce effectiveness and engender an anti-productive spirit. An illustration of why these performance evaluation systems are always going to produce statistically irrelevant results was the Red Bead experiment[0] designed by the late, great W. Edwards Deming. [0]: https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm

odonnellryan 5y ago

Lazy? It seems like you were not doing the job Amazon wanted you to do but rather some other job that you decided was better to do. I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.

thecleaner 5y ago
Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  > As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. You can call it lazy, that doesn’t make it any less of the goal or KPI Amazon created.
  - thecleaner 5y ago
    Sure. I agree with you here. These managers were lazy and it just means that Amazon internal KPIs reward lazy and use-and-throw management over actually developing talent. How sustainable this strategy is only time will tell.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.

Firmwarrior 5y ago
I did that at Amazon, and it didn't help me too much, since basically my entire org got burned to the ground after our VP lost a fight with another VP. Proving I did my job for the year I got a bad performance review didn't really mean anything when 4 layers of management above me all disappeared. It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave. In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful. Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.

zerr 5y ago

Are managers also put on pip? Especially those who try to dodge their teams from stack ranking? Is stack ranking practiced for managers as well?

schadenfriend 5y ago
Yes. I was an L6 manager and was put into Pivot (the umbrella process that surrounds PIP), which I managed to beat. I saw two other SDMs in that org successfully PIP'd out in the same ~18 month period. I'm sure there is some magical level where you're "calibrated" but not put into Pivot, but I suspect it is pretty high up.
wnolens 5y ago
I would love to know this from the inside. My gut says: no. I've never seen a manager face any sort of criticism. They just lead with impunity. Often they are promoted for miserably failed projects because they took a risk, and in large tech companies with big cash cushions, risks are worth it. In my experience most of the time managers just maintain status quo. Run standup, do 1:1s, hire, and pass on orders from above. They keep their jobs forever.
mistyislands 5y ago
Yes they can be. Managers also get evaluated the same way. But replacing a manager is usually more hassle, so it's not as common to push them out to meet your URA quota. I've seen it happen once, and they re-org'ed and abolished the entire team (distributed everyone to other teams). Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.

mandeepj 5y ago

> 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. Is n't OP's manager actually did that?

zippergz 5y ago

And sadly most of this is not unique to Amazon. Almost every company I have worked at over the past 15 years or so claims "we don't do stack ranking" but they do calibration and then effectively force managers to change ratings to fit the "expected distribution." It has the same effect as a stack ranking, except it's less transparent and even more open to manipulation. If you have a manager who is good at playing the game, you're a lucky one. If you don't, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe not this round, but soon.

vanusa 5y ago

I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager. That's funny, because from the other things you said: There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.

pm90 5y ago
I read this as the manager being lazy because they were giving in to the unwritten pressure from their manager to force attrition (less work) rather than trying to help their team members by protecting them (more work).
- avisser 5y ago
  I understand that take, but, in the parlance of our time, you're hating the player and not the game. It might very well be a "both" situation rather than an either/or. But focusing on/scapegoating this manager's behavior, to me, is the wrong takeaway.
- vanusa 5y ago
  If the manager is "giving in to unwritten pressure" -- particularly when it comes to making decisions that they, on some level, know intuitively to be wrong; and which more to the point, harm not only other people's careers and health, but the company's reputation and prospects for long-term success -- Then by definition, it is the directives of senior management that are at fault.

mistyislands 5y ago

Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience. Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR. This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.

allochthon 5y ago
I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.
- mistyislands 5y ago
  hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    As soon as the C Suite has the same PIP / stack rank / % attrition forced, the policy will be ended.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      Why stop at C suite? Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure, and do it by shareholder vote of confidence.
      - ltfey 5y ago
        Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.

anon7725 5y ago

> lazy manager. No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.

mistyislands 5y ago
He has to push the big red button on someone. That's the problem.

allochthon 5y ago

That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.

ctvo 5y ago
> The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?
- allochthon 5y ago
  Stack ranking is not my cup of tea at all. But, yes, I'm kind of leaning against performance reviews as well. It's an open question in my mind. I appreciate that big companies might have a challenge on their hands, and I don't have a lot of answers, here. But in my experience, performance reviews have not added anything obviously positive to the workplace, and they're invariably a source of friction. Which seems willfully obtuse when a company has an attrition problem. And I say this as someone who is not considered a low performer.
- noblepayne 5y ago
  > but you're against performance reviews? It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time. > How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.

JJMcJ 5y ago

> force a certain amount of attrition each year Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP. The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said something that pissed off a Director, I'm sure we can think of many more possibilities.

geekbird 5y ago
That's why I told my manager at an Amazon subsidiary that performance reviews were a farce. Because they were. I was burned out, and seeing all too clearly what a shit show it was. I got a layoff in April.

argc 5y ago

I'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our VP has tried to get out of the system (there are some quotas that he didn't go into detail about) we are stuck in the system and the result is that over the entire org, people are stack ranked (or something similar to stack ranking but not explicitly called "stack ranking" and if, for example, he was able to make the case that his direct reports were all doing well and improving, then inevitably other teams in the org would somehow be forced to have more low ranked individuals. I don't know how these things are enforced but there you have it. He also mentioned that someone explicitly said that the way to think about it is to "stack rank individuals in your head". Pretty blatant and it seems to be very much built in to the system.

subsaharancoder 5y ago

> Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers. Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager

broknbottle 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Amazon

arendtio 5y ago

Sounds a bit like Jeff asked Jack how to win. Explanation: Jack Welch wrote a book called 'Winning' in which he describes a system for rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% on a regular basis to foster a performance culture. From Wikipedia [1]: > Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

mjdude 5y ago

In my experience it was the same at Goldman Sachs.

tylerdurden91 5y ago

The stack ranking has another really bad effect for Amazon. I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org. This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve. This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.