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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
        • mtoddsmith 5y ago
          I will never unsee this.
    • schwarzmx 5y ago
      My impression as a former SDE was that it's already accounted for. Hoards of new hires from college join each year and the hiring process is getting cheaper for that pipeline. I think they know that while increasing throughput in the hiring pipeline they're also letting in some low performers, so PIP is one mechanism to shed some weight.
    • lokar 5y ago
      Many companies (not just Amazon) believe that employees at the low end of the curve are not simply contributing less, they see them as being actively negative. This is not just about their individual output, quality, etc, it's the impact on the overall org, culture and expectations. Not defending, just explaining.
  • abeppu 5y ago
    > If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards. But this makes sense _in a game with a fixed hand size_. But a company's staff should grow over time. So shouldn't one have an ROI-based criteria where you want each team member to help grow generate meaningfully more revenue than they cost to employ. If my "lowest" performing team members still make meaningfully more money than they cost to employ, they still increase my ability to hire more.
    • pythonaut_16 5y ago
      Isn't that the point of the end of that comment?
      • abeppu 5y ago
        > 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. This acknowledges that the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy leaves out factors -- which is true. My point is, even if there were no emotions or institutional knowledge, even if I had a "staff" of AI agents or robots whose "knowledge" could be fluidly copy-pasted, the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy is poor, because a robot that makes money is worth keeping even if there are better robots out there. An army of low-but-positive ROI robots can help me buy a high ROI robot.
  • anonymous8979 5y ago
    I've been an SDE at Amazon for 8 years. What I've noticed over time is that the quality of hires and employees has gone down. I think the stack ranking is partly responsible for it, because it couldn't evaluate engineers in absolute measures, but only relatively. This is where your cards analogy falls through, in a deck of cards, you know that there are better cards you don't have in your hand, you know exactly what your Jack is worth in absolute terms. At Amazon, you can have a Royal Flush, and because of stack ranking decide to discard your 10, and if you know your poker, that makes you go from the best hand to one of the worse. The issue is you wouldn't know your 10 at Amazon was a great engineer and a key asset to your team, and that all replacement candidates are going to be worse, except now you've lost precious time, ramp up, and moral, as well as a great employee. For a smaller company, it might make sense as you're building a core team and might need to go through a few people before you find a set of good ones, but where Amazon is now, at its size, over time, it has lost engineers that in industry wide averages were above it, and it has created a reputation that hurts it from attracting them back or other engineer's above the industry's average. Due to this, Amazon is becoming a second pick. Good engineers will pick Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and even sometimes Facebook (due to their higher comp) over Amazon. And since all these companies hiring process are the same, it's common that someone who can pass the Amazon interview can pass one of those other ones as well. In fact, almost 70% of everyone I've seen be released from a PIP went to work at one of the other big tech companies. The other big problem is that the stack ranking works like American reality TV competitions. It doesn't matter if you've excelled year over year, if you have one bad year, where for whatever reason you get identified as a low performer, you'll get PIPed. In my experience that's often contextual, a new manager or you look like a bad performer because the business and leadership couldn't figure out good projects for you to work on and own that year, or they themselves couldn't get their act together and you're a scape goat. Other people on your team might have performed better simply out of luck of having been assigned better projects. Amazon used to get away with simply finding the best talent, but in my experience there, that's now backfiring, and instead of growing the best talent, their quest to find it is turning into a system that recruits more and more mediocre talent as time goes on.
    • vvvnnnnvvv 5y ago
      I recently left Amazon, and I don't think the stack ranking is to blame for the reduction in talent (which I also noticed). Amazon doesn't pay top dollar for engineers, and the delta between Amazon and other companies is growing every year. (The compensation ends up being competitive when you take into account stock growth, but the new hire offers are not attractive.) And it's a very results-driven, stressful work environment. The effect of that is that people who get better offers go elsewhere, both new hires and existing employees. Those who are left either don't feel like interviewing or interviewed but didn't like their other options.
  • vvvnnnnvvv 5y ago
    That may be the public way of explaining it, but I see it slightly differently. Amazon doesn't like "good intentions", rather it prefers "mechanisms". We all know that managers should put low performers on PIPs, but Amazon doesn't really trust managers' good intentions. It wants to make SURE that low performers are put on PIPs. The mechanism they've selected is an unregretted attrition target. The target represents the number of people they expect to be under performing and only applies to orgs greater than a certain size. source: recently left Amazon as SDM
  • mateo411 5y ago
    It's an interesting analogy, but employees aren't cards. One important difference is that employees get better over time, assuming there is a decent culture of communication and mentorship. Maybe you hired a 7 of clubs, but given time they can gain institutional knowledge and improve their skillset to become a Jack of Spades. I'm happy there are companies that set attrition metrics as a KPI, it makes it easier for me to hire and build out a technical team for my company.
• 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.