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Company identifies its best performers and then pays them more than others. Why is this controversial? Is this the “everyone gets a trophy” generation shocked

• lijogdfljk 4y ago
  I imagine because, as i've heard not experienced, Amazon purposefully tries to churn employees. Sounds awful to work for.
  • JCM9 4y ago
    Why is it bad that Amazon seeks to cycle out the lowest performers? Is that not what any high performing organization does? I’m not aware of any very high performing organization that doesn’t have some form of cycling out low performers. And places that don’t do this, or promote based on silly metrics like years of service, consistently are places plagued with poor standards and performance overall. High performing individuals also loathe the underperformers and want them gone. They drag down standards, create more work for others, impact morale. I’ve seen too many orgs that don’t chase out poorly performing people. What happens? The good performers flee.
    • specialist 4y ago
      Sure. But is "Rank and Yank" the best strategy for that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
    • voxl 4y ago
      Performance cannot be evaluated in a vacuum, and likely has as much to do with your environment as it does your experience and talent. A _high_ performance company, if such a tech company even exists, would do everything in their power not to lose institutional knowledge. Throwing out a low performer is the wrong tact if you have more products and teams then you know what to do with it, it is much better to shuffle that employee into a new environment a couple of times to see if anything sticks.
    • throwde 4y ago
      Because it encourages pathological behaviour. Amazon's attrition goal is an open secret everybody knows. Once everybody knows that someone else's success is your failure, people start backstabbing eachother. They stop helping eachother. The problem is that the attrition target is a quota that all of us had to fill.
    • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      This assumes an organization can effectively identify who are the underperformers of a company. I've yet to see this proven out.
    • et-al 4y ago
      More concretely, imagine you're on a team of 4 and management says the lowest performer by some metric will be cut at the end of the quarter and replaced with some other random person. Does this sound like a healthy environment? It creates perverse incentives where folks become more concerned about outperforming the next person than actually working toward the primary goal of shipping a product. If your goal is to whittle a group of people down to one, then stacked ranking is the right tool. However most, if not all, organizations are created to achieve larger tasks. And this requires the cohesion of a team. If you think of only individuals, then you'll miss the forest for the trees.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      How high performing was the stack ranking regime of Ballmer-era Microsoft? Thought it was industry consensus that stack ranking led to a toxic, highly political organization propped up by perverse incentives. This is history repeating.
    • rxbudian 4y ago
      Stack Rank is bad is because mid to low performing developers will put a lot of effort to not get fired. That means they're not fully putting all their focus and effort on the company's goals. Their views will focus on short term gain/success because they expect to eventually get fired. They'll try to get an accomplishment notch on their resume and preferring speed over quality and design. Hopefully their managers will see their accomplishments over the other brown nosing under performers and won't be around for the fallout of their low quality work. That's only for the ones who have hope. The hopeless ones who knows they can't make it won't care about the quality of their work and would focus more on finding another job.
    • DragonStrength 4y ago
      If you have a whole team of high performers, you still are going to have to fire one of them. The high and low performers are not evenly distributed across teams because good people do their best not to take bad jobs.
    • microtherion 4y ago
      1. Is it actually good to fire the lowest performers? In some cases, yes, if those performers actually add negative value by creating more problems than they solve. But if the simply are less productive than others, but still add positive value overall, maybe less so. You may lose institutional knowledge, team cohesion, or other intangibles that do not show in metrics. 2. Does your system actually correctly identify the lowest performers? If you believe that, you have more faith in metrics than I do. 3. Does every team have lowest performers that should be fired? I think that is the real toxic component here. I'm sure that all of us have occasionally met an underperformer that the company would have been better off without. But an automatism that every year, a blood tribute of N% shall be paid leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
• sgift 4y ago
  The interesting part is not that they identify their best performers, but how they try to do it. This tells us something about the company, what they value and so on.
  • mirekrusin 4y ago
    Self review? Manager and peer's review? What's "interesting" in pejorative terms here?
• Shared404 4y ago
  Side note: what generation do you think started handing out trophies to everyone because parents couldn't stand their kids not getting anything? No one I know raised on "everyone gets an award" has done anything but mock it.
  • dls2016 4y ago
    I tend to agree with people mocking this pov, but working as a university instructor… holy hell! There really are some very entitled and shameless people out there. I doubt it’s generational, though.
    • bigbillheck 4y ago
      I was a university instructor during grad school back in the 90s, there were plenty of entitled and shameless people back then too.
  • AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    Amusingly the Forte system itself is very much an implementation of “everyone gets an award.” Every peer review calls out someone’s “superpower” and the Leadership Principle they excel at. (It also has some suggestions for improvement.) There’s really very little to complain about in Amazon’s process except for the curve fitting.
    • no_wizard 4y ago
      It’s near consensus if not full consensus that Amazons number one problem is the URA and work environment that fosters. Even Microsoft reversed course on this after Nadella took over. It’s what I think has lead to their high attrition issues
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • neon_electro 4y ago
        URA = "unregretted attrition" for anyone confused.
• DragonStrength 4y ago
  The issue is high-performing teams can never last more than 18 months at Amazon because someone is getting sacrificed on the altar of URA, which then demoralizes the other employees. Amazon has a bad reputation as a place to work because it is highly political since everyone is always trying to avoid getting axed. You end up with the people with the fewest options left behind after any project ships.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• didibus 4y ago
  The issue is that they evaluate people relatively to each other, but only within their own team, though they try a little bit to do it at the director level. If you're the worst of the best, you might be paid the same as the best of the worst in a different team, even if you're way better then them. I think a lot of people would prefer an absolute measure, like did you deliver what people expected you to do deliver for the role and position you were hired for, aka, are you doing the job they need. If it was an absolute scale, then ideally someone that's the worst of the best would still be paid more than someone that's the best of the worst. But, like with interviews, I think it's just a hard problem. Evaluating performance is not something anyone has found a good way to do it. Wanting to do it seems reasonable, but being accurate at it isn't easily achievable, there'll always be injustice due to the innacuracies of the process.
• noasaservice 4y ago
  > Is this the “everyone gets a trophy” generation shocked by how the world really works? In my experience, it was the boomers who did this sort of shit to us millenials. I remember the 2nd grade softball games that we just wanted to have fun, and the younger boomers (our parents) then got all of us participation trophies for.. reasons. I know at least 3 in my team that intentionally left the worthless trophies underneath the benches. They were nothing to us. We 2nd graders just wanted to play ball. Sure, do points (we weren't "allowed to"), and play quick, mix up teams. But no, it must be structured. My generation was also the start of that crap too. And speaking of participation trophies, schools tried to do that crap too with "gold stickers" on perfect homework. I mean, who cares? I just wanted it done. Fellow students did similar with rolling eyes, like whatever.
• throwaway743 4y ago
  Which generation is that? The ones who had a much easier time affording college, houses, making a living (even just with a high school degree), etc, and just think everyone can pick themselves up by their bootstraps? Or is this just another low hanging cheap snub at millennials and gen z? Tbh, I'm a millennial, but always thought "everyone gets a trophy" was a crock, as did many of my peers. What's also a crock though is the world we've been left with, but that's also become just a cheap low hanging generational quib that is counterproductive. Then again, it does actually provide some sense of foresight