8 ms·

Amazon shut down a Slack channel where 2k employees talked about PIPs

LinuxBender 3y ago
Corporate Slack instances are probably not a great place to discuss such things. One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. There is a demo documented in that git repo. People can ssh under a pseudonym rather than using a real name. The daemon uses private keys to track identity so make a new SSH key specific to that server. Not my repo but the maintainer is here on HN. # append to ~/.ssh/config # ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "chat" -f ~/.ssh/ssh-chat Host chat Hostname some-ec2-ip Port 22 User some-username IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ssh-chat # Go's ssh lib is old HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa Another quick, lightweight and simple option is uMurmur but it would require people installing Mumble on their laptop or Mumla on their phone so that's extra friction. [1] - https://github.com/quackduck/devzat https://github.com/quackduck/devzat
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  https://slack.com/pricing/free https://slack.com/pricing/free for expediency, https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ as you scale. Make it easy to onboard folks in the org from their personal devices, no corp devices.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I have no clue why anybody would use work slack for anything more than friendly conversation. The idea of using company-monitored communications to discuss dissatisfaction with your jobs is insane to me
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. If you want any non-engineers in on your conversation, you absolutely should not assume that.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Yep, they could just fire up an EC2 instance after creating an AWS account on Isengard and go ham. /s
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Or you know, Discord.
- quackduck 3y ago
  Oh btw the go SSH lib being old thing has been fixed for a while now.
nine_zeros 3y ago
Blind app is the best place to find the nuances of corporate nonsense.
- oldbbsnickname 3y ago
  I'm against placing employee-to-employee conversations that aren't work related on work resources: No one can be honest because there's always a risk the company will use it against them. Meta has/had a secret "ADHD support group" on Workplace, but I would be wondering who's reading it, what people are and aren't saying, and, again, how it could be used against them or taken out of context. There are no "safe spaces" at work. It's fucking work, where politics and bullshit usually win over merit and personal ethics.
scarface_74 3y ago
Amazon had an “anonymous” internal Slack channel where you could discuss pay by using a bot to post on your behalf. It was called #pay-equity and there was another one called #pay-equity-discussion. I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements or take a severance that’s one month severance for each year you worked there + the partial year or “leave Amazon”. If you fail the PIP you only get 1/3 of the amount. If you appeal and lose you only get 1/2 of the 1/3. Who would want to work there after they have already showed their true colors? Amazon ain’t that serious to work for. I worked there remotely knowing full well what Amazon was about from day one. It was my 8th job. I made my money, put it on my resume and gladly chose to “Leave Amazon” with a decent severance and had a job within three weeks. People who choose to try to fight and stay after a PIP is like begging to stay in an abusive relationship.
- shostack 3y ago
  If you're looking for a serious answer, not everyone has the extreme privilege of being as in demand and finding another job quickly, particularly in this economy. People may also have financial situations where they need to hold on to whatever hope they can of a job because it is less scary than taking the money and then taking the leap. I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior. When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?
avidiax 3y ago
Why did Amazon close this? Were people succeeding their PIPs? Isn't that a good thing? Were people discovering that they were in secret pre-PIP (pivot), and then giving up earlier than the company wanted? Were people taking the severance instead of working themselves to death just to get fired anyway? Was there mounting evidence that Pivot/PIP at Amazon is quota-based, not performance-based? Were employees getting wise to how performance is documented, and either documenting their own side, or interfering with the company's documentation efforts, which increases legal risk?
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It wasn’t a secret that I was in pre-pip. But here is how it escalated 1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat 2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them 3. I met all of the requirements to get off with flying colors and got perfect customer sat scores from two customers (Professional Services). I led both engagements. First goal accomplished. I lasted through a six month vesting event 4. The manager added on more requirements for me to get out of focus and told me a date to meet them. I met the requirements and the manager kept declining my meeting invites and I thought I was off. 5. Finally when they did have a meeting with me three weeks later after the deadline, the manager cooked up more things that I hadn’t done that wasn’t related to any of my projects and mostly geared toward my refusing not to take on a new project that I knew was going to fail on top of my current project that was going well and that would have had me working 60 hours + a week. By the time #4 came up, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting feelers out. I was just waiting to be offered a severance. I had something basically already lined up.
  - pylua 3y ago
    That is messed up. Sounds like a terrible environment. Do they really have no decency ?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
Wait a minute: does Amazon even tell white-collar employees they're being PIP'd? I though they just fired people without giving them any reason.
- coredog64 3y ago
  There’s a secret (to the employees) period pre-PIP where management is either collecting evidence of your inadequacy or setting you up to fail so they can hit URA quota. You’re absolutely notified your in PIP as you can just take the money and run.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    It’s not a secret. They tell you your on “focus”. Let me take that back. I knew I was on focus. But thought I was off since I had met all of the criteria and my manager went on radio silence for a month. I mostly worked with project managers and customers (consulting division) day to day. That’s when my manager was finding things to use against me.
    - oldbbsnickname 3y ago
      Radio silence is generally ambiguous: either you're doing really well or really badly. xD Meta is obsessed with "impact", a illusion of precisely-quantifiable innovation and productivity setting up perverse KPIs to never refactor, never invest in employee career development (because "the year of efficiency" and "we're moving to fast"), and never bother with anything other than looking good. And everything diff has to be reviewed by someone on your team, but if your team doesn't include actually seasoned coders, they're going to nit pick because they don't understand the programming language and take their time, slowing you down.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        so my success criteria in ProSerbe and metrics were simple - stay 80% billable, keep the customer happy and make sure my projects were done on time, on budget and met requirements. No matter how hard my manager tries, they couldn’t get me on those metrics. Mind you that my manager is not involved in my day to day work. I worked witg project managers and other consultants. My previous manager had left and my new manager went hard on me from day one. I had ever had any previous interaction with them. They couldn’t even find anyone to give me bad feedback internally or the customers during the focus periods. The only thing the manager could do was try to keep adding more work on me until I refused or failed.
tbrndyn 3y ago
[flagged]
tbrndyn 3y ago
Creator of the new group mentioned here... My opinion is this. PIP is needed. URA projections are needed, but need revised and reformed. The question remains..is how should either be implemented. I think URA metrics should be nothing more than a suggestion of what's likely the case. Example? Say Amazon has 1.5M employees. URA hypothetically set to 6%, Currently, That's 90,000 employees worldwide who would be considered underperformers and should be eliminated. To me, that is absurd. How I think it should be carried out. Lower URA to 3%, 35,000 total employees. Change URA to "Underperformance Risk". There's a good chance 3% of employees are indeed underperformers. However the question remains..how are we targeting such? Warehouse associate tracking is easy. They make up the majority. Non WHA folks is a bit harder. So we need to focus on their accomplishments, ticket resolution, other verifiable data which can attribute to their performance. I.E. - How many of their resolved issues needed reopened due to misdiagnosis? - How many unsuccessful attempts to resolution of an issue? If unsuccessful, are there attempts made to properly escalate and learn from such failed attempt? Projects that required rework or additional assistance? Manager direct report attrition? Thing is, requiring a certain percentage to be let go is absurd. Maintaining a target percentage of employees to identify at risk of underperforming is more ideal IMO. Then figure out a way to identify genuine underperformers, and actually make the attempt to get them to improve. Also, give underperformers a chance a one time chance to relocate, down-level, or find a role which best fits their demonstrated skill set. We need to eliminate the fact that a Manager can unilaterally request a Focus entry. They can accomplish this by simply ommitting certain accomplishments of affected employees via OLR, therefore making them look less than ideal. Also, Peer feedback is terrible. If they're your peer, chances are they'll be looking to promote. You're competition to them. It's human nature. We need to emphasize stakeholder and those who are a level higher..their feedback on the performance of an employee. Peer feedback should only be used as a way to Guage whether the Bar is at the right threshold for such level/role. We are a hypersensitive Data collection organization. There's no reason other than acts of God where we can't accomplish such. Additionally, I am human, and my ideas aren't perfect. That's why I created this group. To show the absurdity and encourage a channel for those involved to express their experiences, concerns or ideas for improvement.
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  Up to now I was reading this as a US-centric story. You mentioned "worldwide" in your comment so it changes the game. The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice. I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.
tjpnz 3y ago
Can anyone at Amazon confirm how PIP works outside the United States? In countries like Japan it would be illegal.
- rurounijones 3y ago
  Amazon PIPs happen in Japan but I don't know how the process may differ from an American PIP.
gardenhedge 3y ago
Is PIP just an American thing? I don't think they could do it in Europe, right?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  So, you are European, and you hire a dev who is clearly not contributing or pulling their weight. Maybe they lied about their experience on their resume. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Just let him coast forever, collecting a paycheck while wasting company resources and dragging the team down?
  - steeve 3y ago
    You know it's possible to fire people in Europe, right?
    - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
      If only there was a structured process for that. Maybe we could call it a "performance improvement plan," or PIP for short.
      - rurounijones 3y ago
        That fact your reply to a comment about having a structured way to fire someone could be called a "performance improvement plan or PIP for short" is hilarious to me. It seems you have accepted that PIPs are just a tool to fire someone but still think calling it a PIP is perfectly logical and desirable to the point that you snarkily suggest that this is what it should be called.
        lopkeny12ko 3y ago
        I don't know about your situation, but at every company I've ever worked for, firing a report for performance reasons requires the employee to first be placed on a PIP. Call it whatever you want, but in most cases (from both the employee and manager perspective), a PIP is not designed with the intent that the employee should remain at the company.

Corporate Slack instances are probably not a great place to discuss such things. One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. There is a demo documented in that git repo. People can ssh under a pseudonym rather than using a real name. The daemon uses private keys to track identity so make a new SSH key specific to that server. Not my repo but the maintainer is here on HN. # append to ~/.ssh/config # ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "chat" -f ~/.ssh/ssh-chat Host chat Hostname some-ec2-ip Port 22 User some-username IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ssh-chat # Go's ssh lib is old HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa Another quick, lightweight and simple option is uMurmur but it would require people installing Mumble on their laptop or Mumla on their phone so that's extra friction. [1] - https://github.com/quackduck/devzat https://github.com/quackduck/devzat

toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://slack.com/pricing/free https://slack.com/pricing/free for expediency, https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ as you scale. Make it easy to onboard folks in the org from their personal devices, no corp devices.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I have no clue why anybody would use work slack for anything more than friendly conversation. The idea of using company-monitored communications to discuss dissatisfaction with your jobs is insane to me
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. If you want any non-engineers in on your conversation, you absolutely should not assume that.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Yep, they could just fire up an EC2 instance after creating an AWS account on Isengard and go ham. /s
chpatrick 3y ago
Or you know, Discord.
quackduck 3y ago
Oh btw the go SSH lib being old thing has been fixed for a while now.

nine_zeros 3y ago

Blind app is the best place to find the nuances of corporate nonsense.

oldbbsnickname 3y ago
I'm against placing employee-to-employee conversations that aren't work related on work resources: No one can be honest because there's always a risk the company will use it against them. Meta has/had a secret "ADHD support group" on Workplace, but I would be wondering who's reading it, what people are and aren't saying, and, again, how it could be used against them or taken out of context. There are no "safe spaces" at work. It's fucking work, where politics and bullshit usually win over merit and personal ethics.

scarface_74 3y ago

Amazon had an “anonymous” internal Slack channel where you could discuss pay by using a bot to post on your behalf. It was called #pay-equity and there was another one called #pay-equity-discussion. I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements or take a severance that’s one month severance for each year you worked there + the partial year or “leave Amazon”. If you fail the PIP you only get 1/3 of the amount. If you appeal and lose you only get 1/2 of the 1/3. Who would want to work there after they have already showed their true colors? Amazon ain’t that serious to work for. I worked there remotely knowing full well what Amazon was about from day one. It was my 8th job. I made my money, put it on my resume and gladly chose to “Leave Amazon” with a decent severance and had a job within three weeks. People who choose to try to fight and stay after a PIP is like begging to stay in an abusive relationship.

shostack 3y ago
If you're looking for a serious answer, not everyone has the extreme privilege of being as in demand and finding another job quickly, particularly in this economy. People may also have financial situations where they need to hold on to whatever hope they can of a job because it is less scary than taking the money and then taking the leap. I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior. When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?

avidiax 3y ago

Why did Amazon close this? Were people succeeding their PIPs? Isn't that a good thing? Were people discovering that they were in secret pre-PIP (pivot), and then giving up earlier than the company wanted? Were people taking the severance instead of working themselves to death just to get fired anyway? Was there mounting evidence that Pivot/PIP at Amazon is quota-based, not performance-based? Were employees getting wise to how performance is documented, and either documenting their own side, or interfering with the company's documentation efforts, which increases legal risk?

scarface_74 3y ago
It wasn’t a secret that I was in pre-pip. But here is how it escalated 1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat 2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them 3. I met all of the requirements to get off with flying colors and got perfect customer sat scores from two customers (Professional Services). I led both engagements. First goal accomplished. I lasted through a six month vesting event 4. The manager added on more requirements for me to get out of focus and told me a date to meet them. I met the requirements and the manager kept declining my meeting invites and I thought I was off. 5. Finally when they did have a meeting with me three weeks later after the deadline, the manager cooked up more things that I hadn’t done that wasn’t related to any of my projects and mostly geared toward my refusing not to take on a new project that I knew was going to fail on top of my current project that was going well and that would have had me working 60 hours + a week. By the time #4 came up, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting feelers out. I was just waiting to be offered a severance. I had something basically already lined up.
- pylua 3y ago
  That is messed up. Sounds like a terrible environment. Do they really have no decency ?
  - scarface_74 3y ago

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

Wait a minute: does Amazon even tell white-collar employees they're being PIP'd? I though they just fired people without giving them any reason.

coredog64 3y ago
There’s a secret (to the employees) period pre-PIP where management is either collecting evidence of your inadequacy or setting you up to fail so they can hit URA quota. You’re absolutely notified your in PIP as you can just take the money and run.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It’s not a secret. They tell you your on “focus”. Let me take that back. I knew I was on focus. But thought I was off since I had met all of the criteria and my manager went on radio silence for a month. I mostly worked with project managers and customers (consulting division) day to day. That’s when my manager was finding things to use against me.
  - oldbbsnickname 3y ago
    Radio silence is generally ambiguous: either you're doing really well or really badly. xD Meta is obsessed with "impact", a illusion of precisely-quantifiable innovation and productivity setting up perverse KPIs to never refactor, never invest in employee career development (because "the year of efficiency" and "we're moving to fast"), and never bother with anything other than looking good. And everything diff has to be reviewed by someone on your team, but if your team doesn't include actually seasoned coders, they're going to nit pick because they don't understand the programming language and take their time, slowing you down.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      so my success criteria in ProSerbe and metrics were simple - stay 80% billable, keep the customer happy and make sure my projects were done on time, on budget and met requirements. No matter how hard my manager tries, they couldn’t get me on those metrics. Mind you that my manager is not involved in my day to day work. I worked witg project managers and other consultants. My previous manager had left and my new manager went hard on me from day one. I had ever had any previous interaction with them. They couldn’t even find anyone to give me bad feedback internally or the customers during the focus periods. The only thing the manager could do was try to keep adding more work on me until I refused or failed.

tbrndyn 3y ago

[flagged]

tbrndyn 3y ago

Creator of the new group mentioned here... My opinion is this. PIP is needed. URA projections are needed, but need revised and reformed. The question remains..is how should either be implemented. I think URA metrics should be nothing more than a suggestion of what's likely the case. Example? Say Amazon has 1.5M employees. URA hypothetically set to 6%, Currently, That's 90,000 employees worldwide who would be considered underperformers and should be eliminated. To me, that is absurd. How I think it should be carried out. Lower URA to 3%, 35,000 total employees. Change URA to "Underperformance Risk". There's a good chance 3% of employees are indeed underperformers. However the question remains..how are we targeting such? Warehouse associate tracking is easy. They make up the majority. Non WHA folks is a bit harder. So we need to focus on their accomplishments, ticket resolution, other verifiable data which can attribute to their performance. I.E. - How many of their resolved issues needed reopened due to misdiagnosis? - How many unsuccessful attempts to resolution of an issue? If unsuccessful, are there attempts made to properly escalate and learn from such failed attempt? Projects that required rework or additional assistance? Manager direct report attrition? Thing is, requiring a certain percentage to be let go is absurd. Maintaining a target percentage of employees to identify at risk of underperforming is more ideal IMO. Then figure out a way to identify genuine underperformers, and actually make the attempt to get them to improve. Also, give underperformers a chance a one time chance to relocate, down-level, or find a role which best fits their demonstrated skill set. We need to eliminate the fact that a Manager can unilaterally request a Focus entry. They can accomplish this by simply ommitting certain accomplishments of affected employees via OLR, therefore making them look less than ideal. Also, Peer feedback is terrible. If they're your peer, chances are they'll be looking to promote. You're competition to them. It's human nature. We need to emphasize stakeholder and those who are a level higher..their feedback on the performance of an employee. Peer feedback should only be used as a way to Guage whether the Bar is at the right threshold for such level/role. We are a hypersensitive Data collection organization. There's no reason other than acts of God where we can't accomplish such. Additionally, I am human, and my ideas aren't perfect. That's why I created this group. To show the absurdity and encourage a channel for those involved to express their experiences, concerns or ideas for improvement.

BrandoElFollito 3y ago
Up to now I was reading this as a US-centric story. You mentioned "worldwide" in your comment so it changes the game. The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice. I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.

tjpnz 3y ago

Can anyone at Amazon confirm how PIP works outside the United States? In countries like Japan it would be illegal.

rurounijones 3y ago
Amazon PIPs happen in Japan but I don't know how the process may differ from an American PIP.

gardenhedge 3y ago

Is PIP just an American thing? I don't think they could do it in Europe, right?

lopkeny12ko 3y ago
So, you are European, and you hire a dev who is clearly not contributing or pulling their weight. Maybe they lied about their experience on their resume. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Just let him coast forever, collecting a paycheck while wasting company resources and dragging the team down?
- steeve 3y ago
  You know it's possible to fire people in Europe, right?
  - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
    If only there was a structured process for that. Maybe we could call it a "performance improvement plan," or PIP for short.
    - rurounijones 3y ago
      That fact your reply to a comment about having a structured way to fire someone could be called a "performance improvement plan or PIP for short" is hilarious to me. It seems you have accepted that PIPs are just a tool to fire someone but still think calling it a PIP is perfectly logical and desirable to the point that you snarkily suggest that this is what it should be called.
      - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
        I don't know about your situation, but at every company I've ever worked for, firing a report for performance reasons requires the employee to first be placed on a PIP. Call it whatever you want, but in most cases (from both the employee and manager perspective), a PIP is not designed with the intent that the employee should remain at the company.