20 ms·

I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

• rkagerer 3y ago
  There's barely any detail in that article.
• tareqak 3y ago
  The Former And Current Employees (FACE) of Amazon https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon
• underseacables 3y ago
  Amazon seems like a really awful place to work, at the warehouse or at the corporate office. Why do people still work, and want to work, there?
  • zakary 3y ago
    Money is a powerful motivator
    • bogdanu 3y ago
      Amazon pays less than local outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe. Faang salary my arse.
      • hfhdjdks 3y ago
        Faang salary only exists on the US. Even the richest countries in Europe don't have those salaries for programmers (maybe if you work on finance or some niche subject).
      • ddorian43 3y ago
        What numbers?
        • bogdanu 3y ago
          I haven't worked there, but I've seen salary reports online between 1.5k-2k euros for a senior, after taxes, per month.
          • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
            Seniors hit about 4-5k eur in Poland. Poland is far worse than Germany tbh.
            • bogdanu 3y ago
              On average, I would say a senior would get between 3k and 4k euros in RO, at a regular company. It depends a lot on city too. In bucharest salaries should be higher. Obviously Amazon thinks that mortages can be paid just by flexing their employee badge.
              • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
                I was wrong, seniors hit 4.5k net base salary, L5s hit about 3.5k net base salary, and L4s about 2.5-2.7k net base.
      • lnsru 3y ago
        Romania? That’s why companies go there and other distant countries. To pay below market rate with huge press support. I experienced it first hand from Continental and Hella. If I have the same job in Germany, I will get normal salary. If I take job in eastern branch, I will get 1/3 salary. And local companies offered me 1/2. Obviously I stayed in Germany.
        • bogdanu 3y ago
          Yup.
  • satao 3y ago
    high compensation for skilled workers, lack of options for the unskilled ones, probably.
    • glimshe 3y ago
      This. For skilled workers, it's still a lot of money if you can't get a job at the other FAANG companies. In the few miserable years you'll be there, you can make a lot of progress towards buying/paying off a house, for instance. If you have a thick skin to not care about a PIP and just shrug off the nonsense, it might be a really good deal.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    Immigration, money, CV.
  • cedws 3y ago
    The mindset of a lot of engineers working at these companies is to stay a year or two, get the bonus, put it on their CV and get out. Of course, this kind of staff turnover is terrible for the company, but they reap what they sow.
  • bell-cot 3y ago
    In the warehouses...well, nobody else is hiring those kinds of headcounts. And few of the people taking those jobs are in any position to be picky. For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".
  • pjerem 3y ago
    Sure. But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide). As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing. You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?
  • cle 3y ago
    I worked there for 8 years (both retail and AWS) and loved it and never experienced a toxic environment. Consider that the anecdotes that are published by the media may not be representative of everyone's experiences.
    • wildfire 3y ago
      AWS, like every company, is really the culture+ managers. Some managers can deflect the culture enough for you to feel "loved". Others can't. They embody the culture. The AWS culture really is that ruthless.
    • Jaygles 3y ago
      How often were your team members PIP'd -> fired and do you think it was deserved each time?
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      Have you ever thought that your experience may be anecdotal?
  • Kiro 3y ago
    The narrative on HN is almost always driven by negativity so I wouldn't presume that things posted here are representative of the actual working conditions at corporate, or exclusive to Amazon. Here's an alternative view that popped up in my feed yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IVdaysrIS74 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IVdaysrIS74
    • hef19898 3y ago
      Of, both things can be true you know? I worked there, left for various reason, don't regret my years there and even considered going back. Why? Because most other places, and I have seen quite a few, are similar, Amazon is just up front, hobest and open about it. And, even more important, they follow their own rules, meabing as an emoloyee I can play the game as well since the rules are kind of known. Most other places, there either are no rules, or they are used totally at will by management. I prefer honesty, even or especially, when cruel, about being stabbed in the back by axe.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• rcarmo 3y ago
  This completely tracks with regards to some folk I’ve interviewed recently. But then again it’s not an Amazon-specific thing (the process and targets, even if they seem to be a lot more aggressive than what I’ve experienced and talked about with peers in other companies).
• toasted-subs 3y ago
  Not surprised, the point being to squeeze you out of everything. The point being to basically put you in prison until you can retire and die.
• aestetix 3y ago
  This seems common in American companies. I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager. Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?
  • antupis 3y ago
    Also if pips are constant it will just create a nasty culture which is very hard to turn back.
    • aestetix 3y ago
      Well it seems that PIPs are not actually improvement plans. An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals. What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.
      • me_me_me 3y ago
        PIPs (at least in europe) are a way for company to prove employee was fired because they are incompetent. We tried to help employee X, see the paperwork? But they are not good enough. Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits. Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements I have only heard secondhand of two cases where pip didnt result in being fired (but cant confirm it, could have been a propaganda stories passed on by gullible)
• ngalaiko 3y ago
  6% target for people to leave sounds very much to me like inflation targeting [1] modern economies use. i wonder if the reasoning is similar [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting
• xvector 3y ago
  I'd rather not work at all than work for that complete disaster of a corporate environment. The corpo speak in Callahan's note at the end is simply infuriating. Don't know how these people can lie and mislead with a straight face and sleep at night.
• unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  > But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date. So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together. If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.
  • miningape 3y ago
    I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while. While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
    • iLoveOncall 3y ago
      Unless you're a director you will never come even close to $100K of stock vesting in a single event, and directors are not subject to PIPs. So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.
      • capableweb 3y ago
        So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number? > I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date. > If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me. > I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
• RCitronsBroker 3y ago
  this person should have left it at shafting Amazon with their soon vesting stock options, I’m all for that. But this account just feels disingenuous
  • anonymousDan 3y ago
    In what way is it 'shafting' Amazon to leave with stock options you have already earned and are perfectly entitled to? Personally I find it very useful information to know the real implications of Amazon's PIP process, as I'm sure would many other less savvy/experienced employees for whom getting fired despite being perfectly capable must be a very difficult experience.
• bandrami 3y ago
  Pretty much like clockwork when the company I'm at gets large enough to have an HR "department" that does more than process payroll, I'm making calls and doing interviews. It's never worth it. When the headcount gets over Dunbar's number I don't have a place there.
• bilekas 3y ago
  I will probably get some slack for this, but not ever usage of a PIP is necessarily a bad thing.. The example above and large companies in general do seem to use it as a firing tool or at least pretence. From experience we had one developer on our team who was gradually just showing less and less interest and quality of work was dropping so much so it was effecting the rest of the team. I wasn't involved but he was put on a PIP that was quite well layed out and measurable. After the process he was better than before. I can't put it down to the PIP only of course, but as he said it was a way for him to focus on what was wrong and get back into being consistent. Super rare I'm sure, but just thought I'd at least five one good example of its use case.
  • iLoveOncall 3y ago
    I work at Amazon and you're right that PIPs are not an issue. But having a certain percentage of people that you HAVE to PIP is. It simply doesn't make any sense. You can have a team of only high performers and your manager will tell you to fire someone, and if you don't do it it will be you.
  • blitzar 3y ago
    The "scheme" as a general HR tool was designed to work like this, was likelky deployed successfully like this. Then someone (I am just going to assume they had a Harvard MBA) realised that it could also be used to save on costly dismissals. Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.
• nickd2001 3y ago
  I once had a kind, capable and hard-working boss, who hinted that a few years previously he'd been on a PIP due to being out of his depth in the role, and had managed to claw his way out of it. While I was in his team, he got a, IMHO, well deserved promotion. To my mind, the company basically mistreated him, made him wait years longer than he should to get the promotion. The reason he probably couldn't was lack of formal academic qualifications to job hop with, and possibly risk averse because his wife had walked out and left him with 2 kids. Its seems to me in this case, a bunch of game-playing which helps nobody. Also other people will have noticed how this guy was treated, and responded with the amount of "loyalty" that that employer deserved back.
• VoidWhisperer 3y ago
  This has probably already been said, but places that mandate that X% of people need to be put on performance improvement plans are not great. This can force managers (or HR, depends on who decides the PIP) to put otherwise good engineers or staff on PIP when they are perfectly fine employees - they may not be 10x, perfect, and can just be doing what they need to do to do their jobs, but they still aren't doing anything wrong and end up on a PIP because the company is forcing them to put atleast some percentage of people on it each year
  • bellgrove 3y ago
    I completely agree. Plus, part of Amazon's candidate evaluation is to consider whether they are (or clearly have potential to be) better than 50% of your peers, as part of the hiring bar. Between that and stack-ranking/forced-attrition, even previously high-performing employees can one day find themselves on the chopping block.
    • kudokatz 3y ago
      tl;dr: "You can't raise the bar if you can't pick the bar raisers. " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619#21732841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619#21732841
  • jeremiahbuckley 3y ago
    And don’t you end up with hire-to-fire practices as a result of this? Hire a lame employee just so they can be the one on the chopping block; preserving your actual valuable team members?
    • eschneider 3y ago
      Yeah, but why do that when you can hire someone good, get good work out of them, then toss them on the chopping block, preserving your 'actual' valuable team members?
  • eenell 3y ago
    "Radical Candor" calls it rocks & rock stars. You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks) just as much as you need highly motivated people looking to work up the ladder into leadership positions (rock stars).
• intunderflow 3y ago
  I've heard so many terrible stories about working at Amazon that I'm not sure I would ever work there, both in the media and from friends who were severely mistreated. It's a shame, because some of the tech they work on (like S3) is super interesting and high scale, but I do not want to acquire a mental health crisis from work.
  • morkalork 3y ago
    I'm morbidly curious, like if I knew I had a solid job waiting for after and didn't have to stress over it going sideways. They'd probably smell my non-seriousness a mile away though and never hire me.
    • randerson 3y ago
      You'd come across as relaxed and confident, and probably stand a better chance of being hired as a result.
    • matheusmoreira 3y ago
      That's just leverage. Nothing non-serious about it. No reason to sacrifice one's life for a corporation when you have better options. They generally don't want people like that, they want people who will sacrifice. People without options.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    That's the draw for me. Now that I've adequately licked my wounds from a life where I just never quite had the stability I needed (and got that stability too ofc), I now really want to work for Amazon just to see how hard I can push myself. I've told my wife the current plan is, once she has her degree finished, I'm going to crowbar my way into one of their software engineering departments by any means necessary.
    • zug_zug 3y ago
      Seems like a weird way to push yourself. Like what if it turns out you join a team that ranks you more based on politics/caste/luck than any sort of talent or motivation and you just feel trapped in a weird game?
• intunderflow 3y ago
  > My manager was super mad and asked me when I was leaving. I said two weeks. Serious question for Americans as maybe this is cultural: They're an at-will employee, seemed to already have a new job lined up and the company seemed to have burned all goodwill with them, why not resign effective immediately?
  • capableweb 3y ago
    That's like a cultural quirk they have over there, where even though it's not stipulated by law, people need to stay at the place they're leaving for two weeks, no matter what, otherwise the optics are really bad, for whatever reason. But it only works one way, if you get fired you usually get fired immediately, no two weeks to find something else. In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short stick for so long that they don't even know what fair working conditions look like anymore.
    • aylmao 3y ago
      I had never thought of it that way, but you're right— firing is immediate but employees always feel the obligation to stick around for two weeks. It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.
      • regularfry 3y ago
        Assuming your last paycheck includes those two weeks, that's (almost certainly, in context) an $X,000 difference in what you walk away with. I could probably stomach hanging around for an extra fortnight even if X was quite small.
        • aylmao 3y ago
          I guess it depends. Personally, if it's a job I really dislike, I don't mind losing the extra $X,000. I've discovered through the years my mental health is worth a lot more. Once you leave a high-paying job for one that pays less, or even to just take a break and earn nothing, you start thinking about these sorts of little extras as inconsequential at best. If the next job pays more than the last one, you could say it's a net loss for the employee too, since that's an extra two weeks one could've earned more. But if neither of those apply, it's probably worth it to hang around and get some extra cash, or just get a couple more weeks of hanging at the job with "graduation goggles" and little work stress, yeah.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  The mindset is that you can always find new factory floor operators to push buttons on keyboards and operate ci/cd pipeline interfaces. Software "engineering" is the new factory work. To be automated soon so y'all can be freed to work on important things.
  • aylmao 3y ago
    > Software "engineering" is the new factory work. I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".
    • intelVISA 3y ago
      Unless you own the company you are never "in control".
      • scarface_74 3y ago
        If you own the company you are still not in control - you have to worry about customers and a larger company throwing a few people at your product and squashing you like a cockroach
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      This truth got blurred by "solving hard problems" and "rock star developer" mantras. I'm sorry but plumbing APIs and building react interfaces is neither of the two. It's all about churning out features (or parts as they used to be called in old days of manufacturing). Even the agile methodologies used are essentially factory floor practices adapted to operating keyboards. The only way to ever be in control is to own a business.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      I’ve been telling people on this forum for years that when Jeff Bezos looks down at them from on high (literally from space at one point), he sees them as barely differentiated units of labor. The talk about passion and innovation quickly struck me as just another part of a system to keep employees from thinking too hard about what the job really entails.
• reportgunner 3y ago
  Person working for ruthless corporation finds out that the corporation they are working for is ruthless.
• vasco 3y ago
  If in a PIP you can actually improve the thing in question, then the PIP is useless and your manager failed to communicate it to you properly. In all other cases a PIP is not passable. Nobody becomes a significantly better engineer in 2 months if they haven't in their career so far, with the only new factor in the 2 months being "now you have extra pressure and a clock ticking".
  • ochronus 3y ago
    I disagree, having been on both sides of PIPs. Not all PIP reasons are about not being a certain level of engineer. Sometimes it's about behaviors or the lack of them. In some cases, the forcing function of a strict timeline with high stakes attached is what people need. Usually not, but sometimes yes. Anyway, it's a tool that's to be used as a last resort, 99% of performance cases should have a much lighter solution before they escalate.
    • vasco 3y ago
      If you told them clearly about the behaviors and you need to start a PIP, I assume you took a few weeks to tell them and waited at least a few more weeks until you started the PIP, and if the behavior kept going for all this time, again, I can't see how the PIP will help anything other than being "this is what we do before we fire someone".
      • throitallaway 3y ago
        Yes, in most cases PIPs are an ass covering and serve as a form of documentation.
      • ochronus 3y ago
        The PIP does two important things: 1. Raises the stakes 2. Involves a 3rd party (yes, yes, we can argue that HR is not your friend, etc.), which _can_ help with the trust (it's not just you & me anymore, you not knowing how I twist my story of you) I get all the skepticism. I simply have different experience.
• risfriend 3y ago
  I'm a manager and have been forced to apply similar PIP process to my team and it is truly horrible when the folks are forcefully put in the lowest performance just to satisfy the projected yearly budget. The 2-3 month improvement process is hogwash and hardly anyone survives it, PIP means they're 90% going to be axed.
  • rgblambda 3y ago
    I wonder if fired employees could take a class action lawsuit against these types of procedures. If acceptable performance is altered relative to how many people need to be let go, and there is data showing that few survive the PIP (Employers claim that the intended effect is to help the employee improve performance) then surely that's evidence that the so called Performance Improvement Plan is a sham.
    • badRNG 3y ago
      There's no grounds for a lawsuit, not in the states. They can legally fire you for nearly any reason or for no reason whatsoever. All PIPs do is help the company fend off claims that the employee was fired for an illegal reason (e.g., for being a member of a protected class, retaliation, etc.)
      • lowbloodsugar 3y ago
        PIPs would do that if the process was valid, but as pointed out, they are not. So if they defend against a claim of racism, sexism, castism, or ableism, with “but PIP!”, then it helps if we can show that PIPs are bullshit.
• aylmao 3y ago
  > I still wonder about what happened to all the people that went through that process. How did it impact their life? I think it leads to a lot of mental-health issues. IMO this is a key issue with this system. The company evidently only cares about the employee as long as they're employees, and can dispose them and forget about them, like they'd dispose any other leftover resource. But evidently said people are still around. If every company adopted a system like this, in theory it'd be great for the economy. It's capitalism, and you're getting rid of the people who sell you the least effective labour in an easily scalable way. In practice, all these companies are pumping out a lot of stress, and it's thus no surprise the USA is notoriously burdened by mental health issues when compared to other high-income countries [1]. [1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/may/mental-health-conditions-substance-use-comparing-us-other-countries#:~:text=Discussion,in%20other%20high%2Dincome%20countries https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2....
• bratbag 3y ago
  So stepping back from the unreliable narrator of a person living through this with ptsd: -person is suffering mental health issues due to strain of job. -persons performance drops rapidly without warning as a result. -boss takes workload off them without putting them on a pip process, to give them time to work through their issues. -person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them -person gives interview to justify their behaviour
  • curiousgal 3y ago
    This! People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.
  • civilized 3y ago
    It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?
    • curiousgal 3y ago
      Narcissism.
  • aylmao 3y ago
    Even from this perspective I don't think the employee is in the wrong. If a job gives you mental strain, especially if it is affecting your performance, IMO the right thing to do is to quit. I'm not surprised the boss was disappointed, but I do think they should've seen it coming. I've been in situations where a job evidently isn't for me anymore, albeit in a seemingly healthier environment— my boss and I talked openly about the team no longer being a fit for me for weeks if not months prior. I was evidently not working at my full potential too, and when I told my boss I was quitting, they told me what date I should officially submit my resignation so that I'd still get my latest bonus. It was all very amicable and objective.
  • 3y ago
• kgbcia 3y ago
  I think this is why some companies fail. So much internal politics, no time to fight the competition.
  • s09dfhks 3y ago
    What competition
• jwsteigerwalt 3y ago
  I’m not seeing a victim here. They resigned and got a new job (where they hopefully fit better) and their stock vested.
• richardwhiuk 3y ago
  This would probably be illegal in the UK.
  • intunderflow 3y ago
    In the UK you can be fired for any or no reason, except a specifically illegal reason, until you have 2 years of service. It's like at-will employment but with a notice period. https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:~:text=Qualifying%20period%20to%20claim%20unfair,period%20is%20normally%202%20years https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:...
    • richardwhiuk 3y ago
      Given they worked for Amazon for several years, I assume they would no longer fall in that category. At which point some of what they allege happened would probably fall under constructive dismissal.
• fourseventy 3y ago
  Wtf is Pivot
  • tariksbl 3y ago
    can i get a pivot tshirt
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • emeril 3y ago
    it's pretty helpful in excel!
  • monster_group 3y ago
    It's the element in quick sort that you swap around to make sure all elements before pivot are less than it and all elements after are greater than it.
• H8crilA 3y ago
  I do wonder if it would be easier if, say, 3% of people were simply fired each year, perhaps with a 1-3 month notice. It would save the pointless back and forth effort, you wouldn't have to pretend it's about improvement, and the fired people could work on their next steps immediately. (this is orthogonal to the decision to always fire some percentage - I am merely discussing a different implementation of the same policy, not discussing the merits of the policy)
• stevage 3y ago
  I don't really understand how someone can work in HR at a place like Amazon for so long and then claim to be surprised that Amazon is actually very evil. Or that we are somehow supposed to feel sympathetic for someone who has profited to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars perpetuating this soul-crushing machine. No.
• kobieps 3y ago
  I've never seen a PIP actually work in practice.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    No? I've seen it work countless of times, employees either getting fired and the PIP is cited as the reason why, or the PIP process is so toiling on the employee that they quit by themselves. Seems to work exactly for the purpose it was created, to force out employees one way or another.
  • monocularvision 3y ago
    Anecdotal but I have seen it work more often than not at my employer.
• kinduff 3y ago
  So its okay doing the evil thing for a while to several professionals, but when it was OPs turn, then its a no-go?
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    I never thought the face-eating leopard would eat MY face !!
  • francisofascii 3y ago
    Reminds me of the bank robbery scene in "The Dark knight", in which every "clown" robber is supposed to kill the previous robber to increase the share, and each robber doesn't realize they could fall prey to the same fate.
    • PoignardAzur 3y ago
      (Nitpick: the second one does realize, he just gets killed anyway.)
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    If he was OK doing the evil thing, he wouldn't have gotten PTSD doing it.
    • dudul 3y ago
      What he claims is PTSD - unless medically diagnosed its just BS.
• pixelmonkey 3y ago
  Many years ago, when I worked in high finance, it was common knowledge that 3-5% of the staff would be fired every 1-2 years, all at once. This created a lot of tension every time rumours swirled that the "culling" was coming up. But, when you were fired, you were simply given a phone call, out of the blue one day, told to come to an office, and then offered a severance package based on your years of service, and escorted out of the building. At the end of one of those days, everyone not called breathed a sigh of relief. (And some who were not called, but didn't really want to stay either, secretly wished they were called.) As cold-hearted as this practice is, it seems downright humane vs putting 3-5% of staff on a PIP or "Pivot" or whatever, and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture) that this has something to do with individual performance rather than systematic payroll cost control at the corporate finance level.
  • djha-skin 3y ago
    It's about liability management I think. The company can show a judge that "they did all they can" while like the same time gathering a paper trail on the employee.
    • underdeserver 3y ago
      In the US, at least, you don't have to show a judge anything.
      • lmz 3y ago
        Unless the employee sues you, which is discouraged by practices like these.
        • scarface_74 3y ago
          Sue for what?
          • lmz 3y ago
• nemo44x 3y ago
  Although I think mandatory rankings and assuming the bottom x% should be exited isn’t great approach, I also don’t think it’s a company or managers job to coach you into being a productive employee. Yes, they should have direct feedback but overall you are expected to be a professional. This means you are accountable for your work - you do what you say you will. That you express concern early and not late in the process. That you deliver quality outputs that your peers respect. That you assimilate to team culture and participate it and that you are a net positive to morale - your team wants to work with you. Managers lay out expectations but they aren’t babysitters. Not all managers are good of course. A good one should be able to nudge you back on course and build a rapport, but they can’t be expected to make you a professional.
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    I know you are getting downvoted but the real question is: What is a manager's job? If it is not to code, not to understand systems, not to design, not to coach, not to help the team - what is it exactly?
    • nemo44x 3y ago
      "It depends". A managers job is to understand the business and what the strategy and ultimate goals of the business are and to direct their organization in such a way that contributes to this. This means staffing, equipping, training a team and then ensuring that the best possible objectives are being met that contribute to the larger organizational objectives. To ensure their cog is functioning optimally. That their KPIs are being hit effectively and that they make sense. They should ensure the right code is being written and that it's of high quality and know who is contributing what. They should design and use metrics to measure this. They should nurture, yes, but they aren't a parent. But yes they should identify when a team member is coming up short and help them get on track but the contributor needs to come equipped with the basic skills - which is the managers responsibility to judge during hiring. To be sure, a manager who tends to have trouble with low performing contributors they've hired usually shows the managers is ineffective at hiring.
    • disambiguation 3y ago
• rgblambda 3y ago
  >there were no warning signs. There was no trail of communication saying, "You are underperforming." I don't know about the U.S but in many countries, I imagine this would be a valid justification to reject a PIP. Take it to an employment tribunal and say: "There was no indication that I was performing anything other than as expected until I was handed a PIP".
  • wyldfire 3y ago
    This appeal process was handled by the employee themselves. so they probably had an idea of how effective appeals were. > And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.
    • rgblambda 3y ago
      That sounds like an internal corporate appeals process, which is as rigged as an East German court. I'm talking about an external state affiliated employment ombudsman.
      • wyldfire 3y ago
        Yeah for the most part in the US there's very little legal protections in the code that state authorities can use to vindicate an employee. I think the only protections are things like age, sexual, racial discrimination. The PIP itself is designed to gather evidence that the company has a cause to rebut any claim of illegal discrimination. But if you don't start out with one of those claims, it's moot to disprove the cause. I could be wrong - some more progressive states may have more protections than this. And certainly folks who are employed under collective bargaining agreements have more protections. That wouldn't apply at Amazon, though.
  • nness 3y ago
    That was my first reading — in every country I've worked (that is not the U.S.), the burden of proof on the employer is very high. Which is not to say that organisations can't find their own ways to fire staff that align with the regulatory environment in which they operate — just, it's very hard for this kind of U.S-style ultra-capitalistic culture to develop. I largely think that is a good thing. Employers have a disproportionate power over the employees, and having to go through the hurdles to fire a few troublesome employees is well worth the protections afforded to everyone else.
• onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  We should normalize tech companies vesting monthly. Everything else is a scam to pretend like you have good wages when you really don't. I get at startups - there's some artificial need to keep the number of people on the cap table low. I'm not sure why one of the cap lines can't be "EMPLOYEE EQUITY" which is a company (like a VC company) where the shares are distributed by that company to the employees in accordance with their contracts... This is a problem that could definitely be solved, but like most "problems" - it's working as intended - to give employers the optionality to clawback your equity if it ever really does become worth a ton and they don't like you.
  • ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    I think Amazon's 4-year vesting schedule is 5%/15%/40%/40%, so monthly vesting wouldn't help much.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      The first two years are great because you get a large prorated monthly signing bonus to make up for the back heavy vesting.
• wyldfire 3y ago
  > That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning. They blew a gasket — absolutely blew a gasket I don't understand how someone could be responsible for a policy that puts people's livelihood at risk under the headline of "just business things" and not expect the same treatment from their employees. "sorry boss - just looking out for my shareholder: me"
  • allenp 3y ago
    I'm genuinely curious about this - my best guess is there may be some measurement on the manager's employee retention numbers or similar that would make the manager look bad to have an employee quit.
  • datadrivenangel 3y ago
    I once had a manager at a temp-to-hire job spend the first 10 minutes of my resignation call swearing angrily about the situation. He clarified that it wasn't anger at me specifically, but it was an impressive fit. Some people don't react well to failure.
    • yoyohello13 3y ago
      I feel like having so little control over your emotions should be an instant rejection from any management position. Swearing angrily in any professional setting is just ridiculous.
  • gangstead 3y ago
    The manager was probably mad because they wasted a PIP on someone else. From other accounts here I've seen that if your manager gets any inkling that you are leaving they will throw a PIP on you to meet their quota.
    • impute 3y ago
      So you mean when they resign instead that PIP no longer counts towards the manager's quota and they have to find someone else?
• ftyhbhyjnjk 3y ago
  The problem with people in HR is that they are highly disconnected from the people who actually build stuff, and are also highly arrogant.
  • dudul 3y ago
    100% of all the departments they seem to be the ones who have the least amount of clue about the business, the product, etc. At my current company we had a massive, make-it-or-break-it deliverable for the spring. It was literally all departments coming together for a whole year and trying to get this thing done on time. All, but HR. All HR cared about was to make sure managers would pester their report to put their 3 annual goals in [random HR system] before [random day in March]. HR like to see people as interchangeable cogs but that's because that's what they are themselves.
  • nness 3y ago
    It's naive to think that these decisions are made by HR, and not, your organistion's leadership — your building stuff set by the leadership, and the HR team are executing policy as set by the leadership.
• steveBK123 3y ago
  One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually. So really it's overhiring BS that is then getting taken out on employees. Given that, I think as has been pointed out by another commenter - the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance, generally. Seems better than year round psychological torture of being at risk of a PIP, and then if being put on one knowing the most likely outcome is being fired. So you feel dragged through the mud and then having doubly failed (put on PIP & failed the PIP). I knew a guy who moved from Wall St to Amazon and described the performance management / compensation system to be pretty rough and had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.
  • philipwhiuk 3y ago
    > If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?
      • mrbgty 3y ago
• rubyissimo 3y ago
  The problem isn't so much the actual culling. The problem is the tax it puts on everyone for the rest of the year to self-promote and make sure they don't get caught accidentally. If you put your head down and do great work, you just run the risk of getting out-politic'd, so you've got to do that too. But that makes the political players spend more time on it to make sure they're still ahead of the part time politicians. And it's an arms race of spending time making yourself look good instead of doing work.
  • bluecheese452 3y ago
    The problem is this is on purpose. Those at the top are good at the political game so they make the game all about politics.
• from-nibly 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is why FAANG are such trash companies that can't achieve anything of substance. Their employees are too busy playing games to get anything done. This practice is like setting up a museum with priceless artifacts and explicitly saying to the night watchman "if you can get away with stealing from us you can have it, also you're probably going to get fired next quarter" In any normal sized business this would be an absolute disaster. FAANG has to spend like triple on talent for people to be ok with this nonsense. Why not just treat people like people?
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    Let’s be honest here. To say that FAANG hasn’t achieved anything is demonstrably false
    • from-nibly 3y ago
      When was the last time nextflix did anything interesting other than media production? When was the last time Google created a product they were so proud of they kept it around? When was the last time Facebook built anything they didn't just buy? What was the last thing Amazon did that wasbnt just more vertical integration? Apple is the only company who recently did anything noteworthy and that was just they decided to build a CPU for an architecture they licensed. I know these guys move a lot of deck chairs, but they used to actually do stuff. Now they just buy other companies that do stuff.
      • scarface_74 3y ago
        Google doesn’t have the attention span of a crack addled flea, I’ll be the first to admit that. But Microsoft is doing some interesting things to productize its partnership with OpenAI. You think all Apple did was “build a CPU?”. You can literally walk around with a 64 bit computer on your wrist that has cellular, WiFi, BT, GPS, a bunch of sensors and it can track workouts. When I first got into fitness over a decade ago, a humongous much less capable Garmin was the state of the art and you had to wear a chest strap to monitor your heart rate. If all a company has to do is license ARN tech, why is Apple so far ahead? I got Amazoned a few months ago (I got a job in three weeks, don’t cry for me). While they are a shit company to work for, were you around before AWS when it took months and tens of thousands of dollars to build our infrastructure and you can now provision infrastructure by writing some yaml? They are also designing thier own processors. I know first hand the type of technology that AWS has. Even Amazon retail and the logistic it takes to ship at that speed and volume is a modern miracle . Facebook basically stopped competitors like TikTok and Snaps growth by rapidly competing with Reels.
• bsuvc 3y ago
  This reason for "hire to fire". Incentives are weird.
• giantg2 3y ago
  I mean, HR is disgusting in general. You're basically a double agent. The companies tell employees that HR is there to help them, but HR is only there to help the company.
• euix 3y ago
  It's all about the money, the writer himself mentioned he had 100k's of stock that would vest. When you get into the 100k range of windfalls, people will do all sorts of things, even people you have known for years. That's why sometimes you only see people's true nature when their parents die and estate settlement comes into the picture. If you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, don't allow the almighty dollar to control your life.
• paganel 3y ago
  > You had visa-sponsored employees who, once we Pivoted them and moved them out, no longer were authorized to work in the United States. One of the main reasons I staid out of working in the US, maybe it's just sour grapes at this point (as I'm already in my early 40s that train has long passed) but seeing as how I would have basically been considered just a modern work slave it makes me think that I made the right choice. Also, all the best to the poor people affected by this insanity, I'm sure that they deserved much better.
• mparnisari 3y ago
  Ahhh of course, Pips! Mass layoffs in disguise, no severance, additional trauma! It's 3 for the price of 1! Best deal in town.
• someonehere 3y ago
  The Blind app seems to discuss this quite often in the Amazon employee posts that go up. If anyone wants more context and conversation about this topic. I’ve never considered Amazon a place to go after reading some of those posts.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  My perspective: I was your everyday ordinary CRUD developer in 2020 with leading a few projects under my belt at mostly unknown companies who had two years of AWS experience and was 46 years old. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for a software engineering position. At 46 years old there were a number of problems I saw with that “opportunity”: - I hadn’t done a real coding interview ever and had no desire to spend a few months “grinding leetcode” - I had no desire to have the thought of moving from my nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to move to Seattle “after Covid lifted” - I had no desire to uproot my life to work at Amazon knowing their reputation both from reading online and seeing what one of my best friends went through working in the finance department. But we kept talking and she suggested I apply for a role at AWS Professional Services it would be fully remote and more inline with my experience. I said sure why not? I got the job knowing from day one it wasn’t going to be a long term thing. Long story short, I went in with a plan. It was my 8th job out of college and my sixth since 2008. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 I made my money, got PIPed 3 years later, got a nice severance package and had a job in 3 weeks. Yes it pays about 20% less in total comp. But the lack of stress is well worth it. If I had known things were going to turn out like they did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988 I still would have worked for Amazon. It was just my 8th job out of nine and another method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Nothing more nothing less.
  • francisofascii 3y ago
    Yep, Assuming you will be fired eventually and will have to fall back to a normal CRUD job is the right play when taking these high pressure, high salary roles. Any idea why you were PIPed after 3 years?
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better. On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963737 Honestly, I didn’t look at the reasons why I was put on PIP on the remedies to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the paperwork. As soon as my manager starting discussing them, I interrupted them and asked how much was my severance. After they told me 40K+ and paid out vacation, I asked where do I sign? I knew someone would hire me. By the time the conversation came up, I already had a side contract with a former manager/CTO waiting in the wings for $135/hour. I also knew the director of a major non tech company who was willing to create a position paying more in cash than I was making in all at Amazon to lead the cloud transition and architecture. We had worked together at AWS and he was the one that suggested I wait for the PIP. I ended up not taking his offer because I didn’t want the stress of the job even though I would have loved working with him again. My compensation now is somewhere on the high side between CRUD developer and BigTech software dev. I can easily go up after a couple of years if I care too. I’m working full time at a consulting company because I really don’t want the hassle of going independent.
• baggachipz 3y ago
  PIP Plan ATM Machine PIN Number Is there a term for these sorts of things?
  • M2Ys4U 3y ago
    RAS Syndrome. (Redundant Acronym Syndrome) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
• pc86 3y ago
  > If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me. What exactly are people in HR doing to warrant getting over $200k in stock grants? Even spread over an entire vesting schedule (and it's not, it's just the final vest) that's ludicrous for the work they do.
  • throitallaway 3y ago
    Laying off lots of people isn't fun?
    • pc86 3y ago
      Neither is laying concrete but those guys aren't getting a quarter million in stock every 4 years, despite having a more positive effect on the economy.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • TrackerFF 3y ago
    I'm gonna be the devils advocate here: If someone in HR can save a company hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars by removing underperforming workers, and replacing them with better workers, shouldn't that warrant some bonus? In the same way that if some engineer discovers a bug that is costing the company a lot of money, and fixing it, should also get a bonus?
    • gurchik 3y ago
      > In the same way that if some engineer discovers a bug that is costing the company a lot of money, and fixing it, should also get a bonus? How often does this happen?
• xivzgrev 3y ago
  Why does anyone choose to work at Amazon? Given all the stories of PIP, it sounds like a not great place to work Go to other fang, or other tech. Lots of companies that pay just as well. Amazon would be my last choice - my job search is going awful, gotten rejected from most big tech companies, and I have well paying Amazon and a long tail of little shit companies that don’t pay that great (think of the equity!!)
  • torton 3y ago
    Immigration support. Decent salary. A big name on a resume that can be leveraged into a better, well paying job. Remember, people who are content don’t leave reviews. I worked with Amazon a lot over the years. There are people there who have been there for a decade+. It wouldn’t happen if they were treated abysmally.
  • delecti 3y ago
    Most of my time there was pretty good, even given the fact I got put on a PIP at one point, which I realistically deserved (lazy kid right out of college). I graduated from the PIP and stayed another couple years, and by the end had paid off a substantial pile of student loans. One thing I liked was that Amazon puts up less of an act that everyone is one big family. I knew they saw me as a "human resource", and could behave accordingly. It was only when the stress started to follow me home that I got out, only sticking around longer than that to take advantage of the great health insurance for a big procedure.
  • digitalsushi 3y ago
    I've never worked there and never tried to work there ... I dont consider myself anywhere good enough to even try I have the impression that if you can survive for 4 years, you get some very lucrative wealth building stock options. But I also believe that most people don't actually make it all the way to the end. Kind of like a winning lotto card you get for standing in a boiling shower for an hour
  • strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    Not everyone is talented enough to have their pick of jobs to choose from. A lot of people take what they can get within their constraints.
• mparnisari 3y ago
  Do managers get PIPed too? I've only ever seen regular devs get PIPed
  • dtmooreiv 3y ago
    Yes, managers do. This article is about a manager who got PIPed. From the article, "So my manager took away all my direct reports, and shoved me into a small box, and said you could do this and try to work yourself out of it."
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  This is a carry on from Welch capitalism which puts management at a combative pose against employees.
• neilv 3y ago
  This looks like raw material for quotes that would be sprinkled throughout a normal piece of journalism. Why was this person talking to BI (instead of, say, the NYT or a major metro area news org)? And why did BI publish this sometimes unclear monologue, rather than do more journalism? (Did BI not want to allocate resources to do a proper piece? Did the source talk to multiple news outlets, and BI wanted to be the first to publish anything at all from it? Did the source insist that BI do this as a condition, and BI didn't tell them to take a hike?)
• amznburn 3y ago
  I personally enjoy the number of times Amazon's PR has to call out the tens of thousands of complaints from tech and non-tech employees as "not representative of the experience of the vast majority of our employees." The other employees are too scared to speak up, else lose their job. Or, they are sociopaths.
• dboreham 3y ago
  When you take a job with a large company (and potentially smaller companies too) you are not joining The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, you're a character in The Hunger Games.
• uptownfunk 3y ago
  It’s a terrible place to work but not for the reasons people think. Being green and fresh is priceless, you can take on any challenge because you don’t yet know the reality of it, and once you get in it, your only way is out, which can be really powerful if put to the right uses. Amazon puts a good price on that to juice the best years of your life. Please don’t squander your best years to go from L4 -> L5 or L6 -> L7 Play and win at a different game. The prizes are way better.
  • firstSpeaker 3y ago
    How about L7->L8?
    • uptownfunk 3y ago
      That’s not my point. It’s nothing to do with the number. It’s just not worth the best years of your life, unless you think it is, in which case maybe you should do it, or.. maybe you are undervaluing yourself. It’s all the same recipe, take on more work, grow L(n-1) under you, be lucky, kiss up to management, and.. be lucky. Even then it’s 4 years at a minimum of grueling work. I’m not against grueling work, but why not put that effort in for yourself? What are you going to get as an L8, maybe 1M? Is that worth 4 years+ of your prime time life ? Are you really learning all that much? Are you really having all the impact you want in the most meaningful way? If you think your ultimate purpose is playing the games to get the L(n+1), maybe it’s the right place. But if not.. maybe not?
• datacruncher01 3y ago
  Stack ranking biggest flaw is that it results in managers gaming the system by over hiring to create strategic buffer ftes they can drop if they need to. Which leads to a reoccurring need to use stack ranking and more over hiring.
• notjoemama 3y ago
  I’m going to rant for a sec… Glad I’m not smart enough, nor care to put the work in, to pass a FAANG interview. I’ll stick to stupid crud land tyvm. This PIP behavior is just one more reason I consider their employment a kind of abuse. I’m human and I refuse to be compromised so easily. Pathetic (to me). Closest I got was an interview at what I’ll call a molar company (want to be FAANG). I asked the HR screener if the technical code interview was based on real world code or just puzzles (I was going to walk if it’s just puzzle code, not good at fake stuff, haven’t practiced, and I wouldn’t be a good fit if that’s what they are looking for). She assured me the eng lead doing the interview used real code. So I call in, get on camera, where they used a coding interview website and it was a small sample with no context. It may have been from their code base but it was scrubbed and meant nothing to me. I asked for context but he said i don’t need it. I asked if i could change integer types to dates but he said no. Oh, and I was recorded but wasn’t told about that until I called in. So I was pretty pissed because I’m staring at a damn puzzle but this guy thinks the whole setup is a-ok. Well, fine. It might be. For them. I felt like I was lied to them provided no concession. So I hummed and hawed with no intention of solving his puzzle. I made him stick out the whole hour. I even explained at one point I wouldn’t write code like that because multiple conditions and multiple code paths converge on 7 lines. I explained the conditional logic was hidden and it would be better if it were more explicit, not just so it’s readable but because simplifying it by expanding the conditions makes it modifiable, supportable, and testable. Nope. I was told it was Ruby and it’s a Ruby thing to reduce logic in fewer lines of code. Yeah I get it. Inventing a complex trick makes you feel smart. I’m so sorry life is so boring to you. I’m certain I looked like a fool to him. I don’t care. He had mannerisms that screamed “on the spectrum”. I think that’s fine…until smart people are put in charge and never get an ego check. Leading means leading people, not writing code more complicated than everyone else. I’m obviously still salty about the whole thing. There’s another situation with people from a much larger software company came in and took a big dump at one of the smaller software companies I worked at. At this point I just don’t trust corporatized anything anymore. I think they’re liars. I think they chew up and spit people out. I think they put profit over humanity. I also think I need to go for a walk. Sincere apologies if I’ve offended anyone. Guess I just needed to get that off my chest. I do hope you have a good day.
  • 3y ago
• xyzelement 3y ago
  I never worked at Amazon, but I did work at other companies known for toughness and "places you can get fired from" - most notably Bridgewater (from where I did get fired...) These places are not for everyone, but there are very good reasons why people consciously join a place with an "elevated risk of a PIP." Most notably, these places execute very well. Amazon is crushing it in vastly unrelated fields from Retail to Cloud. That seems to suggest that their philosophy on performance is more helpful vs hurtful to them in contrast to what others do. Doesn't mean it's perfect, but that perhaps the imperfections are worth it. Since no system is perfect, a company has to either run the risk of letting good people go, or bad people stay. Amazon has chosen which risk to run and it seems to work for them. As an employee, there's risk both ways. If you want to grow your skills and comp, your best bet is a place that errs towards strength. In the long run, it might be worth the small risk of let go, to be surrounded by strong performers. On the flip side, if you are really worried about underperforming and getting fired, Amazon is probably fine with you self-selecting to not apply. Personally, I took the risk of working at Bridgewater. While I did eventually get fired, those couple of years made me for sure a stronger performer (and person overall) so I am grateful for it. It was the right call but not for everyone.
  • pvtmert 3y ago
    > Amazon has chosen letting good people go I work at Amazon and I can tell that it depends on the organization and politics. Of course nobody is untouchable when it comes to the layoffs, but quite many people have made their spot pretty much resistant to firing. They are crucial for business to continue. (Again, maybe my organization) Also, it is very common at Amazon; Nobody is doing the job they are hired for. As a developer, you are responsible for anything and everything. Management only deals with PIP and crunching out weekly/monthly/quarterly documents where their management doesn't give a damn about except the summary part.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      Statistically eventually Amazon is always going to Amazon.
• shivtherust 3y ago
  A certain Y Combinator startup (two-sided labor marketplace in healthcare and nursing homes) requires that its frontline managers PIP or fire at least half of their team each year and sometimes more frequently. "If you're average, why are you here." And the managers do because they are terrified about losing their jobs. It has one of the worst cultures, and code bases, in the world, because nobody knows how things work or why decisions got made, and no one trusts their team mates enough to ask questions. Its all done in the name of excellence.
  • distortionfield 3y ago
    This sort of “manually induced churn” is absolutely god awful for a code base. I’ve seen the exact product of this type of management. And then, because the code base is so awful, the only productive people are the ones who have been around long enough to avoid the culling, but they’re also dealing with how bad it is, so even their productivity comes to a near-grinding-halt. and management wonders why nothing is getting done. It must be because they need more engineers… and the cycle continues.
  • Ancalagon 3y ago
    clipboard? edit: can we just say the company names, this site is anonymous lmao
    • whynot-123 3y ago
      that would make sense - they've reached out to me frequently over the years - seemed a bit desperate. Stopped the interview process the first time after learning what their PM salaries across a couple of levels were from an acquaintance who had recently interviewed there and realized they didn't value engineer's time.
• ken47 3y ago
  Amazon has been known to be a relatively undesirable place to work for those with options. So I’m not surprised at all by this article’s content. If it wasn’t part of the arbitrary FAANG acronym, they’d have a really hard time finding talent.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• astrostl 3y ago
  > PIP plans Darn those Performance Improvement Plan plans.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• sershe 3y ago
  Hmm, most top comments appear to construe this as some sort of anti-labor tactic. As someone who has seen them in action and actually sorta been on one, that seems super alien to me. If anything these plans are way too soft and pro-worker... 1) My own story is that in mid 20ies I was arguing a lot with teammates. I think there's some blame on both sides but most was on mine. There was one person who I think was a not very competent schemer (~confirmed later anonymously by other coworkers) who really set me off with poor technical decisions pushed thru with what I saw as dishonest ways, but overall the team was fine... being a junior developer I was willing to die on way too many hills and I wasn't nice about it either. So they put me on this thing where my coworkers would assess me anonymously, and it came out saying I am great to ok all around but my communication skills are terrible. Then they gave me a bad review and started pushing me towards some online courses and stuff to improve, and saying how it's a risk for my career etc. The job was getting boring and I didn't want to climb uphill from the bad review so after 6 months or so I just left. And I definitely saw the errors in my ways and the negative impact on the team and ~never behaved like that again on my future jobs. But my point here is... why would they do it if they were anti-me? The most logical way to deal with this situation is to fire me and forget about the whole problem. They actually ended up helping my career in other companies cause if they just fired me, instead of doing the plan song and dance, I'd probably be filled with rightful indignation instead of learning. I don't see how the whole perf plan was some sinister anti-labor move. Another 2 situations, to contrast. 2) In a big tech co, joined a new team and there was some guy doing almost no work. Like I'd walk into his office to ask a question and he was fiddling with fantasy sports. I am pretty sure he had to be on some plan... but as far as I understand (it was before me) it took at least a year for him to leave/be fired. As opposed to... 3) In a small Russian co, we hired a guy and he was not very productive. Getting ahead, similar to (2), we found when cleaning his desk later he was doing tons of puzzles at work. Anyway, I was a junior team lead with no power. After the tickets assigned to him languished one too many times, a manager asked me what's up. I said I dunno, he seems competent but very slow and I cannot get him to speed up. Manager: "well why not just fire him" me "I can do that?" manager "just say a word" me "hmm, let me talk to him, let's give him another chance" manager "ok you know what, I'm gonna fire him right now, problem solved" This is how non-FAANG "PIP" plan works :)
• iamnotsure 3y ago
  People are not PIPS.
• fooker 3y ago
  I've heard this described as stack ranking with extra steps, seems accurate!
• allenng 3y ago
  > "Like most companies, we have a performance management process that helps our managers identify who on their teams are performing well and who may need more support. For the small number of employees who are underperforming, we use performance management programs to help them improve, and many employees do just that." That language is so disrespectful. If I were an Amazon employee reading that, it would feel like being in a toxic, violent relationship and hearing my partner at a party tell others "They're so clumsy; they need my support. They fall down the stairs a lot."