[HN Gopher] Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on...
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance
management plan
Author : xenocyon
Score : 285 points
Date : 2021-07-09 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seattletimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seattletimes.com)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Which manager came up with this brainwave of an idea to make
| themselves appear useful?
| r00fus wrote:
| It's probably an interpretation of why Bezos wants (he's been
| quoted as thinking workers are lazy by default).
|
| So it's from the top.
| mkl95 wrote:
| What makes Amazon employees so eager to work there? Is it purely
| because of their salaries? I have worked at large companies where
| none of this dystopian stuff happens.
| patch_cable wrote:
| There are teams building cool things, used by large customers,
| where you're paid decently.
|
| It's not really all that dystopian.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Thanks for the info. I come across more and more of these
| articles that paint a grim picture of Amazon's engineering
| departments. But as an outsider I get the feeling that's it's
| better than your average mid sized startup where you will be
| lucky to make 1/3 of what an Amazon engineer makes, while
| working more hours and getting your performance reviewed by
| equally sociopathic middle managers. I still wonder how it
| compares to other FAANG companies though.
| pancaku wrote:
| I think Amazon is not as bad as people harp on. However,
| other FAANG's definitely pay more, have better benefits,
| give refreshers, and also don't have a culture which
| heavily emphasizes PIPs.
|
| Since Amazon interviews are similar to other FAANGs, people
| who pass an Amazon interview have a higher correlation of
| passing other interviews. Those FAANGs and associated
| companies tend to have a higher value proposition so people
| tend to choose them.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| I think there may be some who appreciate certain idealized
| notions of the company's operations and competence in
| engineering and logistics. Few other companies could offer the
| same mix of software and real-world engineering at scale.
| koolba wrote:
| There's a Heisenberg principle at play here as anybody that knows
| they're on the thin ice is going to respond to that knowledge in
| some way.
| mrorbitman wrote:
| I've never seen anyone on a PIP bounce back. The smart move is to
| start your job hunt immediately when you discover you're on a
| PIP. Otherwise it's a long and stressful road to termination.
|
| The second the people around you don't believe you can cut it,
| it's already too late and best to find a gig elsewhere.
| throwaway48323 wrote:
| I had a PIP at a startup when six months in and several years
| later I'm the lead now.
|
| I saved my job by working during my ~two day vacation (and
| weekend) and building a bunch of things that I had talked with
| the non-eng cofounder about that weren't on the official
| roadmap but that had high value.
|
| Turned out the way engineering was organized wasn't very
| compatible with me (didn't take advantage of my product sense
| and generally was focusing too much on reviewing things in code
| that really didn't matter.)
|
| One of the people above me on the org chart (VP Engineering)
| lost his job instead. The lead at the time is now CTO and
| around that time adjusted the org to better match how I like to
| work.
| macintux wrote:
| I suspect that kind of story is more common at small
| companies still trying to define a path forward (or with
| inconsistent management philosophies).
|
| Still, impressive turnaround.
| otterley wrote:
| I have. I went from being PIPed after my first year due to not
| getting along with my team, to being nominated for Yahoo!'s
| Super Star award (the highest honor in the company) a year
| later. People can and do turn around when they are mentored
| with care and the will to succeed.
| topkai22 wrote:
| To be the odd man out, I do actually know someone who did and
| managed to later on advance in his career within the company.
| We shared a particularly bad manager who was forced out of the
| company himelf while he was on the PIP, so possibly special
| circumstances.
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| At most companies, having _ever been_ on such a list is a
| permanent mark. Any manager can pull up your record and see the
| whole history.
|
| Thus, any indication that you have got onto such a list is a red
| warning: _find another job_ somewhere else, and quickly. Do not
| wait to see if they will change their minds. They might decide
| not to fire you right away, but they will think of you, forever
| after, as a "problem employee". If you ever get off the list,
| you will go back on it the moment the length of your manager's
| list goes below quota. You may be sure that there is such a
| quota.
|
| This is very much like the notion of "politically unreliable" in
| the Soviet countries, and in China. Corporate governance
| resembles nothing so much as Soviet governance. This is not an
| accident: Lenin was a huge admirer of the Ford Motor Company.
|
| Being _still-employed_ is a huge factor in how attractive you are
| to your immediate future employer. So, it is important to act
| fast. Part of why they try to keep the list secret is that they
| want to be who controls when you leave, not you. Managers
| typically only get points for firing you, not you quitting. (But
| Amazon 's documented notion of "unregretted attrition" suggests
| it might be defined as somebody leaving who was on the list.)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _This is very much like the notion of "politically unreliable"
| in the Soviet countries, and in China. Corporate governance
| resembles nothing so much as Soviet governance. But one
| important difference is that the label equivalent to "class
| enemy" is not hereditary._
|
| Excellent point, though I think the only reason for the
| hereditary difference is that most corporations don't recruit
| from a multi-generational population in a fixed location. But I
| bet there are commercial fishing and logging firms where if the
| dad was a problem employee, expectations about the son will be
| correspondingly lowered.
|
| Anyway, in both contexts information asymmetries inevitably
| exacerbate power differentials; while this is to some extent a
| fundamental aspect of competition, the denial or posture that
| such asymmetries exist aims to maximize those power
| differentials, perhaps allowing them to grow in accordance with
| power laws rather than linearly (pun semi-intentional).
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| Amazon is a strange company. After having spent 4 years there I
| am convinced that they hate their employees. They want you to
| burnout.
|
| Just look at the stock vesting schedule, its 5, 15, 40, 40. First
| two years you barely get any stock, and I believe the average
| time someone stays at amazon is around 1.5 years (I don't have
| latest data so maybe this is wrong)
|
| On top of that, you have the pathetic 401k match (50% upto 2% of
| paycheck). Amazon's contribution to 401k vests after 3 years in
| the job, so you leave within the first 2 and you don't get
| anything. Not to mention the base salary cap of $160k.
|
| Add to that the horrible WLB, I knew teams who'd get 40 high
| severity tickets in a week (And there are teams with much worse
| WLB). You are constantly waking up at 2-3AM in the night, and
| fixing fires for no extra pay.
|
| Many times, Upper Management would dictate a timeline for your
| project, doesn't matter if it takes 4 months, we need it in 2 so
| get it done. This obviously leads to bad code. But there is no
| incentive within the company to fix/improve codebase, every thing
| is taped together, and On Call is there to tape things up some
| more so that they stay fixed. Even if you take the time and fix
| some of the tech debt, the company is not going to care and its
| not going to reward you.
|
| Speaking of rewards, if the company stock grows (which it has for
| the past several years), and because of this growth you stand to
| make more than your Amazon decided Target Compensation, then you
| won't get any base salary increase even if you were the best
| employee Amazon has ever seen. You might get additional stocks,
| but those will vest 2 year later. So basically, you did great
| work for the company in 2021, as a result the company stock grows
| enough that you are not out of range for your role's
| compensation, so they don't increase your salary, and they give
| you stocks that vest in 2024, 3 years after the you did the work.
|
| More often than not, I felt that most amazon employees (current
| and past) hate amazon. I have never seen a company being hated by
| its own workers with such fervor.
| qqtt wrote:
| I never understood the secretive nature of these Amazon "devplan"
| / "FOCUS" lists. If an employee has a performance issue, they
| should know. Period. If they are on a formal list, they should
| know that too.
|
| The only "positive" here is that it can affect the individual's
| moral to know you are not meeting expectations - but that has to
| be communicated regardless. If it's understood it has to be
| communicated and there is a list specifically including the
| individual, it's up to the company to manage that communication
| in a supportive manner.
|
| And the consequences of this secretive list are a culture of fear
| and uncertainty and doubt. Especially with the harsh consequences
| such as - if you leave while on this secretive list (which you
| cannot even know you are on) - you are ineligible for rehire.
|
| The solution is not to maintain a secretive list of employees who
| have performance issues - it is to be fully transparent about
| those performance issues and destigmatize being included in this
| nebulous secretive list in the first place - through a culture of
| support and shared success.
|
| Honestly it boggles my mind how Amazon managers accept this
| status quo at the scale that Amazon operates. It is so on it's
| face a recipe for having a toxic culture which breeds stress,
| doubt, and only serves to reinforce poor performance outcomes.
|
| Out of all the things I've heard about Amazon culture for its
| software organization - this single thing (secretive lists of
| employees with performance issues with "never rehire"
| consequences that employees can't even understand they are on)
| symbolizes for me all the reasons I would avoid them as an
| employer. There is no way to have this process without creating a
| toxic culture.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Maybe they are just trying to hide their unspoken requirement
| of firing a given proportion of their workplace for managers to
| be considered good. It should help give them plausible
| deniability when they need to fire someone that wasn't on the
| list as well.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Not really. The management team can make mistakes too. In those
| cases, it is not clear whether it is better for the employee to
| know. There is no clear cut obvious answer to this, unless you
| assume everyone is an emotionless robot.
| underwater wrote:
| It's not like management will just let the employer keep
| underperforming. They'll secretly PIP them, let them continue
| on their course, and then fire them with no warning.
| temp8964 wrote:
| No. Sometimes the employee didn't underperform at all. Why
| do you assume the manager always know the truth?
| CamTin wrote:
| Management effectively does know the truth, for the
| trivial reason that they get to decide what the truth is.
| They are the ones who get to decide what counts as
| performing and underperforming. It's not as though there
| is some objective way to determine who is and isn't a
| desirable employee.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I didn't read OP's comment as "performance issues should be
| publicized within the workforce" and more "performance issues
| should be known to the individual employee"
|
| If management thinks you're doing a bad job, it's not needed
| to make it known to the entire team - but _you_ should know.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I don't think you should always know. I also updated the
| language.
| lazide wrote:
| Doing something about a problem generally requires
| someone is aware that a problem exists right?
|
| Otherwise it's just marking them for future termination
| without telling them, which seems like a waste of
| everyone's time.
| temp8964 wrote:
| No. The management team can make honest mistake. After
| preliminary investigation, they find they are wrong. No
| need to tell the employee in this regard.
|
| I did not say they should never tell the employee. I
| think sometimes it's unnecessary.
| lazide wrote:
| Shouldn't that investigation happen before they are
| considered a performance problem and put on the list?
|
| Giving the employee a chance to rebut any performance
| problem assumptions would be an important part of this,
| and would also require they know.
| handmodel wrote:
| It doesn't seem crazy to me on the surface. You say you are
| worried about "toxic culture which breeds stress" but I think
| you could equally say that constantly getting notes that you
| are a below-average performer would be just as bad.
| chris11 wrote:
| Discovering that I misunderstood the seriousness of an issue
| is more stressful than being told something explicitly. And a
| major misunderstanding decreases trust. It would be much
| better to explicitly be told I'm on a pre-PIP plan than to
| assume it's a less serious issue and find out when I try to
| change teams.
| lazide wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they won't let someone change teams, and
| many of the people on this list aren't expected (and for
| some managers, maybe not even allowed) to improve.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| That's the point. They don't want a blocked transfer to
| be the first sign they could lose their job.
| mataug wrote:
| A toxic culture of fear is the intended effect here.
|
| People at amazon love to discuss the flywheel effect[1]. The
| flywheel here is the culture of fear that keeps employees on
| their toes. Bezos believes that employees are inherently
| lazy[2], and it seems like fear is tool the S-team have chosen
| to solve the problem of lazy employees.
|
| This has a lot of unintended consequences[3], but the
| executives with the power to change this don't care as long as
| they keep getting rewarded with a higher stock price, and fresh
| college grads who are willing to sacrifice themselves at the
| altar.
|
| [1]https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-
| flywhee...
|
| [2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-
| be...
|
| [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786829
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Do you think that this culture will shift with his
| retirement, or do you think that this culture is so embedded
| within the fabric of Amazon itself, that there is no
| separating this kind of behavior from the company without a
| dismantling of the corporate structure itself?
| Retric wrote:
| Company culture always decays over time to reflect
| incentives. Not to denigrate Andy Jassy as a Harvard MBA
| turned Marketing Manager who moved up to become a CEO. But
| upper management always ends up with the kinds of people
| who tend to reach upper management in any company.
|
| That said, Amazon's culture is closer to the norm than most
| startups so in the short term things are unlikely to change
| much. At least until some new management fad becomes
| popular or they run into a significant issue.
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| Unless they dump the entire senior management and bring new
| folks in, its not changing. That culture is at the core of
| Amazon, and perhaps even a contributor to its success, at
| the detriment of its own employees of course.
| meh99 wrote:
| I think we define success too narrowly for these
| sprawling organizations with massive social influence.
|
| How much political scrip such an organization generates
| given esoteric economic measures should not outweigh real
| world impact
| mataug wrote:
| Andy Jassy used to lead AWS before becoming Amazon's CEO.
|
| AWS has a reputation of being a difficult place to work,
| even more so than Amazon's other divisions.
|
| So no, I don't think anything will change.
|
| https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/he-
| l...
| traskjd wrote:
| Yes, those poor AWS employees sure have it tough vs that
| warehouse division.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Yes, those poor AWS employees sure have it tough vs
| that warehouse division.
|
| Pointing out that someone has it shittier is typically an
| _excuse_ for shittyness.
| traskjd wrote:
| Yes that's why I thought it odd to say the AWS devs have
| it hardest in the whole company. It's not a competition
| though it always feels a bit silly to pretend back
| breaking physical labor is easier than sitting in an air
| conditioned office in a chair.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The strongest plausible interpretation is they meant for
| equivalent jobs.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Or in some cases letting said shittiness manifest because
| the person doing the pointing isn't themselves subject to
| it and/or could stand to lose ground when someone decides
| to do something about it.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| yes here. if no person knows if is on performence management
| plan all must act like they are on probation of some sort,
| work much extra. like dictatorship where person may be
| monitored any time and so always act like this.
| grayfaced wrote:
| Imagine suffering from imposter syndrome in an office with
| this fear culture. People will work themselves to the bone
| trying to fix personal perceived inadequecies. Then they
| burnout and quit.
|
| I guess if workers are considered expendable than that's a
| positive. Corporations need to be more accountable to their
| workers welfare and not solely stockholder's welfare.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Given their seeming labour challenges, maybe it is a self
| regulating problem?
| tlogan wrote:
| I bet this FOCUS list is used by managers to prevent good
| engineers moving to a different team.
|
| Also my experience tells me that all these mega corps have very
| similar culture.
| opportune wrote:
| I have spent a lot of time on Blind where this is discussed
| often and I think I have an idea what is going on.
|
| At a high level, Amazon orgs have Unregretted Attrition (URA)
| targets/quotas for orgs. Not every manager needs to hit the
| exact target but under a certain level of middle management
| they do. Because of this built-in churn they need to have a
| pipeline of low performers - because once the current set of
| URA targets get managed out or leave you will need to still hit
| that quota next quarter/half/year/whatever. So maybe your quota
| is 5% but you have another 5-10% extra in earlier stages of
| your pipeline so you can sacrifice them later.
|
| In the later stages when you're actively getting managed out
| they put you on a formal PIP. In theory it's possible to "get
| out" of it but because of the quotas it's pretty much a lost
| cause. So on Blind the most common suggestion for people on PIP
| is to do the absolute bare minimum and start interviewing
| elsewhere, expecting to fail the PIP.
|
| I imagine the reason Amazon doesn't want people to know about
| Focus/Dev plans is that once you know you're in the earlier
| stages of the pipeline, you may come to a similar conclusion.
| Basically if a target is painted on your back and you know
| there's a high probability you're going to get managed in the
| next 6 months, it's better to do the bare minimum at work and
| focus as much as possible on getting a new job. But from
| Amazon's perspective that's a lot of lost work/time/money, and
| they're not even sure yet that they want to get rid of those
| people. And further, if employees don't know about the
| performance plan there is less chance they will deliberately
| sandbag and may actually improve their ranking enough to move
| off the early stage pipeline.
|
| In my opinion the root of all this disfunction is the quota
| system. If managers were not forced to manage out so many
| people and being on a "low performance plan" at any stage were
| seen as an actual opportunity to identify issues and improve
| performance, there would be much less incentive to sandbag by
| doing the bare minimum, and also much less need for secrecy
| about the process.
|
| But this is Amazon, I am sure they have thought deeply about
| this. My guess is that they have done the math on many
| alternatives and this is the least-worst. For example by
| managing out so many people they can be less selective in
| hiring which may be better overall (eg an overall acceptance
| rate of 20% with 10% of those being false positives fills more
| roles than an overall acceptance rate of 10% with a 0% false
| positive rate). Of course managing people out also has a cost
| in creating an unpleasant/toxic work environment that itself
| increases churn, which they may or may not account for. Keep in
| mind due to their vesting models, a good performer burning out
| and quitting after 2 years is actually good for their bottom
| line. As long as they continue to fill roles I doubt they will
| be incentivized to change this model.
| qqtt wrote:
| I can see how some small aspects of this policy could make
| sense objectively. Having a URA target + needing a pipeline
| to feed that at scale certainly makes sense - notwithstanding
| the proven misguided approach of having a URA target to begin
| with.
|
| But taken as a whole I cannot help but conclude that the
| program is meant to instil a culture of fear (and by
| extension toxicity). Considering the following:
|
| * A manager may or may not have made vague statements to
| indicate you are on this list. Since the manager is
| explicitly instructed not to talk about the list itself, it
| is up to the employee to triangulate from a manager's
| statements their standing relative to performance. This means
| that employees can never really be sure about their status
| with respect to this list and so must constantly be on their
| toes (especially regarding statements from their managers).
|
| * If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the
| logic in preventing them from switching teams internally?
| Perhaps a culture change or a product change would tip the
| scales for them to increase performance. Maybe there is a
| culture clash with the org or with the direct manager. I
| don't see any downside in maintaining the FOCUS status but
| allowing the employee to explore options to improve their
| productivity internally.
|
| * If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the
| rationale behind blacklisting them from ever becoming rehired
| at the company? This the most egregious offence to me
| regarding the entire program - that Amazon is hanging a sword
| of damocles over all their employees heads, implicitly
| threatening them with blacklisting them as one of the largest
| tech employers in the industry. This list, again, being
| entirely secretive and Amazon explicitly instructing managers
| not to talk about with employees.
|
| From my understanding, you can work at Amazon several years,
| be on a FOCUS/devlist for a huge amount of that time - and
| never even know. When you leave, you are automatically marked
| as URA and ineligible to rejoin the company.
|
| This all adds up to me as a program specifically designed to
| be vaguely threatening and fear inducing.
|
| If we assume an ideal world where managers are all great
| communicators and can handle performance management with
| skill and would never misuse the program for any reason - I
| can maybe squint and suspend my disbelief enough to see how
| this program can effectively work.
|
| But you would have to be breathlessly naive to assume that's
| how the program would practically work in the real world with
| actual managers (and the state of middle/upper management in
| tech companies at large).
|
| Any management/leadership team who is OK with rolling such a
| program out at scale given the above is not a team I would
| want to work with in any capacity, and IMO it just speaks to
| the dehumanizing nature of the culture they are aiming to
| create. It is inconceivable that upper management at Amazon
| doesn't realize these effects of the program.
|
| Like you say, they have probably thought about it deeply, and
| just don't care. The metrics are working for them, so it
| continues. I personally am not going to lose sleep over it, I
| will simply refuse to work there. I hope employees who do
| work there know that there are other technology companies who
| actually consider these negative effects on their own
| employees and actually have empathy towards creating a place
| where people genuinely want to work - because for other
| companies, the equation regarding optimizing business metrics
| lands a bit differently when it comes to their own employees.
| If you can pass the bar at Amazon you can pass the bar at
| other places. Don't sell yourself short thinking this is
| normal or OK.
| usefulcat wrote:
| That does make a lot of sense. One question I have is how
| this practice will affect their reputation. My theory is that
| the reputational damage will most adversely affect their
| ability to hire more experienced workers. But maybe their
| plan is to hire more people fresh out of college and bring
| them up internally (the ones that don't get URA'd anyway), in
| which case the reputational damage may not matter as much? It
| still seems like a pretty big long term gamble to me. I have
| to think a lot of experienced workers will be reluctant to
| even consider working at a place with this level of
| shenanigans. I know I would be.
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| I do believe that Amazon has irrevocably hurt its image.
| You only need to spend like a week using the Blind app and
| you'll run into a few horror stories about amazon.
|
| There were posts on the blind app regarding how amazon has
| been having trouble hiring experienced folks. I am also
| seeing increased linkedin posts from Amazon SDMs in my
| network, all advertising positions they have open on their
| team.
|
| > maybe their plan is to hire more people fresh out of
| college and bring them up internally
|
| In addition to new grads, amazon also depends on L1 visa
| imports from India and other countries. And maybe H1 hires
| here. Its not easy to switch jobs on visa besides you need
| to stay at a company for 2-3 years to get green card, so it
| works out in Amazon's favor. My guess is they are feeling
| the pinch now because Covid is bad in India, and India to
| US travel is stopped, So visa pipeline has dried out
| significantly.
| varispeed wrote:
| Why people go to work to places that treat engineers like some
| farm animals?
|
| Zero respect to the craft. Plus the company is avoiding taxes, so
| everyone gets paid less thanks to that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Amazon workers should unionise, then collectively every single
| employee asks their boss "morning boss, am I on the list" every
| single day. They'll soon change the policy.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| As far as I know... nobody at Amazon when I was there got taken
| off "Focus" (whatever it was called in the past). They only ended
| up leaving the company.
|
| But that said, I think Amazon had a very long interview process.
| Too long. (But I hear it's gotten better.) And so to grow fast,
| they need an easy way to exit people... that's not a bad thing.
|
| Interviews are never a great way to hire people. Working with
| them tells you a lot more about personality and work ethic and
| commitment.
|
| From what I've seen, I don't disagree with any of the employees
| that had been on Focus. Like generally speaking, we showed the
| people the door who needed to be shown the door.
|
| For the good of the team, some people just don't fit, or they
| distract... a lot of it was personality, but a lot of it was
| really they were lacking the Ownership quality we needed.
|
| If you have someone waiting for 12-levels of approval, they just
| slow down the others. I don't know quite how to say it, but it
| was a common thing you'd get someone from a big company... and
| they had various processes in mind when doing anything. We need
| that "Bias for Action" instead of anyone just looking to do
| things the way they did them at past jobs.
|
| Or we had a guy who thought, "We're Amazon, we print money...
| let's just solve all our problems by throwing money at them."
| Oof. Amazon is, silly as it sounds, a startup at scale. And their
| Leadership Principles really speak to this.
|
| Some people just don't get it.
|
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
|
| Anyway, my 2 cents, as a former Amazon employee... It's good for
| any company -- especially one that wants to grow fast -- to exit
| about 5-10% of their workforce every year. Find the ones that
| aren't doing what's needed... and encourage them to go work
| somewhere else where they can add value. I never saw anyone
| bullied, I never saw anyone put on "Focus" who shouldn't have
| been there.
|
| Playing devil's advocate... given so few people get off "Focus"
| plans, what's the point of letting people know they are on it?
| Kind of just seems like a waste of everyone's time. Some
| conversations just burn hours, no?
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| > Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not
| meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to
| improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.
|
| As long you are effectively communicating performance on a
| regular basis, I don't really see the point in telling an
| employee that "we're formally thinking about firing you" other
| than dropping a morale bomb in the workplace. If you're telling
| an employee that their performance needs improvement in general,
| it stands to follow that termination is a possible result.
|
| Either people improve when they're told their performance is bad,
| or they don't. Workplaces without formal PIPs don't tell
| employees to their face that they're thinking about firing them
| either. Not sure why the formal paperwork makes any difference.
|
| Although maybe I'm missing something, I've never worked at a
| mega-corp.
| tlogan wrote:
| I worked as a manager in a mega-corp. One of tricks I was told
| by other managers is to put your best employees on the 'focus'
| list (grade 3) so they cannot leave for a better position/team
| in the company. But they would get bonuses because the bonuses
| were per team and HR was not aware who gets what.
|
| Of course the 'focus' list was a secret list :)
| jp42 wrote:
| Thats evil. Blind is littered with posts of amazon employees
| who are mentally destroyed. It's ok to put on pip for genuine
| performance issues, but why destroy those who are performing
| well.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| There are many types of PIPs, and Amazon seems to be trying a new
| flavor. This one seems to be about managers focusing (hence the
| name) on floundering employees, giving them the attention they
| need to get back ok track. And maybe telling the employee "you're
| getting extra attention" could make them pessimistic and less
| able to be improved. It's a good theory, anyway. We'll see if it
| works out.
|
| Of course the other, darker possibility is that this is an
| attempt to take the evil parts of the PIP and get rid of the
| actual improvement. Keep the "build a case against the employee
| so we can fire them without a lawsuit", ditch the "actually
| trying to improve their performance". I prefer to think this
| isn't the case.
| chris11 wrote:
| > Keep the "build a case against the employee so we can fire
| them without a lawsuit", ditch the "actually trying to improve
| their performance"
|
| I'm less optimistic. I see two main uses for PIPS.
|
| 1) 3rd parties usually get involved in communicating the
| performance issues and expectations.
|
| 2) It explicitly documents failures if an employee doesn't
| improve.
|
| I'm assuming employees usually only pass the PIP if
| communication is the major issue. But a manager should
| communicate performance concerns before starting an official
| PIP process. I'm not confident that a well intentioned PIP
| process will lead to a large minority of employees passing it.
|
| Documenting failures only helps in firing someone. It isn't a
| benefit to the individual engineer.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| Being employed to one of those companies is like working for the
| mafia without the risk of being killed (at least not directly)
| part. Expect no loyalty,fairness,open-communication, or just any
| basic decency from them.
| motohagiography wrote:
| There is some rationale for this, as why tip an at-risk employee
| off to what is essentially a foregone conclusion?
|
| Napkin math, if your salary is $100k/year - you are necessarily
| delivering at least $200k in revenue/value, so if you have a
| rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that
| point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on
| the other part of that expected $200k value, the opportunity cost
| is harming the company.
|
| The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the
| company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as a
| purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to not
| disclose it. The laws make it such that everyone has to sustain
| the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates that creepy
| gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping it secret could
| mean a more personally honest and less psychologically harmful
| relationship for all involved.
|
| Reality is, performance in most organizations is secondary to
| relationships in them (and perhaps credentials) because the
| reason a (profitable/long-lived) company makes money as a
| business is because it can operate at scale with interchangeable
| parts that get along, which means the marginal value of a high or
| low performer is not as significant to its bottom line as
| downside risks from a lack of cohesion, so the main thing you
| need to care about in an organization is your key relationships.
|
| If your relationship with co-workers or managers is getting
| dicey, all you can do is "read the room," keep your CV updated,
| and your recruiter contacts warm, because unless you deliver some
| large multiple on performance (product breakthrough they need you
| to execute, or land a large client, etc), opinion-wise you're
| done there and it's time to move on.
| nodelessness wrote:
| > The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the
| company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as
| a purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to
| not disclose it. The laws makes it such that everyone has to
| sustain the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates
| that creepy gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping
| it secret could mean a more personally honest and less
| psychologically harmful relationship for all involved.
|
| Are you from the USA?
| mrRandomGuy wrote:
| 'tip an at-risk employee'? Are we talking about a person who's
| not doing a good job at his job, or a suspect in murder deemed
| as a flight risk?
|
| Wtf
| Zenst wrote:
| What happens if an Employee of Amazon who is in a country that
| has a data regulation that allows them to ask for and legally get
| any data pertaining too them?
|
| That would place Amazon to legally disclose if such an employee
| is on any list or anything else they have on them, be it paper or
| digital.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Focus/PIP is a lot harder in Europe for this reason, among
| better labour protection laws
| malfist wrote:
| Managers are required to disclose focus/devlist status if asked
| directly. But they're not supposed to tell you without you
| asking. At least not until you get your PIP papers.
| mataug wrote:
| Based on a few anecdotes, managers do not disclose even if
| the employee asks directly. Apparently managers actively
| sabotage the employee by telling others to not collaborate
| with the person on Focus.
|
| So many employees find out by either attempting an internal
| transfer, or getting PIP papers served.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I had an ex that was in all honesty was a horrible employee. I
| feel bad for anyone that ever worked with her. She was always
| qualified for the job but a nightmare doing actual work. She came
| to me with some project that her boss asked her to work on
| looking for advice. This Fortune 500 company was asking her, as a
| software engineer, to create an Excel spreadsheet budget for her
| next project. I honestly helped her to the best of my ability (it
| actually wasn't half bad haha) but they ended up firing her
| within a few weeks. They were just looking for a final project to
| show in plain view that she couldn't do what was asked of her.
|
| Anecdotal but... I suppose they could be protecting themselves
| from these situations where once they have made up their mind,
| it's probably in their best interest to see their everyday work
| ethic. I think most of us would like the chance to know whether
| they are doing a good job to improve, but this sounds like once
| they are on this list, their days are numbered
| nashashmi wrote:
| It's not a "conceal" as it is a lack of discussion. I get that
| being put on performance management plan can be demoralizing. The
| article makes it appear unjust. It only reveals the true nature
| of the concealing AFTER it has narrated the whole story with
| opinions. This is ridiculous.
|
| Amazon is doing it exactly right. However there needs to be
| transparency at the minimum expected performance. For all
| employees. And when employees know they don't meet that
| expectation, they do whatever they need to do including use
| corporate resources to get there.
|
| But this article is a hit piece
| tannedNerd wrote:
| What's the true nature of the concealing? The fact that some
| managers flout the guidance that Amazon provides to not tell
| people they are on a PIP? I've never heard of another company
| doing that, much less would want to work for one where that is
| the official guidance to managers!
|
| If you might label it a hit price, I don't think it's that
| controversial to label you as Amazon apologist.
| DougBTX wrote:
| In the small section where they quote Amazon's perspective,
| it says:
|
| > tell the employee that their performance is not meeting
| expectations
|
| Then the rest of the article is all quotes about employees
| who are not sure if they are meeting expectations or not. Are
| managers just not following this guidance, or is there some
| other rule that says the opposite of this quote?
| void_mint wrote:
| > Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that
| they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts
| their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks,
| according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for
| managers.
|
| This is distinctly not a "Performance Management Plan", as the
| plan involves the employee and provides clear guidelines for
| success. If you're concealing that they're on a PIP at all,
| it's not a PIP, it's literally just the declaration that you
| intend to fire someone you deem low performing.
|
| _edit_ And I 'll add, I don't think they're legally obligated
| to tell a person they're not performing to their desired
| standard, as at-will employment, but it just seems silly to
| call something a PIP that is actually not at all a PIP.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > but it just seems silly to call something a PIP that is
| actually not at all a PIP.
|
| Or it's _too good at_ being a PIP ;)
|
| Many PIPs (in my experience: _most PIPs_ ) are not good faith
| attempts to allow a poorly-performing employee to improve.
| The decision to fire them was made before the PIP was issued,
| the PIP is just documentation to protect the company in the
| case of a lawsuit.
|
| Amazon's approach here - if correctly reported - seems like
| it takes the step of embracing a PIP for what it actually is,
| by making it purely a documentation/justification task and
| eschewing the (often make-believe) step of letting employees
| fulfill the requirements of the PIP.
|
| Overall I'm very much against non-transparent PIPs. Short of
| gross behavior, employees deserve to know if they are going
| to be let go for performance and prepare an exit plan. Not to
| mention PIPs are often arbitrary and capricious - not every
| employee on a PIP is actually poorly-performing. At the very
| least it gives people time to jump ship.
| void_mint wrote:
| The silliness is in the pretending its even a pip at all.
| It's not. Management is just reporting low performance to
| HR, which is neither a process for improvement nor
| newsworthy. It's specifically anti-employee, but it's not
| news. Amazon has always been anti-employee.
| kjsingh wrote:
| To correct the point, this is about Focus/Dev plan which an
| SDM undergoes and all this is pre-PIP. In this case he just
| highlights the org leadership, not HR.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's not a "conceal" as it is a lack of discussion.
|
| Lack of discussion _is_ concealment. Knowing you 're on a
| formal PIP is to know whatever performance issues your manager
| might be telling you about are actually serious and that your
| job is on the line. It's my understanding that formal tracking
| of performance issues is frequently a CYA step prior to
| termination.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > "Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees
| that they are on a formal performance-management plan that
| puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly
| asks, according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for
| managers."
|
| The fact is the PIP hasn't put their job in jeopardy, it was
| their not meeting expectations that put their job in
| jeopardy. The reality is once you're there, it's (a) probably
| obvious due to your manager's consistent displeasure and (b)
| almost impossible to get out of either way because even if
| the manager is wrong the employer will side with the manager.
| The PIP itself is, as you say, just procedural backside-
| covering to paper up a decision that was already made.
|
| > Lack of discussion is concealment.
|
| With that in mind, is it really better to torture an employee
| with a set of steps you know they won't execute to your
| satisfaction anyways and dole out false hope? It seems far
| more humane to let them know it isn't working out and to put
| their stuff in a box.
|
| I bet my lunch money that an employee is far more likely to
| shape up and deliver in line with expectations when they
| aren't afraid each day they walk into the office may be their
| last. I think this gives employees more chance to succeed,
| not less. More transparency isn't always beneficial.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Putting aside everything else, having a formal performance-
| management plan, in which those put on it will be informed
| of that fact, normally means that most employees will have
| some evidence for not feeling afraid that each day they
| walk into the office may be their last.
| arcticbull wrote:
| There is a plan, and the manager will hold employees to
| it, the difference is they aren't proactively saying "if
| you don't complete these steps, you can see yourself
| out." At that point the manager has usually already, for
| better or worse, flipped the "bozo bit" on the employee
| and is very unlikely to attribute any successes and
| instead over-index on the failures. The vast majority of
| employees put on a PIP do not successfully complete the
| PIP.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Targets the employee doesn't know about aren't a plan.
|
| The low probability of reversing the bozo bit is why the
| employee should know when the manager flipped it.
| throwaway73851 wrote:
| I was nearly put on a PIP when I was at Amazon. I noped out
| of there and went to greener pastures before that could
| happen.
|
| I was severely jaded by my experience there. When I started,
| I immediately initiated conversations with my manager about
| what I could do to make sure I succeeded. I asked the more
| senior engineers on my team if we could whiteboard about the
| services we owned and who interacted with them as well as
| what upstream teams we depended on. The SDE3 told me "I don't
| know." To this day, I'm still pissed off that an SDE3 who had
| been on the team for 4+ years "didn't know" who used their
| services or how the services interacted. And it wasn't that
| he didn't know - he just didn't give a shit about onboarding
| newbies.
|
| That same engineer, when I asked him for help in debugging an
| alert that I had put into a system, threw out some bogus
| answer and took one step back. I told him I had tried his
| suggestion. He then gave another bogus answer and took
| another step back. He literally backed away slowly and after
| three or four steps, just sat down at his desk and ignored
| me.
|
| I recognize I'm an N=1, and I have friends that more or less
| enjoyed their time there, but I saw far too many bullshit
| patterns from engineers and managers for me to think of
| Amazon's approach as anything but intentionally malicious.
| babesh wrote:
| I think that he was trying to sabotage competitors. I saw
| this behavior at UC Berkeley. An ultra competitive, almost
| 4.00 student intentionally gave the wrong approach to
| another team in our graduate level computer architecture
| course. My understanding is that the pre-med students at
| Berkeley engaged in this behavior much more extensively.
|
| This unethical behavior is rewarded in zero sum games and
| systems graded on a curve like most tech companies and UC
| Berkeley will exhibit this behavior.
|
| The student went on to a masters at Berkeley.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You don't survive 4 years without doing that. Remember
| someone gets voted out each year. Your goal is not be that
| person so you can't help a newbie. Someone new has to come
| in and screw someone else over to stay.
| andrekandre wrote:
| i may be way off base, so appoligies if so, but isnt that
| a form of sociopathy?
| aaomidi wrote:
| Meanwhile Amazon recruiters keep spamming me to join their cult.
|
| No one *wants* to work for you anymore. You don't need to
| recruit. If someone is desperate enough they'll let you know.
| tdeck wrote:
| It's amazing because I've told multiple Amazon recruiters "I
| don't want to work at Amazon, please make a note so that other
| Amazon recruiters don't contact me" and it never works. They
| have a central secret list of employees not to rehire, but when
| it comes to sourcing they can't get their shit together.
| 8note wrote:
| Accept a job, and get paid to be fired and never reached out
| to again?
| BeetleB wrote:
| You vastly overestimate their competence. I routinely get
| recruiter calls from companies that have embargoed me for a
| year due to not succeeding in their interview. They contact
| me, get a conversation started, then in the middle they
| apologize and say they didn't realize I'm on the embargo
| list.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| For 500k? Yeah I'd do it even for a year, working on the most
| dullard shit then have 3 years off.
| almost_usual wrote:
| There are plenty of other employers that pay that and more
| and aren't Amazon. Amazon typically lowballs.
|
| If anything you only benefit from being in Washington and not
| paying half of that 500k in income tax:
| yupper32 wrote:
| Other Big-N companies have comparable pay with way less
| stress.
| decafninja wrote:
| What I see being touted is F & N > G > A & A for TC?
|
| Obviously there are many factors in play so that might not
| always be the case.
|
| Also per my other comment on this thread, sounds like
| Netflix really blows away all others because there is no
| shenanigans around RSUs, cliffs, unexpected appreciation,
| etc.? Correct me if I'm wrong since I am definitely no
| expert at this game.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| This is probably true, but socially Apple seems like it
| gets a better reception/superior people. Folks at Amazon
| are pretty normal.
|
| Disclaimer - I'm very average and work at Amazon
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes Im probably average and I'd go with whoever takes me,
| but as I'm outside of the US it's all hypothetical
| eigen wrote:
| doesnt Amazon cap base salary around $180k and only 5% of
| RSUs vest the first year? my understanding is that, barring a
| massive RSU package, you cant get to $500k in the first year.
| stornetn wrote:
| This isn't the complete picture. It's true that the vesting
| schedule gives you only 5% of RSUs in your first year, but
| employees' cash signing bonus is increased to offset that.
| So _if_ the total compensation target for a role is
| generally $500k (say, a principal engineer or a director,
| maybe?) and your salary is capped at $160k, you'd be given
| a signing bonus of $500k-$160k-(total stock vest x 5%) in
| cash. It's not as though you're paid significantly less
| when you start, it's just that how you are paid is
| different.
| decafninja wrote:
| I keep hearing all the letters of FAANG have more or less
| similarly competitive total compensation if you factor in
| RSUs, appreciation, etc. But then I hear things about
| "cliffs" and how extremely high TCs are possible only
| because of stock appreciation.
|
| In that sense, is Netflix basically untouchable in terms
| of compensation, if F/A/A/G (and other companies like
| Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Microsoft, etc.) can only be
| competitive via unexpected or non-guaranteed stock
| appreciation?
|
| Plus if you reach a "cliff", you end up with just your
| base salary - which seems like it's not too much better
| than a non-tech Fortune500 company?
|
| Is my understanding wrong?
| thor24 wrote:
| To be absolutely clear, comp is not based on stock
| appreciation. You get your grant (aka no. of stocks/RSUs)
| that vest at some cadence. By the time you vest a tranche
| and share price has increased is an added bonus (though
| generally people in tech think 4x in 4 years is their
| birth right.)
|
| As for Netflix, they do give you option of choosing to
| split your salary every year i.e all cash, all options,
| some cash and some options as you see fit.
| decafninja wrote:
| Is the added bonus of increased share price required for
| the comp to be similar to an all-cash Netflix comp
| though?
|
| Or is it still competitive without taking such
| appreciation into account?
| almost_usual wrote:
| I wouldn't want to work at a place like Netflix that
| doesn't comp with equity, especially after a year like
| 2020. A 500k TC could easily be 800k+ now, if that's cash
| it's still 500k and worth less due to inflation.
|
| If the stock significantly depreciates there will be
| layoffs anyway.
| ijamj wrote:
| Beauty of cash is that you can do whatever you want with
| it. For example, buy Netflix shares. Or buy Alphabet
| shares. Maybe Apple. That way you can both benefit from
| upside and somewhat protect from downside of your own
| employer's shares tanking all the while you're getting
| laid off (as you're suggesting).
| [deleted]
| andreilys wrote:
| The funny thing about cash is that you can use it to buy
| equity. Who knows, maybe you'll even learn to diversify
| by investing in areas uncorrelated to your line of work
| almost_usual wrote:
| It's equivalent if the cash bonus is paid up front or at
| the beginning of 2020 when the employee starts. So 200k
| base and 300k signing bonus.
|
| I _thought_ Netflix comps with a cash salary and if
| that's the case it's worth less than equity. The salary
| depreciated over the course of 2020 while an equity grant
| would have appreciated from the start.
| thor24 wrote:
| Read my above comment.
| decafninja wrote:
| We can't base everything on 2020 though. My stock
| portfolio absolutely skyrocketed in 2020 beyond
| imagination. But it has remained mostly stagnant in 2021.
|
| Would cash+equity comp still be preferable to an all cash
| Netflix comp in that case?
|
| I guess the gist of my question is:
|
| Non-Netflix FAANG level company salary + stock _without
| appreciation_ >= Netflix all-cash salary?
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I think the idea is that you'd only reach a cliff if
| someone decided to cut off the periodic RSU grants, and
| at that point you should probably have been interviewing
| elsewhere because they probably want you gone?
| tdeck wrote:
| Cash bonus is taxed at a much higher rate, isn't it?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Nope. When your RSUs vest, their value at the time of
| vesting is added to your W-2 income, and gets taxed at
| regular income.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| No it's just income on your w2 same as rsus and salary.
| You're thinking of long term cap gains which is entirely
| different matter
| [deleted]
| stevepotter wrote:
| they give you a signing bonus, paid out over time, to make
| up for the difference in total comp in the first two years
| BeetleB wrote:
| If you leave in less than a year, don't you have to
| return the signing bonus as well?
| [deleted]
| kleinsch wrote:
| HN isn't the world. Amazon recruiters get tons of positive
| responses to their reachouts.
| ctvo wrote:
| > No one _wants_ to work for you anymore.
|
| You're in quite the bubble. Lots of folks I know would work at
| Amazon. Friends have joined the computing groups (Lambda, ECS,
| EKS) to work on observability, scale, security. It's important
| work with broad impact.
| sneak wrote:
| Some of that impact is making the CIA more effective at the
| things the CIA does, as Amazon runs a special datacenter for
| them on-prem at Langley.
|
| It is quite sad how many in our industry are either
| sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they
| would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially
| under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally
| in the case I mentioned).
| avalys wrote:
| I would be proud to go work directly for the CIA, but I'm
| too selfish to do so, because the pay would be worse than
| what I'm doing now.
|
| Not all Americans loath their country and the institutions
| that help maintain it - imperfect though they may be.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I mean, that's a pretty shitty view considering how many
| lives the CIA has ruined. How many generations they've
| burned. How much unnecessary suffering they've caused.
|
| But, I mean, if the thought of people suffering brings
| you calm at night - go for it!
|
| You know you're a shitty org when you have a whole
| wikipedia page dedicated to you being shitty:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| Yeah my big takeaway from the recent press is that they
| didn't even think I was good enough to be a patsy to fire.
| Definitely an ego hit
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I agree, I know tons of people that work for and would love
| to work from them, and I do not live in WA.
| f6v wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Do they pay well? Do they have cool
| products?
|
| "I've done a lot more for a lot less" - The Office.
| [deleted]
| Guest42 wrote:
| I think a common approach is "I know this job is garbage but
| if I can last 18 months, my resume will look much
| better".....or....."maybe my manager will be alright and the
| bad stories will be less relevant"
| decafninja wrote:
| Another factor might be that there are many companies just
| as bad, but without the prestige of Amazon. At least the
| Amazon name will pad your resume. The names of many other
| bad companies won't (or not to the degree of Amazon).
| chartpath wrote:
| Last time I responded with a polite message that once they
| treat their non-tech employees better I would consider. Never
| heard from them again.
| gigatexal wrote:
| That Amazon or any company has such a plan is actually laudable.
| I was under the impression that folks who are not performing just
| get given a 2-week notice. But it's likely more profitable to
| rehabilitate or retrain an underperforming employee than to go
| through the process of hiring and onboarding a new employee. None
| of this is out of altruism -- it's a cost benefit analysis (see
| also the scene in the Fight Club movie where the un-named
| narrator explains the math behind his company issuing a recall or
| not...)
| malfist wrote:
| Sure, if they were only targeting poor performing folks then
| your statement has merit. The difference is at amazon managers
| have a 5-10% URA (Unregretted Attrition Rate) and must let go
| that percentage of their team each and every year. Doesn't take
| long to chew through poor performers and have to move on to
| people lower on the political totem pole, or worse at playing
| the political game/being friendly.
| rdtwo wrote:
| The bigger problem is that it discourages formation of high
| performance teams. The high performers know to stay away from
| established high performance teams because they risk getting
| cut
| trhway wrote:
| Another goodie from AMZN - hard cap on max of years of experience
| for a position. Nice way to filter out the old dudes like me. I
| suppose the trend will naturally spread through the industry.
|
| Edit: it is max cap in hiring requirements. The requirements are
| directly from AMZN recruiter (AMZN email address, etc). The max
| is bullet pointed together with the min. The max is also
| additionally clearly stressed in the description to make sure
| that there is no misunderstanding (i'd definitely would have hard
| time believing my eyes if seeing it only once in the bullet
| points)
| makoz wrote:
| Disclaimer work at Amazon.
|
| Do you mind expanding on this a little bit on what position you
| were applying for?
|
| I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of
| experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an
| absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II
| level already, or applying for that role with that amount of
| experience.
|
| Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of
| experience but are applying for internships.
|
| Although I doubt that's your specific case...
|
| I'd be very surprised and extremely skeptical we have year caps
| on senior roles like SDE3/Principal
| trhway wrote:
| it was an unsolicited email from AMZN recruiter on what seems
| to be SDE3/4 judging by the requirements.
|
| >I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of
| experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an
| absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II
| level already, or applying for that role with that amount of
| experience.
|
| it is absolutely reasonable to ask and reject if unsatisfied
| with the answer. I think it is discriminatory to bar from
| applying (or reject automatically) based on such years based
| cap.
|
| >Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of
| experience but are applying for internships.
|
| again, i think such automatic rejection is discriminatory.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I didn't experience this while working at Amazon and I'm an old
| fart.
| trhway wrote:
| I guess you didn't represent us, old farts, well enough if
| the management now tries to limit intake that way :)
| ozzythecat wrote:
| I'm at Amazon now. This is not true.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Seconded. Haven't seen this anywhere in Amazon.
|
| Edit: Clarified that I meant within Amazon.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Seconded. Haven't seen this anywhere.
|
| The military has it, and (news to me) it appears common in
| accountancy and management consulting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
| trhway wrote:
| You're already an employee. I'm talking about requirements
| for candidates. As far as I see it is a relatively recent
| innovation, which I thought would be blatantly illegal in the
| US until I saw it myself - I suppose the AMZN lawyers found a
| loophole.
|
| When people talk about glass ceiling - well, now i know what
| glass bottom feels like :) If any requirements you don't
| directly match you can try to make a case in say cover letter
| to substitute - education vs. experience, etc., there is no
| way though how one can "decrease" the number of the years.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > which I thought would be blatantly illegal until I saw it
| myself
|
| it would seem to be:
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/regulations/questions-and-answers-
| eeoc-...
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| That document can absolutely be interpreted to say that
| this is blatantly illegal, but it doesn't explicitly
| address the question of maximum years of experience, so
| it's a matter of interpretation. Have they explicitly
| addressed this question somewhere else?
|
| https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/insight-
| cap... is a more recent article summarizing a court
| ruling from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in
| which, at least for the states covered by that court, it
| was determined that job applicants (as opposed to
| transfer or promotion applicants) can't bring disparate
| impact ADEA claims against theoretically age-neutral
| rules such as maximum years of experience. State or local
| age discrimination laws can go beyond the ADEA, of
| course, and some do.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| What are the effects of this list/Focus on employee? The article
| mentions performance hell but at the same time says people don't
| know they are on the list so they probably don't really feel the
| effects?
|
| Or is it slower promotion less bonuses that are somehow not
| obvious?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It's the step before a PIP. And they're blocked from switching
| teams in most cases. Even when team fit is the real problem.
| master_yoda_1 wrote:
| AMZN is Doomed :)
| nchase wrote:
| Did you mean to post this here? I think you commented on the
| wrong topic :)
| master_yoda_1 wrote:
| changed the comment :)
| croes wrote:
| "The Tomorrow War" is not an Amazon movie, they only bought the
| distribution rights. It's a Paramount Pictures film.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| They sure are making buckets of money on it though
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Are performance improvement plans actually genuine in most cases?
| If I were put on one or got a negative performance review, I
| would assume that I have essentially been fired but my boss is
| waiting on key paperwork.
| crazygringo wrote:
| They certainly can be.
|
| I know multiple cases of bad managers who never clearly
| communicated job expectations/prioritization and then put
| employees on a PIP because they weren't meeting their
| hidden/secret expectations.
|
| The beautiful thing about a PIP is that it forces a manger to
| spell out in excruciating detail what expectations are, and how
| meeting them will be measured.
|
| Once an employee knows what they are concretely, it can make it
| really easy to meet them, and then no more PIP.
|
| In all the cases I know, the employees went on to get "exceeds
| expectations" and then either left the manager or left the
| company, because the problem was always the manager.
|
| Also, because many times you "game the PIP" -- to meet the
| explicit expectations you slack off on the stuff that you know
| matters more to doing a good job, but that isn't being
| explicitly measured. Write shitty code but deliver the features
| on-time, and let someone else deal with the bugs.
|
| Of course I've _heard_ of PIP 's being intentionally vague so a
| manager can arbitrarily continue to say expectations weren't
| met no matter what -- but I've never _seen_ that anywhere I 've
| worked.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| My experience at Amazon was as soon as someone knew they were
| on a PIP, they went out and got another job. It's much easier
| to get a job when you are currently employed, and your PIP
| doesn't show up in any background checks so it was basically a
| "please leave or we will make you leave"
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Yeah, this would be how I would react to any formal
| notification about issues with my performance. I would take
| it as a kind kick out the door.
| BeetleB wrote:
| If your manager has been clearly communicating his displeasure
| with your performance, then a PIP is really just a signal that
| you need to leave. If I didn't see eye to eye with a manager
| all this time, his putting me on a PIP isn't going to suddenly
| make me change. Conversely, if I accepted his criticism
| earlier, I would have already changed and not received a PIP.
|
| Of course, if there are bad actors involved, it's a whole other
| story.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| What about double secret probation?
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/cnJZ7
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > "Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?" the
| question reads. The response: "Do not discuss Focus with
| employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is
| not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to
| improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve."
|
| The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you're told you're in
| Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manager is telling you you're
| not meeting expectations, that's plenty of signal of what's going
| on.
|
| The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is
| pushing out capable talent.
|
| There's a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get
| hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your
| performance?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The process is relevant to the company. So it's relevant to the
| employee.
|
| The headline is correct unless Amazon policy is not telling
| employees about performance problems before Focus. Otherwise
| the discussion about Focus sounds just like the discussion they
| should have before Focus.
|
| > There's a more fundamental question - are we saying once you
| get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your
| performance?
|
| I haven't seen even 1 comment even imply anything even close.
| I've seen many comments say employees should know where they
| stand.
|
| You said you work at Amazon in another comment.[1] It would
| have been appropriate to say here.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786929
| xienze wrote:
| > The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is
| pushing out capable talent.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they have a stated goal of
| cutting the bottom 10% every year? I gotta think that can't go
| on forever without hitting the "capable talent" unless managers
| are hiring sacrificial lambs on purpose. Hmm, I feel like I've
| heard about that somewhere...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-managers-performance-...
| greedo wrote:
| GE was famous for this under Jack Welch?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| "I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole
| park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You
| think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know
| anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2
| million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if
| he can I'd like to see him try."
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Eh-eh-aaaah! ... Eh-eh-aaaah!"
| sharken wrote:
| Was reading this at face value heh. Anyway, nice try Dennis,
| now get back to work!
| ngcazz wrote:
| I thought this was a Gilfoyle quote for a second!
| joecasson wrote:
| Jurassic Park reference? Nice. :)
|
| How did that lack of performance oversight work out for Nedry
| anyway? Oh...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| That sounds much, much, much more reasonable than what everyone
| else is assuming.
| avereveard wrote:
| > should be permanent, regardless of your performance?
|
| You're assuming that the tool will only be used objectively and
| transiently, a big if in a tool with mandated secrecy. The real
| question is should the tool remain secretive so that people in
| power can use it completely unchallenged as a weapon against
| employee?
| patch_cable wrote:
| > "Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?"
| the question reads. The response: "Do not discuss Focus with
| employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance
| is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they
| need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them
| improve."
|
| > "If the employee directly asks, 'Am I in Focus?' you should
| answer honestly," the response continues. "However, remind
| the employee that the use of a specific product should not be
| their take-away from the conversation, as there are important
| performance gaps they must address."
|
| That doesn't sound like mandated secrecy. That sounds like
| they think the employee shouldn't care what the specific
| product is called.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| That sounds like employees who are well-connected enough to
| know to even ask that question will get more information on
| their status than people who aren't as
| extroverted/social/charismatic/privileged.
| fsociety wrote:
| I disagree, I think this kind of corporate mentality should be
| stomped out from existence. Employees should have a right to
| know if they are trending, or are on, a performance improvement
| plan.
|
| Muddying the waters with corporate speak "your performance is
| not meeting expectations" is beating around the bush and not
| saying what is actually happening.
| r00fus wrote:
| > If your manager is telling you you're not meeting
| expectations, that's plenty of signal of what's going on.
|
| Isn't this the part that's not being made transparent to the
| employee?
|
| Asking the employee to constantly read the manager's mood to
| guess if you're on the "list" or not is incredibly stressful.
| What if your manager is just having a bad day?
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| LOL My manager used to discuss my promotion doc with me, and
| talk about who we can approach for promotion feedback.
|
| I found out about 'focus' or my 'performance issues' when I
| resigned from Amazon.
| Aqueous wrote:
| Does it ever happen that the manager puts someone on
| 'Focus,' their performance improves, and then the manager
| forgets to take them off of it?
| stefan_ wrote:
| That assumes you were put on the list for performance
| reasons.
| ikRwS3Nb6Y wrote:
| A number of key engineers who I loved working with left
| my team around the same time, and their departure made me
| uninterested in continuing on that team any longer. I
| applied internally to a few other teams, and found out a
| couple weeks into that process that I was on the devlist
| when the manager of the team I wanted to join suddenly
| said he couldn't take me.
|
| Through some backchanneling with a manager I had been
| friends with before he joined Amazon, I found out I had
| been placed on the devlist the same week my friends left
| the team. No performance issues were ever discussed with
| me, and at that point in my career I'm very confident I
| didn't have any. I am pretty sure management of my team
| guessed (correctly) that I would try to leave once my
| friends were gone, and worried the entire team would
| implode with additional departures, and all institutional
| knowledge of a shitty old perl/mason/codigo codebase that
| needed to be maintained would implode with it. So I am
| pretty sure they placed me on the devlist purely as a
| mechanism to make it difficult for me to leave (I would
| have needed to get the director / L8 level manager of the
| team I was attempting to join to override the devlist
| block. this pretty much never happens unless you have a
| relationship with that person, and I didn't).
|
| I was never able to get a manager in my org to have an
| open conversation with me about that, despite lots of
| effort. Lots of hemming and hawing and a few canceled
| meetings. I was eventually told I was taken off the
| devlist, but when I again tried to transfer a year later,
| found out I was still on it. I'm not sure if it was a
| case of "forgot to take you off" or "lied" and will never
| know, but that happened to me circa ~2018.
|
| Edit: Unrelated to your question, but I also suspect
| having been on one of those lists once and escaped makes
| you a target to get put on again. No manager
| backchanneling confirmed that for me, it's just an
| educated guess. My performance suffered for a couple
| months at the start of the pandemic for obvious reasons,
| and I was placed on the devlist again (now called
| "Focus") around late April / early May 2020. I was never
| told this, nobody ever said the word "Focus", nor was I
| given any performance coaching. I was only able to infer
| it because my manager told me "I don't think you should
| try to change teams right now", and at that point in my
| Amazon career I knew what that really meant. I started
| job hunting immediately, kicked my feet up for a while,
| and took the severance the moment I was finally pip'd.
| Worked out extremely well for me actually, but a less
| experienced employee who might not connect the dots
| between "don't try to change teams ;)" and "your
| performance is considered below the bar" would have been
| blindsided.
| r00fus wrote:
| This sounds even worse than what was stated on the
| article. But predictable with lack of transparency -
| management essentially have carte-blanche to maintain
| their teams.
|
| To be honest, it's quite possible this kind of focus-
| listing exists elsewhere that's not FAANG level exposure.
| zug_zug wrote:
| > One Amazon engineer, who joined the company in late 2016,
| said he found out that he had been on the development list for
| nearly 18 months only after his manager changed. His new
| manager, he said, inquired about his performance-management
| plan.
|
| > "My response was, 'Are you sure you don't have your wires
| crossed?'" he said.
|
| Headline seems pretty accurate to me. Nobody should be on a
| performance improvement plan without being told.
|
| ---
|
| To further on this -- it's really the absolute basics of
| transparency. Imagine if students didn't get any scores on
| tests back until they were about to fail the class. It's super
| important to know accurately and early exactly what people
| think of your work so you can adjust.
|
| Aside from every other reason, let's remember that nobody is
| perfect, including managers. At least 20% of the time in my
| experience, when a manager thinks somebody is doing poorly it's
| because they manager is missing key information or relying on
| outdated information. Just one anecdote I know a manager who
| was only assessing somebody based on Jira tickets, but that
| engineer was doing tons of important work outside the jira
| tickets. The manager needs to initiate that communication
| clearly and immediately to resolve the discrepancy.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've worked for managers who really don't like giving negative
| feedback, and would only give very obscure hints. The upshot
| would be that you'd get put on Focus and have no idea you have
| performance issues.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But some workers who have been on Focus say they were never
| told what their performance deficiencies were, or how they could
| improve.
|
| Sounds like therapy. Doesn't really work most of the time. You
| can't invoke your higher level brain functions without knowing
| the game being played.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I assume this doesn't go on in the UK, as it would fail to meet
| the ACAS code on performance management, and likely lead to
| successful constructive dismissal or unfair dismissal claims.
|
| "If issues do arise, employers should make the employee aware of
| the shortfall in their performance as soon as possible. The
| employee should then be given a reasonable timescale to improve.
|
| Employers should provide their employee with any relevant support
| and training in order to reach the required performance standard.
| They should then monitor and review the employee's progress
| throughout the period assigned for improvement."
| nasalgoat wrote:
| Most successful companies I know are constantly recruiting and
| trying to keep people onboard - why would they be trying to
| actively get rid of people?
| [deleted]
| sangnoir wrote:
| > why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?
|
| It's the same idea behind stack ranking: get _good_ recruits,
| while getting rid of the under-performers who either slip-
| through, or whose performance deteriorated while on the job.
|
| Amazon would like to think they are keeping the _good_ people
| onboard and throwing out the deadwood.
| gmadsen wrote:
| that is for companies without the recruit demand. Amazon has
| stated before they try to remove the bottom 10% regularly to
| keep the average performance moving up
| Jabrove wrote:
| Where did they state that?
| nasalgoat wrote:
| Didn't decades of that policy at Microsoft prove that it
| doesn't work? People then optimize to make sure they only
| work on projects to keep their score up.
| joezydeco wrote:
| These are all echoes of General Electric's / Jack Welch's
| stack-ranking 'innovation' which still gets lauded by MBA
| types but has been a disaster everywhere it was
| implemeneted.
| mataug wrote:
| Optimizing for projects is just one of the unintended
| consequences of a policy of "get rid of the bottom X%".
|
| There are many others such as,
|
| - "Hire to fire" https://archive.is/3Bdv7
|
| - Overworking of employees, especially the ones who are on
| H1B / L1 visa since they are dependent on Amazon for their
| visa status.
|
| - Code is written and architected with promotions in mind.
|
| - Code is reviewed with bring others down since comments on
| code reviews are considered a negative metric.
|
| - No one trusts their manger.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Managers with good teams may bypass this by partaking in a
| "hire to fire" scheme where the newest joiner is guaranteed
| to be at the bottom of the performance list, shielding
| those with longer tenure.
|
| This works for a while - until word gets around, then you
| find your hiring funnel drying up.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Basic math too.
|
| Suppose "ability" is normally distributed in the population
| and in your initial team too. Replace people when the new
| candidate improves the team's median ability (supposedly
| what Amazon's "Bar Raiser" checks).
|
| I kicked together a simulation of this process. The first
| replacement is pretty easy (50/50), but the hundredth hire
| on a team of ten often takes tens of thousands of
| interviews, and sometimes over a million. No one is
| _literally_ doing this.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Would love to see this code if you don't mind sharing.
|
| Mostly interested on how you even create a simulation
| like this.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Mine is super-dumb, but let me walk you though it.
|
| First, you need to a way to generate candidates of
| varying abilities. There are all sorts of tough questions
| related to measuring intelligence, but let's side-step
| those and make something like IQ. By construction, IQ is
| normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard
| deviation of 15. function
| generate_candidates(;n=1) return 100 .+ (15
| .* randn(n, 1)) end
|
| With that, make the initial team and find the "bar" for a
| new hire: team =
| generate_candidates(;n=10) bar = median(team)
|
| To replace a candidate, you just sit in a loop,
| "interviewing" candidates until one exceeds the bar.
| candidates_seen = 1 while (new_candidate =
| generate_candidates(n=1)[1]) < bar
| candidates_seen += 1 end
|
| Once you find that person, you kick someone out of the
| team and replace them with the new candidate. I did it at
| random, but eliminating the lowest performer only
| exaggerates the effect.
| team[rand(1:length(team))] = c
|
| Having done that, you need to recalculate the now-raised
| bar: bar = median(team)
|
| We repeat this process a small number of times to
| simulate turn-over within a team. Since it's random, you
| want to repeat the entire process a number of times too.
| Complete code: https://gist.github.com/mrkrause/e33c589b9
| 01b4b8c96f940ea0a4...
|
| I had a hunch this process would be exponential, and it
| certainly looks that way if you plot the results. This
| was meant as a quick-and-dirty way to check that: there
| are some tricks that might speed up the simulation and it
| might even be possible to do the whole thing analytically
| (but it's Friday afternoon).
|
| FWIW, I _highly_ _highly_ recommend this sort of noodling
| around for building intuitions. At work, we recently
| spent a year and $$$ collecting some brain data, and a
| dumb model like this was the key to figuring out what was
| going on.
| BigBubbleButt wrote:
| How many years does it take a team of 10 to get to their
| 100th hire? If they only replace 1 person a year, ~100
| interviews a year sounds pretty normal to me (it actually
| sounds low compared to where I last worked where I
| sometimes interviewed multiple people a day).
| mattkrause wrote:
| I should have pointed out that it's literally an
| exponential growth, so it'll be fine for a while until,
| suddenly, it isn't.
|
| It's also very vulnerable to "founder effects" if the
| teams are small: a few geniuses early on make it nearly
| impossible to hire someone new.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Didn't decades of that policy at Microsoft prove that it
| doesn't work? People then optimize to make sure they only
| work on projects to keep their score up.
|
| So? It's the kind policy that appeals to the prejudices of
| an aloof executive with a low opinion of his peons. That
| trumps facts.
| oofabz wrote:
| >why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?
|
| It's extremely demoralizing to work with people who are bad at
| their job. It makes me feel as though my hard work is
| unappreciated, because someone who is not working hard gets the
| same treatment.
|
| Sometimes the employee is slacking off, sometimes they are bad
| at their job. Either way, if their failure to contribute is
| bringing the rest of the team down, they have to go. Otherwise,
| the good people leave to get away from the bad people.
| havkom wrote:
| I have encountered co-workers who bring a clear negative
| contribution to the team. I am not taking of not making
| enough of a value for the company for what they are paid but
| rather damaging the company even if they were paid nothing.
| These people have all been eventually let go by the different
| companies I have worked for.
| greedo wrote:
| So many companies I deal with have extremely poor management
| teams and practices. Things like stack-ranking, vague job
| descriptions/responsibilities, managers who aren't technical,
| the list is endemic to IT.
|
| You want demoralizing? How about being an excellent employee,
| but being told that you can only get a COLA raise because
| your manager has been told only 2 out of a team of 15 can
| "exceed standards?" And these standards are as vague as HR
| can possibly make them.
|
| So unless you're sociopathic, you try to "improve" which
| generally means kissing up to your boss. Doing a better job
| revolves around keeping your boss happy, regardless of
| whether that means your real work is being done at an
| "exceeds" level. Find out what metrics he considers
| important, and focus almost exclusively on them.
|
| If you're sociopathic, you do this, while sabotaging your
| coworkers. It's pretty easy to do; keep important information
| away from them, point out any flaws/mistakes they make, etc.
|
| Any large organization will end up like this if they follow
| traditional HR guidelines for performance evals. It's part of
| a competitive environment.
|
| The only place I've seen it work better/differently was when
| the entire team was evaluated. That helped prevent the
| Machiavellian sabotage, but did allow lower performers to
| benefit from the work of the higher performers. But that
| would happen anyway; you can't fire everyone. And the
| motivation of the coworkers shifts from competitive to
| cooperative. Helping others learn new things, overcome
| issues, etc. When management gets behind this, it's amazing,
| but most managers and executives are discouraged from trying
| new things.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > It's extremely demoralizing to work with people who are bad
| at their job.
|
| You're assuming various PIPs are being used in good faith by
| the employer. In a lot of big companies there's a nebulous
| and hand-wave-y criteria for putting someone on a PIP and
| then there's no clear path for the employee off the PIP. Too
| often PIPs are like "mean girl" shit lists. You can get on
| one without knowing it and have little to no agency in
| getting off one.
|
| For companies that do stack ranking, you can end up on a PIP
| just for happening to be at the bottom of the stack for no
| real fault of your own. The employer is then happy to dick
| you with compensation for as long as they can justify keeping
| you on a PIP.
|
| It's _more_ demoralizing to end up black balled and screwed
| over on compensation than just being told outright you 're on
| a PIP and there's some particular goals to hit to get off.
| Not everyone can just jump ship after they get stiffed on
| compensation after a review. The goal is to demoralize people
| so they quit so they don't have to fire them and potentially
| end up with some wrongful termination lawsuit.
| balozi wrote:
| Obvious irony here is that someone in management failed to keep
| secret what was supposed to be a secret plan about keeping secret
| perf man plans. Management should put themselves on a performance
| management plan.
| dkhenry wrote:
| I have a very simple rule that I adopted when I first became a
| manager, and it has served me well. I won't ever fire someone for
| performance unless I have explicitly said to them. `If you don't
| do the following things in the given time frame you will be
| fired` I require myself to explicitly state they will loose their
| job, and I require to have an explicit list of exactly what needs
| to be done and a fixed time frame for it to be done. I feel if I
| as a manager can't do that, then the real issue is a failure in
| management not a failure in the employee.
|
| While I have still had to fire plenty of people for performance
| even with this rule. I can also say that I have had multiple
| people actually improve their performance and get off the PiP
| which as I understand from talking to other managers is not a
| common occurrence.
| posharma wrote:
| This is a company that is enjoying roaring success with such
| questionable employee management practices. How does this happen?
| Does success have no correlation with bad culture? If yes, why
| are other companies focusing their time and energy on good
| work/employee culture? What gives?
| tines wrote:
| Maybe the case is that "bad" culture (i.e. culture that is bad
| for employees but good for employers) can "work" (i.e. make the
| company money) for a little while. And that's all the time that
| it needs to work for, if you have short-term goals like
| creating a virtual monopoly. Then you can relax and reform you
| image afterwards, which is fine with you because you already
| have everyone's business anyway, and they're not going to go
| elsewhere.
| ggm wrote:
| Can anyone explain how this is not a breach of employment law? It
| reads like an on-the-face-of-it constructive dismissal case: if
| your manager has future intent to sack you, has no intention of
| helping you improve, is kpi rewarded for sacking you for reasons
| which don't actually relate to your performance and doesn't
| inform you of your status, surely it's premeditated?
|
| I don't understand how H/R and legal can sustain this. (I do
| understand that they have: I'm not that stupid. So there must be
| some underlying reason this is legal, but I suspect it's not well
| "tested" in all jurisdictions Amazon employs in)
| anonydsfsfs wrote:
| In the US, the burden of proof in constructive dismissal cases
| lies with the employee. How are you going to prove that you
| were placed on a secretive PIP list without your knowledge?
| NortySpock wrote:
| > Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that
| they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their
| job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks, according to
| guidance from an Amazon intranet page for managers.
|
| Wait, what's the point of putting someone on a PIP/PMP if you
| don't even tell them their performance needs to improve (or they
| need to jump ship)?
|
| They aren't likely to change if you don't tell them to change.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Luckily that isn't what the internal document says. It says not
| to go into the Focus tool, and refocus (heh) the conversation
| on the areas needing improvement.
| ta984332444 wrote:
| The article is conflating two concepts at Amazon. There is
| "devplan/focus" and there is performance improvement plan (PIP).
| You are not fired while on focus. Despite what one of the people
| indicates in their comments, you cannot be on a PIP and not know.
| The PIP is an agreed upon plan with a specific output between HR,
| management and the employee. Firing happens through PIPs, not
| focus. Though focus is what leads to a PIP.
|
| I agree the lack of transparency on the focus is stupid
| (especially since it can prevent you from moving), but you don't
| wake up one day and end up fired. You will be put on a PIP first
| and be well aware of it (since you have to agree to the plan or
| take a payout to leave instead).
| r00fus wrote:
| In many companies, the "freeze from moving within company" is
| the same as PIP.
|
| So Focus is PIP-lite for Amazon.
| kjsingh wrote:
| Is PIP==Pivot
| billllll wrote:
| I'm curious if any Amazon (ex-)employee have experience with this
| that they can share.
|
| A lot of Amazon's practices get really severe backlash online,
| and yet if working for Amazon is as bad as they say, how is
| Amazon one of the biggest employers of software engineers?
|
| I personally buy into the hivemind and would not work for Amazon,
| but it seems to me like there is an incongruity between how bad
| their practices are and how many talented software engineers are
| willing to work for them.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As the runt of the litter in my AWS team, I thankfully have
| avoided such plans. I've never been at a company so willing to
| frame mistakes and shortcomings as chances to grow.
|
| Other people clearly are having different experiences.
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