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

One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it.

Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/work and the technology shifted. My disability isn't suited to the new working style/process (or lack of). However, I do excellent work outside of my regular day to day responsibilities, like my secondary role as an ASC. My manager even said that I'd I could just speed up my regular work I would easily get the highest rating and a promotion. Hearing him say that really sucks because I unable to just speed up with my disability in the given work environment. The company/managers have made no effort in helping me find a role that works better with my skills or is impacted less by my disability. It seems there may not be any of the traditional roles/teams left. So now I fill midlevel roles and move team to team trying to find somewhere that I fit in. If I can find a place I fit in like before, then I would easily excel.

Another example was a dev on another team that I worked with a few years ago was sloppy, slow, and just all around seemed like a poor performer - and even our tech lead and manager talked poorly about him. He was even considerably slower than me. About 3 years after that he's now the head of data and analytics for our international operations.

You're mistaken in that you believe that the goal of culls is to cut underperformers. Stack ranking doesn't assess performance, it checks whether you're willing to do a little more to be ahead of your peers.

The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.

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.

I have posted this before, an argument in defense of stack ranking I had heard from a friend's father who was a long-time manager for a large industrial conglomerate from the 60's through the 80's. Simply put it was that they were far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone in 1-1.5 years and it would not be a ding against the hiring manager. Further, at least in that day, it was an environment where everyone was going in with their eyes open -- people were not blindsided by it, they expected it. But as you point out, the FAANG's are doing the opposite of this. They've got extremely difficult hiring processes and are pretending that it's not stack ranking.

There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.

Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).

To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.

Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?

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.

FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to:

  Underperforming:  ~12%
  Meeting or Exceeding: ~80%
  Better than exceeding: ~8%

All that said, every company and even org within a company have their own goals, targets, processes, and flows, and my experience was pre-COVID, so I'm also sure that any needle movement has been in the direction of harsher evaluations.

Their interview process, while thorough, isn't failproof. Additionally, it primarily assesses candidates at entry, overlooking potential changes in performance that may emerge after a couple of years within the company.

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.

Since when did being "humane" contribute to profit?

Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance

The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance. The company doesn't care what ex-employees think.

I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls".

underperformers lying about to cull

is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.

Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?

> ... 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.

Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.

Amazon eng manager here, at least for one more day. I think Amazon is easier to get into than the other FAANGs (I've worked at two of them and was very close to getting into another). This is partially because it's easy/required to manage people out, and partially because Amazon has a rotten reputation in the industry.

It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.

High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life.

With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.

I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.

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's no contradiction. No interview process can avoid low performers. There will always be unmotivated people, people who are difficult to work with and so on...

But yes, this isn't cool, but at least, people working there have very high compensation and know it's a competitive environment.

I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route).

There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.

I completed them. All of them.

My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).

I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...

What really ground my gears?

"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."

I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."

And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.

I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.

Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

About this point he turned his camera off.

Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.

He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.

HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest of the call.

A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).

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.

Interview process doesn’t test for everyday laziness. A lot of very smart people who easily solve leetcode are just coasting at their jobs.

> they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process

You mean ... Leetcode?

I would categorize it as an artificial high barrier to entry that is based on how much you study and a bit of luck. If anything, it is designed to make employees believe they are top-tier.

The point is to instill fear through humiliation. Bonus if you quit on your own, so they don't have to pay severance.

My ancestors were coal miners in Tennessee. They tried to reason with their employers for a long time to establish reasonable working conditions. When it became clear that their employers were not going to listen to reason, they found other ways to establish reasonable working conditions.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate even though I agree with your point.

Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff.

Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.

There’s plenty of people who lose motivation to work hard and want to just coast while taking very high salary. Happens in professional sports teams, happens in tech.

To play devil's advocate, the flaw in your logic is assuming that because someone passed the interview at a FAANG, they must be good.

No interview process is perfect. Companies, no matter how 'high the entry barrier' make mistakes when hiring. This is how they've decided to correct it.

here are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.

I've worked on many high-performing teams where you couldn't find 6%, or 1-in-18 of people who shouldn't be there.

However, I've never worked for an entire fast growing company where I couldn't readily pick out 1-in-18 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone knew it.

Hiring is far from perfect and these companies are growing quickly. Combined with turnover, you're bringing in a large number of new developers every year. Some people are really good at Leetcode and interviewing, but don't actually like to do work at jobs, for example.

IMO, the problem comes when these arbitrary thresholds are applied at low levels like individual teams. If you take a group of 18 people and declare that 1 of them must be fired every year no matter what, it's terrible. On the other hand, if you were to look at a large department of 1000 people and went through everyone's performance closely, I don't think it would be hard to identify 60 people who weren't working out.

The other problem is that some people have become really good at gaming this system. Every time I've worked at a company that does arbitrary culling of employees, there was always a contingent of old timers who had mastered the system years ago and never found themselves up for consideration to PIP. Either they were friends with management, had some arcane knowledge that they refused to let anyone else access, or they were really good at buttering up their manager come performance review time. I can think of one guy who was always fighting with everyone and refusing to do work, but would become the sweetest, most helpful hero a couple times a year when some high profile issue came up. He'd work 16 hour days for a couple weeks, emergent triumphantly with some solution, then disappear again for another 6 months. Untouchable, yet clearly the lowest net performer on the team.

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.

Amazon's stock vesting schedule is 5% - 15% - 40% - 40%, so you're not new anymore by the time you reach any significant number of stocks vesting.

So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

I've heard ancedotal stories years ago about Amazon trying to force employees out just before their share package vests.

Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture.

1. Large numbers

In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.

This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.

2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes

Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.

Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.

Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".

>This seems common in American companies.

If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?

>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.

Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.

So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?

This is random but I was recently rejected for a role from a company I find very interesting - https://www.overstory.com/ - and when I asked, the engineering manager gave me clear, detailed feedback on why (I don't have experience with satellite imagery tools like STAC, I accessed dict members with x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}), and I didn't go in to depth on my takehome assignment.).

I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.

Also if pips are constant it will just create a nasty culture which is very hard to turn back.

PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name.

[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.

What are we not talking about 996 culture. Personally I feel like I'd rather jump off a bridge than work in toxic environments.

Even without worrying about lawsuit, it isn’t a good use of your time as interviewer to tell the candidate. It’s just like having a long conversation with someone you don’t want to go out with any more.

They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.

For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates

In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.

I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.

This is not common in any company I've ever worked for, fwiw.

Common everywhere unions are weak.

I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture

Or a lack of union protection.

Money is a powerful motivator

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.

high compensation for skilled workers, lack of options for the unskilled ones, probably.

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

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 ?

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.

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?".

Immigration, money, CV.

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.

I've put in two weeks notice a couple times. It's polite. It's not loyalty to the company, it's loyalty to my colleagues, and the opportunity to close out a chapter of my life with finality. It lets me say goodbye to people on my team, finish up projects which, for personal pride, I want to leave in a good place, and document things I've done for the people who will pick up my work. I could care less how it affects the company, but to the extent that I care about my own work, I don't want to just abandon it. The reality is that, if other people don't give two weeks notice, I understand, and I'm not mad at them. And sure, the company would not afford their employees the same respect, but then I don't expect them to behave with decency. I know how it works. But, it feels like the right thing to do for me.

You can, and I have, but it's customary for 2 weeks so there is time for finishing tasks, writing docs, performing knowledge dumps, etc. I've left a toxic job effective immediately. But, if it's an "ok" job that I'm leaving, giving 2 weeks is a good way to keep a positive relationship. I've left just for more money, or to have a shorter commute. In which case, I'd like to keep a positive relationship with those companies in case I ever want to go back. Not giving 2 weeks is a red flag for our HR friends

Also, as an employee, those two weeks are easy-street. Leaving early and long lunches are the norm.

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.

If you are put on a PIP, at least you have some time to start looking for a new job. The takeaway seems to be, one on a PIP, put all your effort into finding the next job rather than trying to keep your current one.

and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture)

Psychological torture is there by design and not as a side effect.

I've been working closely with Amazon sellers for more than a decade, when I first heard how they stressed out employees I thought it fit the image that we had from our end, as sellers, perfectly.

I've come to suspect that Amazon has behavioral scientists and psycologists working on how to build the most threatening way possible to communicate, to stress sellers out as much as they can, to have them broken at their feet.

They will send emails like "Action required: your listings have been deactivated", for simple stuff that require a couple of clicks to fix, and the problem is that it's not like the story of the kid who cried wolf, sellers are terrified when they receive those emails. Sometimes 20-30 families depend on that business and an email like that could mean everyone is out of a job.

That is just an example, this strategy is applied in such a consistent manner through their communications that it puts it beyond doubt that it's done on purpose.

And please, don't be heartless to say, that's what you get when you your company depends on a big corp. I've seen that thrown around here when so many can get their lives turned upside down by Google or Apple too.

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?

"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).

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.

In some countries it's even illegal. But since when did this stop (US) management from trying it.

Money

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.

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.

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

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.

When I was at Google, I talked to people who have worked at both.

The general gist of it was: while one got treated better at Google, you got more done -- and had more freedom to choose how to do it -- at Amazon. So depending on the team, potentially higher job satisfaction.

I don't know if that's still the case. Personally if I'm going to sell my soul and work on stuff which isn't my personal passion, it's going to go to the highest and best bidder... but I will admit after 10 years at Google, the slow pace and boredom got to me enough that I quit. Maybe I would not have done that if I'd felt more emotional attachment and productivity in my work, and maybe a place like Amazon could have provided that. But I've heard too many dark tales. (I sure miss that level of money.)

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?

lol yeah, I'm not even willing to commute 30 mins to a local office let alone relocate. Maybe for a mid 7 figure pay day.

So no leetcode if you join AWS Professional Services?

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?

If it were some random company, I'd say your scenario is plausible. But with Amazon, I happen to know that everything written in this article is 100% accurate to their real PIP process.

-person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them

That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.

It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If he was OK doing the evil thing, he wouldn't have gotten PTSD doing it.

I never thought the face-eating leopard would eat MY face !!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Laying off lots of people isn't fun?

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?

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?

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.

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.

can i get a pivot tshirt

it's pretty helpful in excel!

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.

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.

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.

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#:...

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."

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.

What competition

RAS Syndrome.

(Redundant Acronym Syndrome)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

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.