My mother worked at a UK state school. They had this over a decade ago.
Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
41–50 of 385 posts
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#42This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want. It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry.…
Thanks for giving a great example for me to add Amazon to my "never work there" list.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#43The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have been moved/retrained/let go.
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#44It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at the same time company is boasting about making billions and avoiding taxes.
They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce.
This is despicable.
These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.
By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality . For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.
I think a better measure of IKEA would be "value"–the intersection of price, quality, and problem-solution fit.
IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted with resounding "yes".
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#46I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…
I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.
Because they can continually fill the trenches with H1Bs willing to run the gauntlet.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#47I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…
I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.
Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors.
True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.
If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.
As a current Amazon employee I have to say that is pretty ludicrous. If you actually think Amazon could scale back to 10% of it's current employees without losing massive forward momentum and capacity to deliver results then I don't know what to say. All those metrics would suffer greatly in both the short and long term. In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that thos…
If a company makes a lot of money, does that mean every employee is responsible for generating the money they made? Is it possible to make a lot of money with not a lot of employees? Does Amazon make less money when employees take a lot of PTO?
I'll add 90% was hyperbole.
Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#49Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they ha…
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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that a PIP was nearly always a "here's your chance to get another job" warning, and never really an earnest chance to improve. Does anyone understand differently?
I was "put on a PIP" by my boss at AMZN, but it turned out it wasn't really a PIP (i.e. - HR wasn't involved). It was just my boss trying to pressure me to work 50 hours per week during the holidays instead of the typical 60.
> It was just my boss trying to pressure me to work 50 hours per week during the holidays instead of the typical 60.
I'm not following.
Is this sarcasm/humor? Why would your boss put you on a PIP to pressure you to work LESS?