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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#191

Post by rejectedandsad »

silicon2401 wrote: post #64
the_jeremy wrote: post #4

I don't think this is news to anyone. Yes, Amazon has an "unregretted attrition" target. The only surprising thing was this: > The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show I assumed it was much higher.

From personal contacts, the same happens at Facebook. If your performance is good, it means you're not being pushed enough and you need to increase your workload. What a despicable work culture that you have to expect to be told that you're not meeting expectations and that you have to be worked to that extent.

Yeah, I’ve heard it’s similarly bad at Facebook but people there don’t seem to complain as much because they’re the types of gunners that work 60 hours and claim they work 30.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#192

Post by mulander »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #182
mulander wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates Hope this makes you feel slightly better: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... It is impossible to measure someones productivity using metrics like commit counts and SLOC. There are times where I don't commit for weeks and provide actual business value by solving direct client issues without even a ticket being present. At one time at my…

What do you think the reprimanding manager's motivation was? The possibility that you were doing work he wouldn't get credit for?

He assumed I was not working or doing work for a different manager (they implemented matrix management and he was at HQ 70 km away from the town I worked at). I made a judgement call as that migration was a $20 mln project. That corporation had time budgeting. I was supposed to account in a production tracking system every task I did in 15 minute granularity. I have a ton of crazy stories like that out of that place.

In essence, the guy was a micromanager with trust issues. They later replaced him, with someone that was actually worse.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#193

Post by kapp_in_life »

VRay wrote: post #161
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a…

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#194

Post by rejectedandsad »

myroon5 wrote: post #163

Highly Valued 1 (HV1): we expect 35% of Amazonians are HV1 Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY

That doesn’t sound right, I was HV after promotion and still got 2%.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#195

Post by _y5hn »

thereare5lights wrote: post #50
retrocryptid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would he work during holidays?

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#196

Post by sokoloff »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #168
htrp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest

That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.

But you’re vesting 40% of your initial grant this year was the point, not that you didn’t get the initial “fill in” cash bonus.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#197

Post by zzyzxd »

retrocryptid wrote: post #16

This 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.…

Curious about how effective this kind of "private" PIP can be?

PIP is scary to foreign workers who are on temporary worker visa. Losing a job means that you may have to leave the country, which is a life changing event.

It is so scary that, in immigrant communities I am familiar with, it becomes a common sense to not to even dream about getting out of PIP. If your manager put you on PIP, start looking for a new job immediately because you don't want to risk losing your immigration status.

Don't try too hard on the PIP project, don't try to please your manager, only put reasonable amount of effort into the project so they don't have a reason to fire you immediately, and try to get the f** out as fast as you can.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#198

Post by rejectedandsad »

Apocryphon wrote: post #171
kevstev wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile…

Also wondering if the creation of platforms like Glassdoor, Blind, even r/CSCareerQuestions have allowed these issues to come to light.

Ironically, those are all the same platforms that made me want to contemplate ending it all because I work at Amazon. After I blocked them at the router level I started to feel better, until I realized people think I’m inferior no matter if I see them say it or not.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#199

Post by ignoramous »

ladyattis wrote: post #10

I 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…

> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.

Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#200

Post by itsdrewmiller »

julianeon wrote: post #27

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

Typical turnover in engineering is around 20% annually (maybe higher for Amazon), so this 6% target is unlikely to have the impact you are imagining.
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