211–220 of 385 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.
It sounded like that story was at Microsoft to me, but now that I know you thought it was Amazon, I can see that it’s ambiguous and could be read either way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At Amazon you still hire good people you just mark them poorly because you don't want to break up your team.
No, you don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378836
It says that managers who don't perform well will be out. And that was the reason given for why this practice doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff. Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It is setup to be toxic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Top of market quality is obviously not IKEAs goal. There is no one in IKEA corporate who would argue differently. IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it. Disclaimer: I work for AMZN
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…
> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
Morons at Google do it, too. I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review. He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself. Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty man…
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…
I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…
I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The simplest reason is – it's much more expensive to let go someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not so attention grabbing or interesting.
Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that.
But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News, Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every person at Amazon basically hates their job.
And the other thing is the people who do respond with positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often get down ranked and personally attacked.
Lastly – No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally better. There are no brownie points for more code or more complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage frugality and invent and simplify.
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.
Agreed. Anecdotally, I have never seen a PIP lead to a turn around. Honestly, I started to think it was just a way to cover for wrongful termination. What I have seen is PIPs lead to so much stress and anxiety that people are unrecoverable. I unfortunately worked with one person where a PIP led to hospitalization for thoughts of self-harm, because it was clear there wasn't going to be success in the current role, but…
A lot of managers and companies I know have moved away from the "PIP" terminology because the acronym has become too toxic to be productive. Instead, they'll have different names for their version of the program.
With few exceptions, managers don't enjoy firing people. We don't enjoy PIPing people, either. A good PIP (or whatever a company calls it) is usually structured as a mentorship program that lays out clear expectations for what is expected from an employee, pairs them up with mentors who can help get them there, and involves more frequent check-ins than normal to help get them on track.
As a manager, I have seen many PIPs succeed, if executed properly. I've also seen many fail. One of the common failure modes is when the employee assumes the worst and doesn't bother trying to improve. That's one of the main reasons smart companies don't use the "PIP" terminology any more.
When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…
It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?