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Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

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Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#201

Post by usefulcat »

opportune wrote: post #159
qqtt wrote: post #13

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…

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 ta…

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#202

Post by joecasson »

commandlinefan wrote: post #58
ozzythecat wrote: post #25

> “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 manag…

"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."

Jurassic Park reference? Nice. :)

How did that lack of performance oversight work out for Nedry anyway? Oh...

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#203

Post by tlogan »

qqtt wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#204

Post by billllll »

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#205

Post by andrekandre »

ipaddr wrote: post #47
throwaway73851 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

i may be way off base, so appoligies if so, but isnt that a form of sociopathy?

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#206

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#207

Post by jp42 »

tlogan wrote: post #200
kube-system wrote: post #48

> 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 tel…

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 :)

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#208

Post by kjsingh »

r00fus wrote: post #106
ta984332444 wrote: post #65

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…

In many companies, the "freeze from moving within company" is the same as PIP. So Focus is PIP-lite for Amazon.

Is PIP==Pivot

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#209

Post by r00fus »

ikRwS3Nb6Y wrote: post #169
Aqueous wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 fri…

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.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#210

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

usefulcat wrote: post #201
opportune wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

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 st…

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.

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