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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

#221

Post by dv_dt »

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…

Couldn’t this backfire by making a lot more employees feel they should always be evaluating other offers because it’s unknown to them if they’re going to be dismissed at the end of the eval period.

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

#222

Post by astrange »

avalys wrote: post #147
sneak wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of that impact is making the CIA more effective at the things the CIA does, as Amazon runs a special datacenter for them on-prem at Langley. It is quite sad how many in our industry are either sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally in the case I mentioned).

I would be proud to go work directly for the CIA, but I’m too selfish to do so, because the pay would be worse than what I’m doing now. Not all Americans loath their country and the institutions that help maintain it - imperfect though they may be.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

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

#223

Post by wildrhythms »

warmcat wrote: post #218

Amazon and places like Amazon can go to hell. Life is too short to work in such shitty places. Ultimately everyone is just working to make investors and owners rich. Employees will only earn a fraction of what higher ups earn even after working themselves to death. Having worked in such an environment, I will be honest that I have earned and progressed more than I would have had I stayed in that shitty toxic workplac…

The whole point is to absolve the actual workers of any type of non-negligible ownership, while simultaneously retaining their excess labor value, and whenever this is questioned point to a homeless person threateningly.

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

#224

Post by dralley »

grayfaced wrote: post #172
mataug wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A toxic culture of fear is the intended effect here. People at amazon love to discuss the flywheel effect[1]. The flywheel here is the culture of fear that keeps employees on their toes. Bezos believes that employees are inherently lazy[2], and it seems like fear is tool the S-team have chosen to solve the problem of lazy employees. This has a lot of unintended consequences[3], but the executives with the power to ch…

Imagine suffering from imposter syndrome in an office with this fear culture. People will work themselves to the bone trying to fix personal perceived inadequecies. Then they burnout and quit. I guess if workers are considered expendable than that's a positive. Corporations need to be more accountable to their workers welfare and not solely stockholder's welfare.

Precisely this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEaxYCrj-8w

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

#225

Post by triactual »

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…

I have seen these mechanisms abused by managers to retain talent exactly as you are describing. Guaranteed way to lose talent rather than just let it switch teams. Poorly managed teams should wither if the skip level doesn’t recognize it.

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

#226

Post by [deleted] »

decafninja wrote: post #190
almost_usual wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s equivalent if the cash bonus is paid up front or at the beginning of 2020 when the employee starts. So 200k base and 300k signing bonus. I _thought_ Netflix comps with a cash salary and if that’s the case it’s worth less than equity. The salary depreciated over the course of 2020 while an equity grant would have appreciated from the start.

We can’t base everything on 2020 though. My stock portfolio absolutely skyrocketed in 2020 beyond imagination. But it has remained mostly stagnant in 2021. Would cash+equity comp still be preferable to an all cash Netflix comp in that case? I guess the gist of my question is: Non-Netflix FAANG level company salary + stock without appreciation >= Netflix all-cash salary?

[deleted]

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #210
usefulcat wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by almost_usual »

thor24 wrote: post #174
almost_usual wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s equivalent if the cash bonus is paid up front or at the beginning of 2020 when the employee starts. So 200k base and 300k signing bonus. I _thought_ Netflix comps with a cash salary and if that’s the case it’s worth less than equity. The salary depreciated over the course of 2020 while an equity grant would have appreciated from the start.

Read my above comment.

Thanks for clarifying

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

#229

Post by wanderer2323 »

thor24 wrote: post #173
decafninja wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing all the letters of FAANG have more or less similarly competitive total compensation if you factor in RSUs, appreciation, etc. But then I hear things about "cliffs" and how extremely high TCs are possible only because of stock appreciation. In that sense, is Netflix basically untouchable in terms of compensation, if F/A/A/G (and other companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Microsoft, etc.) can only be compe…

To be absolutely clear, comp is not based on stock appreciation. You get your grant (aka no. of stocks/RSUs) that vest at some cadence. By the time you vest a tranche and share price has increased is an added bonus (though generally people in tech think 4x in 4 years is their birth right.) As for Netflix, they do give you option of choosing to split your salary every year i.e all cash, all options, some cash and some…

When you negotiate with amazon they do try to bring stock appreciation into it. It went like this:

I asked for X comp, say 100K total for 4 years, including stock. The recruiter calls me back, says she got the total I wanted, I write down the numbers and it totals to 90K. I ask her why the math does not check out and the answer was that the 'missing' 10K is the projected stock growth.

Haven't seen anything like that in other negotiations.

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

#230

Post by nostrebored »

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 was very similar to my experience. I had a new manager ask me why I was lying to him about the timelines for promotion I had worked out with my previous manager, my skip level, and discussed with my skip skip.

I had optimistically reached out internally and started a process with a team prior to all of this happening. I think my manager focused me then.

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