Amazon Pip Horror Story

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great.

However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company.

It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch.

At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture.

It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways.

So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit.

Nothing toxic so far.

One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool.

Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them.

However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it.

I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.

The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by.

I moved to another project within the HR space.

Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures.

Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception.

He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it.

Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving.

Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did.

So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.

(I didn't read the article; the page seems to be down).

A lot of these cases end up with the manager not necessarily having a lot of blame since they might not have full information on what's happening. They might also be in a similar performance crisis of their own.

If the entire company is having cultural problems and PIP horror stories are common, then the fault is from the people on the top and not from the M1 that laid out the PIP.

It is true, a lot of tech companies will give you very good medical coverage without pay period fees but at the end of the day this boils down to money. Your salary is adjusted based on the company paying whatever rates they pay to offer you great insurance.

When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W-2 employee even after factoring in company holidays, PTO and 401k matching. You also have the option of not buying insurance if you really wanted to.

Most insurance in the US is horrendous too. The whole system is optimized to provide you the least amount of coverage while making the process as inefficient as possible for you. I spent literally 12 hours on the phone over a few calls trying to get basic information from a few different dental insurance providers, in the end I got nothing concrete out of it and the only way I could have gotten concrete numbers is if I submit a form that takes 30 days to get processed except in the US you only have 30 days a year where you're allowed to enroll into insurance. Basically it was impossible for me to pick insurance based on coverage because it's impossible to know the coverage without first signing up and then you're stuck in it for a year in which case everything resets the next year and the process has to start again from scratch.

Bravo! I'm working with and for genuinely great people, but my past experiences with such "stick and carrot" bullshit mean I still treat my employer (i.e. the legal entity) as the schoolyard bully: don't cross their radar.

Such stories do make me thankful for working in a job that allows me to quit one day and to start somewhere else the next day. This is a luxury for most people.