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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#411

Post by aiisjustanif »

thecleaner wrote: post #390
odonnellryan wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazy? It seems like you were not doing the job Amazon wanted you to do but rather some other job that you decided was better to do. I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.

Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.

> As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers.

You can call it lazy, that doesn’t make it any less of the goal or KPI Amazon created.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#412

Post by sydthrowaway »

duncangh wrote: post #340
sgt101 wrote: post #139

This comment killed me : Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story… I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down! However, as I…

Lmao this is great because on my "virtual on-site" final round of interviews at Amazon, the fire alarm of the person who was interviewing me went off. She switched to audio on the call and continued to try to work through the little coding challenge as she was shouting implementation details above the echo-y wails of a fire alarm raging in a crowded stairwell. Baffled, concerned for her safety and bewildered by her p…

So you applied for the job just to shit on them?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#413

Post by wpietri »

RHSeeger wrote: post #364
the_amzn_race wrote: post #353

I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively an…

> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer. Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabot…

Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member.

Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#414

Post by throwingawayyou »

hughrr wrote: post #188
greatpostman wrote: post #3

I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

Well said! I'm there with you. Totally agree. We should all strive for this mindset.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#415

Post by rPlayer6554 »

sgt101 wrote: post #139

This comment killed me : Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story… I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down! However, as I…

When I saw that on bind the follow up comment was.

"He was then PIP'd for accepting the gift card and not being frugal"

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#416

Post by largbae »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #412
duncangh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao this is great because on my "virtual on-site" final round of interviews at Amazon, the fire alarm of the person who was interviewing me went off. She switched to audio on the call and continued to try to work through the little coding challenge as she was shouting implementation details above the echo-y wails of a fire alarm raging in a crowded stairwell. Baffled, concerned for her safety and bewildered by her p…

So you applied for the job just to shit on them?

It sounds like GP had learned enough about the culture from the interview.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#417

Post by rdtwo »

NhanH wrote: post #402
matthewowen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out. By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical…

That only applies if the bad employees are uniformly distributed amongst all teams in the company. Otherwise it makes more sense to chop the worst 10% teams .

That actually makes way more sense. Cutting teams that don’t perform and reforming makes lots of sense

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#418

Post by Jolter »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #363
Jolter wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live that 700€ a DAY is low pay? It’s, that’s MORE than 700$ a day, not less. Consider that most parts of the world have lower cost of living than the Bay Area.

Standard day rate for any software contractor in London at the low end four years ago. Probably higher now.

London being one of the highest-payed places in Europe, of course.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#419

Post by eranation »

i_love_limes wrote: post #230

I have a question for other former/current employees of Amazon. I worked there for 4 years on the AIV / Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn't hear my colleagues talk about it either, "under-performing…

Ex SDM (worked at AWS for 5 years, I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, had a pretty great time), I had a small team and there was no pip (pivot) quota mandated. But I can see how this can be come a pressure on larger teams, e.g. orgs below an L8 / orgs larger than 50 people. Not a pressure on pip (called pivot), but there is an expectation of some % of people as LEs (least effective / improvement needed), and LEs usually lead to focus / pivot.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#420

Post by zo1 »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #59
slt2021 wrote: post #21

How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423

The second post in your second link is shocking too: > One night, when I was a dev manager at Amazon, another dev manager in Seattle sent me a 20-page design document at 11:30 pm and told me that he wanted me to get him feedback by 5:30 am the next day. How fucking rude is that? It’s indicative of an absolutely staggering level of toxicity. Honestly, what a waste. Imagine how much better Amazon could be if they didn’…

We get paid to do a job. And sometimes that requires odd things like helping out with urgent problems at odd times. At that point it really is too-"fucking"-late (too borrow your crassness) to complain about project planning, politeness and schedules because everyone involved already knows those failed.

If it was me asking for feedback, I wouldn't have sent it if I wasn't in a pickle that I probably had no control over. Okay, so you didn't read the mail and you only get to it the next day at 8 when your working hours started, cool leave it at that.

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