531–540 of 771 posts
The idea that there are KPIs that can be used to objectively measure the performance of an SE and that the worst performers will be fired is an illusion. In reality, the direct manager has it in his hands: If he wants to get rid of one of his employees, he will find means and KPIs to do so. It is a political and human decision, KPIs only serve to justify his decision.
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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.
I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang. Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev. They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no…
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…
What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.
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 wor…
“ eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it” erm, this makes it sound like he was a not a very good engineer. Your code should always be written so that if you get hit by a bus one day, the rest of your team could pick right up where you left off
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> 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 outs…
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…
What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards. At the beginning your worst cards are probably below average, so any new replacement is statistically likely to be better. But even when you reach the point where all your cards are above average it can make sense to keep redrawing a small percentage, since that's the only way to get more aces. Of course…
I kind of see that, but it completely ignores the cost of hiring (financial and in lost productivity in the team that has to onboard the new hire) and the loss of knowledge and experience from firing as well.
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I would expect him to not have worked anywhere longer than 4 months considering he just graduated and those were internships
The Full stack developer and ML engineer seem like full positions, considering he listed internships specifically in his prior experience as explicit internships. Also he has a background in bio, and managed to land a full stack and ML engineer positions, implying he is self taught, and therefore should be already fairly intelligent...but he decided to go get his MS in CS, without even doing any research project and…
A CS degree opens doors. And you don't know what he planned when he started his degree.
Asking about someone's experience when interviewing them is reasonable. Calling short jobs during university fishy isn't.
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…