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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#551

Post by mandeepj »

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…

> There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not.

> I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.

Is n't OP's manager actually did that?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#552

Post by Firmwarrior »

lkxijlewlf wrote: post #487
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) I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.

I did that at Amazon, and it didn't help me too much, since basically my entire org got burned to the ground after our VP lost a fight with another VP. Proving I did my job for the year I got a bad performance review didn't really mean anything when 4 layers of management above me all disappeared.

It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave.

In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful.

Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#553

Post by zippergz »

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…

And sadly most of this is not unique to Amazon. Almost every company I have worked at over the past 15 years or so claims "we don't do stack ranking" but they do calibration and then effectively force managers to change ratings to fit the "expected distribution." It has the same effect as a stack ranking, except it's less transparent and even more open to manipulation. If you have a manager who is good at playing the game, you're a lucky one. If you don't, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe not this round, but soon.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#554

Post by 0x002A »

square_usual wrote: post #198
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then senior management should be wondering why so many low performers are ending up with certain managers...

TFA mentions a PIP quota and implies that OP was used to fill the quota, so I'm pretty sure upper management won't blink at this happening. They expect people to get PIP'd, and they have no visibility on the actual internals, so to them OP is just as good as anybody else who got PIP'd.

The upper management only gives a blink when it becomes more known by the public. They don't want to hear (just not to be in the responsibility zone) and when it's widely known they would go whitewashing or PR stunts.

Why they had to invent "to be the best employer of the world" as a leadership principle?

The more people should stand up and make the stupid policies known, that's the only way this can stop. Otherwise this policies will be the norm for many companies since "it can work"

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#555

Post by AtlasBarfed »

efitz wrote: post #547
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…

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

It assumes that you have perfect measurement. Anyone who knows corporate politics, middle management machiavellianism, and inability to properly instrument development, requirements, scheduling knows this is a fantasy.

That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning.

People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd.

The jockeying will result in disruption of team development.

People will sabotage their coworkers.

Trust disappears.

Paranoia grows.

Blame deflected.

Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it.

Bandaids rather than solutions will result.

YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE.

What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people.

And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit.

Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them.

THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT.

Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#556

Post by masterof0 »

nickm12 wrote: post #60

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

So you need to be an experienced dev to speak up against a toxic work environment? I do also cringe when I see comments like yours attacking the guy for doing something you wouldn't do. He probably mentioned the amount of lines of codes as a way of saying he did put a lot of effort(is common knowledge that on itself is a shitty metric). Maybe he, also wouldn't want to be hired by someone like you either, not would I.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#557

Post by coliveira »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #453
coliveira wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every group is different. It depends on the manager, the priorities, the projects, etc. But I imagine you'll be thinking different in a few years.

So, here's an interesting question: I recently got an email from a recruiter for Amazon saying I could interview for whatever org and whatever team I wanted. What are some sane, reasonable teams? Which teams are the most insane and unreasonable?

There is no easy way to answer this question. The best you can do is talk to people working on that group and ask the question. However, even with this knowledge there is no guarantee, because Amazon is always changing and doing reorgs, so what is a great group today can become a nightmare tomorrow.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#558

Post by mtoddsmith »

vintermann wrote: post #475
wpietri wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. It's a good example of POSIWID: The Purpose Of the System Is What It Does. If the system ignores things like financial costs and productivity, then the purpose of the system is something else. What it is good for in my view is making managers look and feel tough and establishing a culture of fear that is so necessary for hierarchical power structures. Power/status hierarchies are a common trait for most pri…

Amazon Primate

I will never unsee this.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#559

Post by vanusa »

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…

I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.

That's funny, because from the other things you said:

There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year.

As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team.

It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#560

Post by masterof0 »

theli wrote: post #7

I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.

I also worked at Amazon, my team was great, and I had a great time. But, I also acknowledge the immense amount of toxicity that comes with "getting promoted" at Amazon. Many manager are on a visa, and get pressured to "deliver results" or they lose their visa. So these managers push insane deadlines, people burn out, the ones not in a visa leave, the others need to deal with the huge ops load, the frequent on-call rotation, and with an angry manager.
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