Amazon Pip Horror Story

This is where your cards analogy falls through, in a deck of cards, you know that there are better cards you don't have in your hand, you know exactly what your Jack is worth in absolute terms.

At Amazon, you can have a Royal Flush, and because of stack ranking decide to discard your 10, and if you know your poker, that makes you go from the best hand to one of the worse.

The issue is you wouldn't know your 10 at Amazon was a great engineer and a key asset to your team, and that all replacement candidates are going to be worse, except now you've lost precious time, ramp up, and moral, as well as a great employee.

For a smaller company, it might make sense as you're building a core team and might need to go through a few people before you find a set of good ones, but where Amazon is now, at its size, over time, it has lost engineers that in industry wide averages were above it, and it has created a reputation that hurts it from attracting them back or other engineer's above the industry's average.

Due to this, Amazon is becoming a second pick. Good engineers will pick Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and even sometimes Facebook (due to their higher comp) over Amazon. And since all these companies hiring process are the same, it's common that someone who can pass the Amazon interview can pass one of those other ones as well. In fact, almost 70% of everyone I've seen be released from a PIP went to work at one of the other big tech companies.

The other big problem is that the stack ranking works like American reality TV competitions. It doesn't matter if you've excelled year over year, if you have one bad year, where for whatever reason you get identified as a low performer, you'll get PIPed. In my experience that's often contextual, a new manager or you look like a bad performer because the business and leadership couldn't figure out good projects for you to work on and own that year, or they themselves couldn't get their act together and you're a scape goat. Other people on your team might have performed better simply out of luck of having been assigned better projects.

Amazon used to get away with simply finding the best talent, but in my experience there, that's now backfiring, and instead of growing the best talent, their quest to find it is turning into a system that recruits more and more mediocre talent as time goes on.

I have friends with horror stories about Sr. SDMs going behind their back to put down names they fought to save. Imagine that SDM now having to tell that report they're at risk of being fired at a performance review.

L6 SDM is the most difficult job at Amazon.

---

SDM - Software development manager.

L6 - Entry level for the role (L5 SDMs exist, but are more rare).

High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems.

Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable?

I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system.

However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.

I feel ass holes should definitely be singled out so that they can't be managers again for the future.

The company is the same for everyone (ie un-humanistic in its management), and if and when your personal circumstances change, you'd then perhaps see what others currently in it are moaning about.