Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Pip Horror Story

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 771 posts

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#651

Post by lokar »

zelos wrote: post #394
wongarsu wrote: post #381

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.

Many companies (not just Amazon) believe that employees at the low end of the curve are not simply contributing less, they see them as being actively negative. This is not just about their individual output, quality, etc, it's the impact on the overall org, culture and expectations.

Not defending, just explaining.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#652

Post by ctvo »

allochthon wrote: post #600
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…

That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.

> The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless.

Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#653

Post by geekbird »

allochthon wrote: post #600
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…

That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.

I have worked at a subsidiary, and other companies worse than Amazon. Imagine if, instead of annual reviews are required to put 5% at the bottom of a stack rank and then "manage them out", you have quarterly stack ranks, where everyone knows who is in the ranking pool, and with two bad quarters you are out, even if it was just the luck of the draw, because management had to dump on someone.

Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)

The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#654

Post by argc »

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'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our VP has tried to get out of the system (there are some quotas that he didn't go into detail about) we are stuck in the system and the result is that over the entire org, people are stack ranked (or something similar to stack ranking but not explicitly called "stack ranking" and if, for example, he was able to make the case that his direct reports were all doing well and improving, then inevitably other teams in the org would somehow be forced to have more low ranked individuals. I don't know how these things are enforced but there you have it. He also mentioned that someone explicitly said that the way to think about it is to "stack rank individuals in your head". Pretty blatant and it seems to be very much built in to the system.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#655

Post by amzn-throw »

asdfman123 wrote: post #570

At this point, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to work at Amazon over other companies. What do they offer over their competitors? Same work and pay at other big tech, but you don't have to worry about potentially crazy hours or getting fired for no reason. Or any of the other great companies outside of big tech. Good pay, good impact, no PIP culture. Recruiters from AMZN are trying to lure me away from Google (a…

I work at Amazon and love it and don't want to work at Google because I want to work on meaningful big projects that deliver real value to customers rather than re-writing a Chat app for the 6th time, or spending time on mandatory-top-down monorepo merges.

I think I would be deathly bored at Google from everything I hear.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#656

Post by asdfman123 »

amzn-throw wrote: post #655
asdfman123 wrote: post #570

At this point, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to work at Amazon over other companies. What do they offer over their competitors? Same work and pay at other big tech, but you don't have to worry about potentially crazy hours or getting fired for no reason. Or any of the other great companies outside of big tech. Good pay, good impact, no PIP culture. Recruiters from AMZN are trying to lure me away from Google (a…

I work at Amazon and love it and don't want to work at Google because I want to work on meaningful big projects that deliver real value to customers rather than re-writing a Chat app for the 6th time, or spending time on mandatory-top-down monorepo merges. I think I would be deathly bored at Google from everything I hear.

I work at Google and my team is working very hard on some greenfield stuff, although there's good work-life balance as well.

Don't believe everything you hear (although I suppose that works both directions).

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#657

Post by allochthon »

ctvo wrote: post #652
allochthon wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.

> The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?

Stack ranking is not my cup of tea at all. But, yes, I'm kind of leaning against performance reviews as well. It's an open question in my mind. I appreciate that big companies might have a challenge on their hands, and I don't have a lot of answers, here. But in my experience, performance reviews have not added anything obviously positive to the workplace, and they're invariably a source of friction. Which seems willfully obtuse when a company has an attrition problem. And I say this as someone who is not considered a low performer.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#658

Post by ctvo »

vvvnnnnvvv wrote: post #648
anonymous8979 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an SDE at Amazon for 8 years. What I've noticed over time is that the quality of hires and employees has gone down. I think the stack ranking is partly responsible for it, because it couldn't evaluate engineers in absolute measures, but only relatively. 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…

I recently left Amazon, and I don't think the stack ranking is to blame for the reduction in talent (which I also noticed). Amazon doesn't pay top dollar for engineers, and the delta between Amazon and other companies is growing every year. (The compensation ends up being competitive when you take into account stock growth, but the new hire offers are not attractive.) And it's a very results-driven, stressful work en…

I also used to worked at Amazon.

There are elements of the culture I miss. The focus on writing was great. Shipping things quickly that impact a lot of people is nice. It made up for a lot of the deficiencies, and it isn't universal (cough Google). Amazon tends to make the right tradeoffs with tech choices to enable this, not always, but most of the time.

I enjoyed working with principal and senior engineers at Amazon. I didn't meet a single PE that I didn't thoroughly respect and enjoy talking with. I miss the internal PE talks, and I wish they'd make them public.

Compensation is deeply personal, but once I broke 400k, I really didn't care too much one way or another, and Amazon's total compensation was never significantly less than competitors. It was about the work, impact, and people.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#659

Post by chandrod »

I also believe that staying long in that culture also changes your personality at a deeper level. You might start treating your personal life in a similar manner as well. So someone either exits or stays long enough to start believing in it.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#660

Post by geekbird »

SNosTrAnDbLe wrote: post #526
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…

This becomes more difficult when you have dont adjust for variables like out of work pressure. For example, the year that I had a kid, my performance was not the best. It took me an year to adjust but now I have bounced back. I wonder how this would have played out in Amazon or similar companies.

You would have been PIPed and sacked in April.
Post reply on HN