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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#661

Post by geekbird »

mjr00 wrote: post #423
NhanH wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

At Amazon, the target was between 4 to 6% when I was there, but it was applied at the larger department level, not individual teams. It was perfectly fine to have a team of 10 where nobody was on a PIP (yes, such things exist!), but when it came to my entire 250-person department, all of the managers were in a room together ranking every employee they had and using "data" (peer reviews and results delivered, mainly)…

Yep. This creates a lateral sabotage, work stealing and kiss up culture.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#662

Post by cozzyd »

sgt101 wrote: post #140
qbasic_forever wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pip needs to be put on a PIP (although to be fair pip and the python package ecosystem has come a long way in the last few years)

I'm a data person so I haven't cut any big code with Python, but the package management issues I have had have gone away with conda virtual environments. So - curious; where does that break down?

well, pip will happily brick your system if you let it on many Linux distros. Or at least it used to... I don't trust it enough to use it outside a virtualenv.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#663

Post by mlac »

steveBK123 wrote: post #613
mistyislands wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).

As soon as the C Suite has the same PIP / stack rank / % attrition forced, the policy will be ended.

I honestly had never even thought about where in the org it stops... But seriously, no CEO team would cut 10% of their executive committee each year. It would be a sign that they don't know how to properly vet candidates, and be terrible for morale and turnover...

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#664

Post by sparrc »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #612

Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a "performance plan" and then gone on to be successful in the company? My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it'd be time to get out. Like what's the point?

(I work at AWS) I personally know multiple people who have been on the PIP before and are still here and happy. No idea the percent of people who accomplish this though.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#665

Post by geekbird »

JJMcJ wrote: post #639
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…

> force a certain amount of attrition each year Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP. The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said somethi…

That's why I told my manager at an Amazon subsidiary that performance reviews were a farce. Because they were. I was burned out, and seeing all too clearly what a shit show it was. I got a layoff in April.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#666

Post by throwaway22032 »

sparrc wrote: post #664
throwaway22032 wrote: post #612

Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a "performance plan" and then gone on to be successful in the company? My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it'd be time to get out. Like what's the point?

(I work at AWS) I personally know multiple people who have been on the PIP before and are still here and happy. No idea the percent of people who accomplish this though.

Are they doing well or just getting by, though?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#667

Post by EthOptimist »

slopirate wrote: post #622
muskmusk wrote: post #618

I smell bullshit > I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective" Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he works 10 hours 6 days a week. Of course he takes no bio breaks, doesn't eat or drink and is not required to attend any standups or status meetings or design reviews. This nets you 15600 minutes to code. S…

The fact that he thinks LOC has anything to do with how effective he's been as an engineer is a huge red flag.

He mentions this because LOC is an objective metric that Amazon uses to analyze performance..

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#668

Post by femto113 »

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've worked at Amazon, I won't work there again, but I have (and likely will again) recommend it on occasion for other people as a hugely valuable learning experience. The reason is that Amazon has a strong bias towards getting stuff done, and because it's Amazon that means getting stuff done at scale. You are extremely unlikely to spend much time there without participating in shipping something that gets used by (or at least affects) millions of people, and you will have to struggle against the tooling and culture and even your coworkers to make it happen. I contrast that with say Microsoft or Google where devs may commonly spend years on stuff that never gets past a research project, all while enjoying the support of excellent tools and a collegial atmosphere.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#669

Post by grepfru_it »

linspace wrote: post #562
cvhashim wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers. End result being snakes, backstabbers, and sociopaths rise to the top of the chains. Engineering is a collaborative effort so it speaks to the culture of AMZN how they incentivize this nonsense.

I was thinking along similar lines yesterday, although it was about patents: how things I value like science and software have benefited much more from collaboration than competition. And yet we have been convinced of the power of greed. Where are the works of these powerful people now? Turned to dust. All this chit chat about impact. Impact is about helping others. If your workplace doesn't encourage you to help you…

I have noticed things move much faster when it’s competition vs collaboration. Compare Apache to Nginx as an example

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#670

Post by subsaharancoder »

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…

> Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers.

Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers.

Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager

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