681–690 of 771 posts
A good lesson I've learned over the years: there are 2 sides to every story, and on the Internet you usually get just one. Not saying this guy is wrong, his manager is right, or vice versa. I'm saying you don't know by this post, and by many of the pitchfork comments I'm reading, a lot of folks feel an unwarranted sense of surety in their outrage.
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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…
Yes comp could help to attract better talent, that's what Facebook is doing. But of the about 150 interviews I've conducted for Amazon, 90% of almost all candidates always ask me: "So is it really as bad as they say working here? With how they treat you?"
I think that's a pretty good indicator that the reputation is just tarnished, and I wouldn't be surprised that that's having a sizable effect on the decrease of talent.
The other thing is, yes maybe some real bad apples leave from a PIP, but the whole culture around it, the stress, the feeling everyone has that they constantly have to fight for trust and respect, that is also a cause for a lot of the really good engineers and high performer to leave as well, of their own, no PIP involved, but it's the same root cause for why they leave.
I see so many good ones, ranking high every year, and after 3 to 5 years say: Well I had enough of this BS, too much hassle always playing the game. If anything, that's the biggest issue.
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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?
It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time.
> How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job?
Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.
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It is true, a lot of tech companies will give you very good medical coverage without pay period fees but at the end of the day this boils down to money. Your salary is adjusted based on the company paying whatever rates they pay to offer you great insurance. When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W…
Here's how you pick dental insurance: it doesn't matter much because it isn't insurance at all. It's just a maintenance plan. The purpose of insurance is to buffer you against sudden large costs by having the insurance pay them while collecting enough of a premium from everyone that they come out ahead. The purpose of a dental plan is to pay for typical costs and completely bail on you if your costs go over a fixed a…
It would be way more efficient for employers not to offer dental insurance and instead give employees a tax-free $1,000 yearly stipend which allows employees to use this for personal and family dental care as an expense report which in turn ends up being a business write off for the employer. Now there's no limitations on what work can get done and no wasting your life trying to chase down dental / FSA details. A higher end dental insurance plan through a company is over $1,000 a year too, so this stipend approach would save employers money and it saves employees a lot of money too because you could easily end up paying $600-700 post-tax money out of pocket for standard cleanings a few times a year when insurance won't cover them (even if that insurance costs $1,000 a year). It's a win / win scenario for both the employer and employee.
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As soon as the C Suite has the same PIP / stack rank / % attrition forced, the policy will be ended.
Why stop at C suite? Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure, and do it by shareholder vote of confidence.
The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.
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Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience. Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR. This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.
I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.
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To wit: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
It's even worse than that. The Office at least had people do their jobs and keep their heads down, cooperate to get things done, ride out the management bullshit. Amazon management practices will breed sociopathy at the root worker level. I agree that is kind of the average-stage evolution of an enterprisey company. Amazon is worse.
The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV.
Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.
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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?
If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.
PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.
In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.
In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.
And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.
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What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
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…
All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.
I really doubt that companies raise the average with stacked ranking.
The real reason tech companies use agrressive hiring (and firing that funds hiring) is to steal the most possible fresh IP from competitors (in a legal way).