Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political. Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law. So either managers follow s…
Agree, 100% McNamara fallacy level thinking. The easily measured things don't make up the full picture, and may even be completely wrong, but they are easily measured so they become the full picture. I worked somewhere that did weird personality tests as part of the recruiting process. I talked to my manager later and he basically explained it as - yeah, it predicts nothing. No one ever gets denied because of it.. bu…
Amazon Pip Horror Story
721–730 of 771 posts
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#722I'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…
In my experience it was the same at Goldman Sachs.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was 5 of the expensive pies from https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/serious-take-out-ballard/ I had gotten them for myself and a friend. They are small pies so a single person can easily eat two of them.
Ok, so that explains how they fit in the refrigerator. Though it's still confusing why you would buy 5 pizzas and put them in the fridge. Is it common around there to buy pizza in advanced and reheat it? Or were they just leftovers, and I was thinking too much about it?
I was new there and didn't want to have to run around to get lunch. The place was a bit of a distance.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#724Earlier quoted context omitted.
HR at Amazon is a shit show. I had $100 of pizza stolen from the fridge at Amazon and I mentioned it casually to HR, as something notable but not too important. And HR then decided to tell my manager without my knowledge. The manager then berated me over communicating about a "trivial matter." So yeah, wouldn't put much stock in HR at Amazon.
Maybe manager stole the pizza.
Well, I left because of him. He stole my dignity.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#725I 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…
Amazon has a way to generate a lot of infrastructure with code templates. So I can push out a ton of infrastructure code in a short amount of time by simply running the generator script. So then I just need to plug and play functionality code. He could be factoring that code in with the count.
^It's autogenerated code for sure, especially considering he's from AWS.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm convinced human beings are naturally designed to operate at 120% for 6-12 week long periods. \ Hunter gatherer survivalist genes just kick in. YMMV, but I consider it a healthy thing for, at least for some part of your career, to work "Amazon hard." Aka, all the reasons that people list when they say you should really try working for a startup. When you push yourself to your limits at your profession, a lot of st…
Human beings are not designed to operate at 120% for 6-12 week long periods; they're designed to survive it. The difference is important. Working at such a rhythm helped me learn much. It also durably damaged my body (both because it chipped away at my health and because it made me forego health check-up), my mental health, and made me lose personal connections. To this day, I'm still picking up the pieces. Human bei…
I think that's a good point.
I guess I should say the healthy thing to do is to work at 100% of your capacity, whilst going to bed at 9pm and doing 25 minutes of exercise every morning?
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#727From a big picture point of view, I understand the original intent of PIP. However, it seems severely disconnected from the ground reality.
* It promotes lazy managers who easily put engineers on PIP. I have heard so many stories where managers put engineers on PIP as soon as they apply for internal transfers and execute very shady stuff like suddenly sending MoM for 1:1 meeting 3 days later with stuff that was never discussed, etc.
* It creates an environment of distrust amongst engineers for the system. I've talked to engineers who have lost trust in all internal mechanisms like Connections, Forte, etc. Blind is full of stories & have seen personally where none of these mechanisms are able to surface structural & cultural problems. Examples like: Managers putting unnecessary pressure on a smaller team due to inability to hire good talent and literally abusing them when they decide to leave. Managers not talking about growth and not doing anything & more importantly not knowing enough to be able to grow their engineers.
* When faced with a bad manager or bad culture, a skilled engineer faces 2 choices, either fight the good fight, try escalating, try reaching out to HR or leave the team or leave Amazon. Even if there were no bad stories, its so hard for an employee to choose the former, but with so many stories floating around, the first choice becomes impossible. That leaves Amazon with a huge blind spot around bad managers, bad teams, and bad orgs.
* In terms of impact, a bad manager has 10x more negative impact to Amazon as compared to a bad engineer, yet the PIP process is carried about when IMO Amazon should be investing in re-establishing trust with engineers, creating processes to discover bad managers, bad teams and then establishing a process to weed them out.
Disclaimer: Amazonian here (soon to be ex).
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer to be paid based on how valuable my work is to the employer, not the cost of living wherever I happen to be or even my personal financial needs.
Sure, so do I, but when I tell my manager I'm worth X amount, he'll say that's just not where local salaries are at for my job category and responsibility. Implying that other developers in my area are available for less than I ask. I mean, if a person is able to extract 700€ per day, kudos to them but that's still above the 90th percentile of senior developers in Europe.
What do other companies say? "Nah you're not" is a pretty standard response to "I'm worth more than this" but consider the source. For some reason many companies would far rather let a good employee leave than raise their pay to market rate.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#729I'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…
The stack ranking has another really bad effect for Amazon.
I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org.
This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve.
This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are managers stack ranked too? If not, and assuming the whole scheme works[1], then steady state is accumulation of bad managers, while they keep firing above-average ICs (that are still in their bottom 10). 1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to cl…
Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon. Only L7 and above escape this, and typically they don't have an option to PIP/Focus, they're just straight out shown the door.
> Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon.
I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd