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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#731

Post by nickm12 »

masterof0 wrote: post #556
nickm12 wrote: post #60

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

So you need to be an experienced dev to speak up against a toxic work environment? I do also cringe when I see comments like yours attacking the guy for doing something you wouldn't do. He probably mentioned the amount of lines of codes as a way of saying he did put a lot of effort(is common knowledge that on itself is a shitty metric). Maybe he, also wouldn't want to be hired by someone like you either, not would I.

I'm not saying he shouldn't speak up against a toxic work environment. I'm saying he's doing it on LinkedIn in a way that makes him look bad and could hurt his future career prospects.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#732

Post by kerneis »

ltfey wrote: post #685
aspenmayer wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop at C suite? Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure, and do it by shareholder vote of confidence.

Stack rank the board of directors too for good measure The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.

I guess this was meant as a joke, but you may want to read about the reign of Terror and how it led people from all social classes to rat each other out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

See also how people had to get a "certificate of civism" lest them be considered suspect by default: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_civism

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#733

Post by pcthrowaway »

crowbahr wrote: post #362
dorianmariefr wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's wor…

I wish I had realized your comment was better spaced before slogging through the previous text brick.

I really didn't think the "linkedin-style spacing" was necessary. The OP was not exactly short, but had a good enough sense of spacing and used paragraph breaks appropriately.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#734

Post by urthor »

taneq wrote: post #345
alistairSH wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s roughly equivalent to 120,000 Euro/year once normalized for taxes (~50% for self-employed, ~30% for employees). I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.

Is it low-mid for "much of the US" or for much of the Silicon Valley venture crowd?

Keep in mind consultants don't get 401K plans or many other things, AND they have to save about 15-20% of their income as "in between jobs" money, in case they don't line work up.

If you earn 30% more than a salaried employee you are barely breaking even most of the time.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#735

Post by pcthrowaway »

MattGaiser wrote: post #71
chronogram wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance improvement plan. Either a manager writes a plan of measurable goals focused on improving, or a manager and the target employee both work on the plan together. It can be used for actual performance improvement or it can be used as something the employee cannot meet as a way to fire them or get them to a different team.

You would be nuts to treat it as anything other than loading the bullet into the gun that terminates you. All it is is to make sure that the bullet is legal.

I think there are exceptions to this. At my last full-time role I was PIP-ed, and if I'm being completely honest, it wasn't undeserved. I had been burnt out for 2-3 years, had tried to quit 2 years prior but they offered me a 10% raise to stay

Honestly, I should have still quit, because it was burn-out over the role rather than compensation-related. But I stayed, and slacked a lot. Tracked my hours towards the end and I might get 12 actual hours of work done some weeks, including meetings. Still got most of my work done, but often with delays. It wasn't a perfect job, but the team was great and I liked the company culture.

My manager was very clear with me when I was PIPed that he really wanted us to work together to get me back on track. HR wouldn't consider letting me work part-time despite multiple conversations (it went against the company policy, and other people would start asking for it), but he tried to convince me to take paid time off instead. I decided to quit anyway, because I figured I was done spending most of my day configuring automated test pipelines and wanted to spend more time writing code that wasn't bash.

When I put in my notice, the manager tried to convince me to stay again, said they really wanted me just on track, and reiterated again that up to 4 months of paid leave was an option. Seemed really forlorn about the situation during the exit interview.

I honestly believe I could have worked my way out of the PIP, and the management would have preferred that outcome. Employing me at my current level of performance wasn't delivering the value they were paying for though, and quitting was ultimately the best situation for everyone involved.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#737

Post by jaromir_ »

desi_ninja wrote: post #582
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…

you are forgetting Facebook. it is Amazon culture on steroids

not really and happy to help to disprove your misconceptions

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#738

Post by southerntofu »

DarylZero wrote: post #257
southerntofu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me. You should have trust issues with "management" in any corporation because these people have the interest of the shareholders at heart, not of the workers. It's just sad some of us have to go through a traumatic burnout to learn this lesson. Of course, what i said doesn't apply in a self-organized workers cooperatives where management…

They don't have the interest of the shareholders at heart, they have their own career interests at heart. The shareholders try to build a social control structure that aligns these, but it never fully succeeds.

The details can be debated, but to ordinary worker instances both shareholders and management inherit from RichAsshole class who both have the same implementation for the Empathy interface:

    def caresAbout(self, other):
        if type(self) == type(other): return random.choice([True, False])
        return False

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#739

Post by benhurmarcel »

Jolter wrote: post #259
urthor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

700 a day??? Why did you undercharge by so much. I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money." Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.

Where do you live that 700€ a DAY is low pay? It’s, that’s MORE than 700$ a day, not less. Consider that most parts of the world have lower cost of living than the Bay Area.

To give a point of reference, an employed senior engineer in mechanical/aerospace in western Europe makes about 250-300€/day, before taxes. So 175-200€/day after taxes.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#740

Post by mtlguitarist »

tylerdurden91 wrote: post #727

From 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…

Regarding your last two points, you're absolutely spot on. I don't have much in terms of data, but I want to at least offer my story so that people understand how fundamentally broken the system is and how it discourages you from doing anything other than leaving.

I internally transferred at Amazon and had many internal offers to choose from - so I went with a team that had great tech survey results and where the manager seemed like an honest guy that I could trust. In Things went about as poorly as you can expect. The new manager had no technical knowledge, poor leadership, and blatantly favored the people he was managing before he inherited my team. But I'm not sure if I can convey how bad he was. He would have engineers manually updating excel spreadsheets for his monthly business reviews as part of their oncall work (which was literally his job). He would gaslight engineers into telling them they'd be promoted, and then hand them a PIP. He would lie at status meetings and has numerous documented performance issues and complaints in his connections and directly to his manager and director. His performance was so dismal that our Senior Manager made his team meet together and write down ideas (anonymously) for the manager to stop being so bad. He would blatantly not pay attention in meetings and ask us to repeat whatever we went over in the previous day's meetings (which he attended himself) in standup. He would never back up his engineers on any push back, even when we would get paged to do things outside of our SLA windows and completely let our stakeholders run us over with requests and expectations.

No list about all of his horrible practices could be complete, but I want to emphasize that he was so disliked that he caused 9 people to leave his team in 10 months. I don't want to say I was the best engineer, but I got positive feedback from all of the senior and principal engineers I worked with and I thought I was on a steady path to being promoted. But it turns out this manager realized he could weaponize performance ratings, and gave me and the other L4s that he inherited the lowest performance rating possible while giving his original reports promos and the highest rating possible. This wasn't an absolute shock to me and I already intended to leave Amazon because I couldn't stand him any longer, but this set my team's senior engineer off. He was absolutely livid and escalated the issue to the senior manager that this was a disaster and completely ridiculous. The senior manager met with me personally, told me it was a problem and that he'd make it right. He and the director decided to have my team report to a new (remote) manager, but for me it was too late and I decided to leave amazon.

But what happened to the manager? Well, I wish I could say HR stepped in and fired him for weaponizing ratings, or his bosses PIPed him for being awful, but actually none of those things happened! He caused ~60-70% attrition, had documented performance issues, and abused tools in a documented way and still manages at Amazon! A few months ago he internally transfered and as far as I know his new team doesn't have him on a PIP yet.

What is the takeaway for anyone reading? Just remember that just because you interview with a manager doesn't mean they'll be your manager forever, or even really at all. And it's okay if you underperform at Amazon, as long as your title is SDM. The last thing I wanna say is that I really liked the Senior Manager as a person, but he was too nice to the shitty manager. PIPing is inherently a bad system, but if it can't even catch someone who is so blatantly underperforming for a year straight then it doesn't even do what it says on the box.

Also no matter what don't join Amazon Go Boston. Just as a heads up.

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