Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe manager stole the pizza.
Well, I left because of him. He stole my dignity.
Dignity and pizza.
Amazon Pip Horror Story
741–750 of 771 posts
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#742I'm neither supporting Amazon or the person who got Pip'ed. But 49k out of those "51k lines of code" are just auto-generated npm package-lock.json diff
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#743I'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…
> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer. Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabot…
> > As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.
> Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this.
I agree. I’d hate to work at any org that does this as a rule.
To play devils advocate however, I’m sure many of us have been in a situation where a co-worker was coasting, or doing the minimal amount of work, while spending energy to look busy.
I’m thinking this cynical outlook could have contributed to this practice being implemented in large organizations.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member. Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outs…
Internal culture, process and behavior is what decides if a job is stressful.. while at Amazon I worked fewer hours outside work hours but was a lot more stressed as every one around you is busy proving their worth than looking at what needs to get done collectively.
You might be able to quantify internal culture, process and behavior, by applying some of the qualifiers from the human development index and happiness index to your company.
Just a thought.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#745At 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
That can’t possibly be true. Facebook can’t be customer-obsessed in the same way Amazon is, because Facebook’s customers are advertisers. This puts Facebook’s product teams and engineers in a position where they often have to avoid doing what would be best for their users in order to satisfy the needs of advertisers.
Amazon is largely free of this kind of conflict: Customers and users are the same group of people.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#746Has 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?
Yes, about 15 years ago, I went from being on PIP at Yahoo to being nominated for a Super Star award. There’s no magic; you just need to have an open mind, take the feedback you’ve been given seriously, and work hard.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
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…
It's an interesting analogy, but employees aren't cards. One important difference is that employees get better over time, assuming there is a decent culture of communication and mentorship.
Maybe you hired a 7 of clubs, but given time they can gain institutional knowledge and improve their skillset to become a Jack of Spades.
I'm happy there are companies that set attrition metrics as a KPI, it makes it easier for me to hire and build out a technical team for my company.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#748Pretty sure GE had a similar bottom slicing program and look at how that company has performed. They were once a big conglomerate and they are now a shadow of their former self.
Companies are just collections of people who are delivering goods and services to customers and returning money to shareholders. The PIP story isn't even surprising based on reporting from Big Technology and even the New York Times story from a few years ago.
I suspect Amazon is going to be in decline the next 20+ years and the start of that decline will be the company breaking up and selling off it's "non-core" businesses.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop with the needless hate. We are talking about people in the top 8% of the income bracket in US. Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood. If you have Amazon on your resume, no matter what, you will have no issues finding another job, because the acceptance rate by itself to Amazon is The biggest drawback of something like this is maybe having to wait an extra few mon…
Cool, basically, "I can abuse you in any way I want because I`m paying you a good money". So, why this is shitty? Mainly because thats inside thing, and there no way to learn it during interview. >> Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood. Can you provide source for this claim?
I did in the next sentence logically. Its impossible to gather such data since you would have to track people across multiple jobs.
Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story
#750Over 700 comments, and noone questions maybe there is a little more to this story.
For example: * Yes, he "submitted" >50k lines of code. Most of it is auto-generated from infrastructure generation templates.
* His teammates are submitting less lines of code because they're working on business logic
* Amazon doesn't let you put people on performance improvement plans because they are trying to switch teams. What is happening in these situations is that someone is ALREADY on a performance improvement plan because of a problem (and it could be technical, or it could be personal or professional), is receiving feedback for improving, decides they are not interested in working on fixing these issues, and tries to switch teams. This is when they find out that Amazon (like most companies) doesn't want you to just run away from problems by moving internally, and that you are not allowed to transfer. Then they go run to Blind or Linkedin to talk about how their manager is trying to sabotage them or hit PIP quotas.
Just saying. There's always more to stories like this.