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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#751

Post by ActorNightly »

deltaonefour wrote: post #530
ActorNightly wrote: post #160

Earlier 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…

>If anything, this kind of stuff should be viewed as games, because that's all this is. Supply/demand of labor mixed in with a few political and psychological things. The manager is not even close to being an asshole, he is just playing the game like all the employees are. Firing people and putting them on PIP is just a game because amazon is such a great company to have on your resume? It's just a game because his l…

When talking about labor management, there is a big difference in it from the perspective of someone making 40k a year with a more demanding job, where they depend on that job for basic necessities and family support, and from the perspective of SDEs that have very kushy lives with very little risk, ESPECIALLY at MAANG level.

As such, if some Amazon manager wants to fire, PIP, overload with work, or do whatever he thinks is necessary to its not imorral or makes him an asshole. An employee can just quit and find a different job quite easily and retain his kushy life.

And to be clear this works both ways - if SDEs want to avoid Amazon or share their experiences, thats all fine as well.

But to start going after personal qualities of managers because someone cant keep their 200k/year position makes you the enitlted asshole, not me.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#752

Post by dekhn »

graycat wrote: post #587
efitz wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

> In a large, Gaussian distributed population Where do we get one of those? The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem. There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and…

Maybe I missed your point, but qualitative phenotypes caused by interactions of many genes that are measureable, like height, are gaussian distributed.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#753

Post by dininski »

spaceywilly wrote: post #432
dininski wrote: post #180

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…

“ eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it” erm, this makes it sound like he was a not a very good engineer. Your code should always be written so that if you get hit by a bus one day, the rest of your team could pick right up where you left off

Unfortunately this is a quite common scenario in big enterprises, such as Amazon, Google and the lot. Main reason is the promotion process.

Usually you need to gather evidence that you've contributed significantly to a project. And the easiest way to do that is to work on new projects. Maintaining an existing codebase is usually a thankless job, which is also hard to get you promoted.

And once the new project is released it eventually gets abandoned and people move to the next one, which would help them get promoted. Think of all the Google projects that have been discontinued, which were also a product of similar processes.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#754

Post by thehappypm »

mr_beans wrote: post #426
thehappypm wrote: post #392

Does anyone have any insight into what the culture for Product Managers in AWS is? Currently interviewing with them, and it’s impossible to determine the culture from their interview process. For example, I asked how large the team was, and the interviewer responded that he couldn’t tell me that information.

You’ll have to change your username if you end up working there.

theburntoutpm is my fear!

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#755

Post by phendrenad2 »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #597
aaviran wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be the case here. As the OP theorized, they were already on the way out of the team, so why not use them to fill up the PIP quotas? The manager might not be incompetent, but they sure are an asshole

If you get PIPed at amazon, you can't transfer teams. It locks you to your current team until you "improve"

I wonder what the logic there is. If someone isn't doing well on a team, shuffling them to a new project might help. But the downside is managers might be annoyed by a new person on the team who is a suspected low-performer. Could lead to a game of hot-potato where people try to avoid having PIPs added to their team through politics.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#756

Post by graycat »

dekhn wrote: post #752
graycat wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a large, Gaussian distributed population Where do we get one of those? The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem. There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and…

Maybe I missed your point, but qualitative phenotypes caused by interactions of many genes that are measureable, like height, are gaussian distributed.

At best, only approximately Gaussian.

Height cannot be Gaussian if only because height is never negative but every Gaussian density is positive for all real numbers, including negative real numbers.

"interactions of many genes that are measureable"

The interactions of many is commonly used to justify a Gaussian assumption, but there is no such theorem. The main theorem to get a Gaussian density is the central limit theorem which usually assumes an infinite sequence of independent identically distributed random variables (plus some), i.e., i.i.d. The i.i.d. is asking a LOT!!! Asking so much that in practice it is essentially unrealistic.

What people often mean by Gaussian is just a central peak, some symmetry, and long tails, but an actual Gaussian distribution has a lot more, e.g., sufficient statistics (as in a classic paper by Halmos and Savage, with a derivation in M. Loeve's two volumes, from Springer, Probability) which, as I recall, E. Dynkin showed are quite sensitive to deviations from actual Gaussian.

Gaussian is important in a lot of derivations -- a LOT is known. But in practice Gaussian has some utility but only as an approximation where don't need to be very careful about accuracy.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#758

Post by schadenfriend »

zerr wrote: post #540
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…

Are managers also put on pip? Especially those who try to dodge their teams from stack ranking? Is stack ranking practiced for managers as well?

Yes. I was an L6 manager and was put into Pivot (the umbrella process that surrounds PIP), which I managed to beat. I saw two other SDMs in that org successfully PIP'd out in the same ~18 month period. I'm sure there is some magical level where you're "calibrated" but not put into Pivot, but I suspect it is pretty high up.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#759

Post by pyuser583 »

wpietri wrote: post #413
RHSeeger wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

“ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.”

This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!

Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.

My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.

But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#760

Post by dreamer6 »

I was on a team at Amazon where I was in a role that had 5 peoople in and out of it within 2 years. The team had basically designated the role to be the one that they would PIP each year to help ensure that they could meet their UAR metrics.
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