Amazon shut down a Slack channel where 2k employees talked about PIPs

We're talking about Amazon, the company where managers are literally required to fire a certain number of people and frequently hire new people with the expectation of firing them to meet that quota. So giving someone a chance to turn their performance around would defeat the purpose.

If you jump to "privilege" for someone saying "take the money instead of hoping to ride out a PIP at Amazon", you have in fact forgotten that people have it worse than you.

There's a difference between knowing something and remembering it.

Creator of the new group mentioned here...

My opinion is this. PIP is needed. URA projections are needed, but need revised and reformed. The question remains..is how should either be implemented. I think URA metrics should be nothing more than a suggestion of what's likely the case. Example?

Say Amazon has 1.5M employees. URA hypothetically set to 6%, Currently, That's 90,000 employees worldwide who would be considered underperformers and should be eliminated. To me, that is absurd.

How I think it should be carried out. Lower URA to 3%, 35,000 total employees. Change URA to "Underperformance Risk". There's a good chance 3% of employees are indeed underperformers. However the question remains..how are we targeting such? Warehouse associate tracking is easy. They make up the majority. Non WHA folks is a bit harder. So we need to focus on their accomplishments, ticket resolution, other verifiable data which can attribute to their performance. I.E.

- How many of their resolved issues needed reopened due to misdiagnosis?

- How many unsuccessful attempts to resolution of an issue? If unsuccessful, are there attempts made to properly escalate and learn from such failed attempt?

Projects that required rework or additional assistance?

Manager direct report attrition?

Thing is, requiring a certain percentage to be let go is absurd. Maintaining a target percentage of employees to identify at risk of underperforming is more ideal IMO. Then figure out a way to identify genuine underperformers, and actually make the attempt to get them to improve. Also, give underperformers a chance a one time chance to relocate, down-level, or find a role which best fits their demonstrated skill set.

We need to eliminate the fact that a Manager can unilaterally request a Focus entry. They can accomplish this by simply ommitting certain accomplishments of affected employees via OLR, therefore making them look less than ideal. Also, Peer feedback is terrible. If they're your peer, chances are they'll be looking to promote. You're competition to them. It's human nature. We need to emphasize stakeholder and those who are a level higher..their feedback on the performance of an employee. Peer feedback should only be used as a way to Guage whether the Bar is at the right threshold for such level/role. We are a hypersensitive Data collection organization. There's no reason other than acts of God where we can't accomplish such. Additionally, I am human, and my ideas aren't perfect. That's why I created this group. To show the absurdity and encourage a channel for those involved to express their experiences, concerns or ideas for improvement.

> to think that people ... have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.

Just to point out, it seems to be fairly common for people in some South East Asian cultures to value job stability over pretty much everything else.

"It's your job as the breadwinner to provide stability for our family" type of thing.

For many of them, there is no way the wife would allow (!) their husband to quit their job when there is any other option on the table.

> I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements

Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.

Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.

I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.

“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”

I reviewed them all.

At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.

He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.

“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.

HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder of the call.

A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).

I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.