41–50 of 80 posts
Wait a minute: does Amazon even tell white-collar employees they're being PIP'd? I though they just fired people without giving them any reason.
There’s a secret (to the employees) period pre-PIP where management is either collecting evidence of your inadequacy or setting you up to fail so they can hit URA quota. You’re absolutely notified your in PIP as you can just take the money and run.
Wow. Imagine that being legal.
Amazon had an “anonymous” internal Slack channel where you could discuss pay by using a bot to post on your behalf. It was called #pay-equity and there was another one called #pay-equity-discussion. 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 or take a severance that’s one month severance for each…
> 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 t…
How did this play out after that for you? Or him, for that matter, if you know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're reading this you're better off than half the world. If you're reading english on a computer and have food in your fridge, you're doing well.
> If you're reading this you're better off than half the world. And you call that "privilege"?
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 consider…
The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice.
I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
Absolutely powerful move. How did this play out after that for you? Or him, for that matter, if you know.
Somewhat similar thing happened on the final review, but without pointing to hard data of the fact. The decision of course remained final, the manager got a light, informal water cooler “hey be more careful of optics” chat, and that was it.
Notably when the former employee tried to go a competitor, former company killed that.
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 consider…
If a company thinks some non-trivial percentage of the employee population is likely to be underperforming to the extent they should be fired, they probably should implement a URA target (or “rank and yank” or similar).
I’m with you in disliking such policies, but if you want forced turnover of those ranked low-performing, you have to make it a hard policy, because human managers dislike firing low-performing employees who seem like they’re trying.
Why did Amazon close this? Were people succeeding their PIPs? Isn't that a good thing? Were people discovering that they were in secret pre-PIP (pivot), and then giving up earlier than the company wanted? Were people taking the severance instead of working themselves to death just to get fired anyway? Was there mounting evidence that Pivot/PIP at Amazon is quota-based, not performance-based? Were employees getting wi…
It wasn’t a secret that I was in pre-pip. But here is how it escalated 1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat 2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them 3. I met all of the requirements to get off with f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn’t a secret that I was in pre-pip. But here is how it escalated 1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat 2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them 3. I met all of the requirements to get off with f…
That is messed up. Sounds like a terrible environment. Do they really have no decency ?
Job hunting is more of a nuisance than anything else for me.
I knew that Amazon was going to Amazon eventually going in. It accomplished its purpose. I made a lot more money than I could anywhere else as a CRUD developer who had only opened the AWS console two years prior and with no previous strategic consulting experience.
My resume is the bomb now. I also got the chance to be the third highest contributor to a popular (thousands of downloads and hundreds of stars) open source “AWS Solution” that led directly to my current job and I was able to put every useful piece of code I wrote through AWS’s open source process (GitHub AWS Samples). I’ve already used some of the work at my current job (legally MIT licensed).
I am always ready to look for a job. I’ve kept that mentality since 2008.