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

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

#71

Post by iaseiadit »

scarface_74 wrote: post #10
shostack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a serious answer, not everyone has the extreme privilege of being as in demand and finding another job quickly, particularly in this economy. People may also have financial situations where they need to hold on to whatever hope they can of a job because it is less scary than taking the money and then taking the leap. I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want…

I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior. When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I…

What year did you leave? Was it when tech companies were hiring as many employees as possible, or after the industry-wide layoffs that that hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed and fighting for scarce jobs? Were you in the country on a work visa tied to your employer, or were you a U.S. citizen? I agree with your overall sentiment but some people will be in different circumstances.

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

#72

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #59
gardenhedge wrote: post #50

Is PIP just an American thing? I don't think they could do it in Europe, right?

So, you are European, and you hire a dev who is clearly not contributing or pulling their weight. Maybe they lied about their experience on their resume. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Just let him coast forever, collecting a paycheck while wasting company resources and dragging the team down?

Yeah, there's typically a 3-6 month probation period

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

#73

Post by lopkeny12ko »

rurounijones wrote: post #67
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was a structured process for that. Maybe we could call it a "performance improvement plan," or PIP for short.

That fact your reply to a comment about having a structured way to fire someone could be called a "performance improvement plan or PIP for short" is hilarious to me. It seems you have accepted that PIPs are just a tool to fire someone but still think calling it a PIP is perfectly logical and desirable to the point that you snarkily suggest that this is what it should be called.

I don't know about your situation, but at every company I've ever worked for, firing a report for performance reasons requires the employee to first be placed on a PIP. Call it whatever you want, but in most cases (from both the employee and manager perspective), a PIP is not designed with the intent that the employee should remain at the company.

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

#74

Post by scarface_74 »

iaseiadit wrote: post #71
scarface_74 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior. When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I…

What year did you leave? Was it when tech companies were hiring as many employees as possible, or after the industry-wide layoffs that that hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed and fighting for scarce jobs? Were you in the country on a work visa tied to your employer, or were you a U.S. citizen? I agree with your overall sentiment but some people will be in different circumstances.

It was two months ago. The tech industry definitely was not hiring like crazy. But I started laying the ground work for leaving Amazon the day I got hired. It was AWS ProServe - the consulting division.

Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago.

Focus on creating an “unfair advantage”.

1. I got on to a high profile open source project and stayed on it until it became a more official “AWS Solution”. In still high on the list of contributors for both code and the documentation. This actually led directly to my current job. The company I was hired for uses the solution.

2. I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I had an open source portfolio that I could say was being used by real customers. I’ve used two of those projects at my current job (legally - MIT licensed by AWS)

I still have one of the two only public solutions to automate deploying one complicated AWS service. I volunteered to design the solution for the service team when they had the APIs it for it in beta and I worked with the guy that created Terraform support for it.

3. I responded to every recruiter over the last three years and kept in touch with former managers and coworkers. This led to an offer of a full time job that I didn’t accept and a side contract I did accept.

4. I constantly kept my resume up to date and I used the leveling guidelines to word it. I also have a career document.

5. I used the extra money I was making to pay off debt, save and “decontent” my life so if necessary, I could go back to enterprise CRUD compensation without having to hold out for BigTech level compensation. I actually turned down a chance at a job that would have paid more than I was making. I didn’t want the stress.

A former coworker is a director of a well known (non tech) company and he was willing to create a position for me overseeing the entire AWS architecture and their transition effort. I really didn’t need to stress.

I’m building out a much smaller “center of excellence” now and it’s rough enough.

6. I kept my LLC active all three years just in case I needed it to ramp up a solo consulting business. I used it for the side contract I mentioned that I started the day I was left (in addition to the full time job I got two weeks later)

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

#75

Post by FireBeyond »

TwentyPosts wrote: post #42
FireBeyond wrote: post #39

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.

For me, well, the company promised follow up with me, and that never happened. Communication was never their strong point. Another HR person had emailed me to go through standard termination stuff, COBRA, etc. "Attached to this email is a FedEx label to return your company laptop". There wasn't, so I emailed him to say so. Never heard from him again, despite three followup emails. I even forwarded the email chain to the HR person who'd been on the termination call, and they didn't reply either. So I kept the emails and printed copies in case anyone knocked on my door. I still have the laptop. I'll happily return it, as soon as they let me know how to. (I've had suggestions to just send it to their corporate address, but then I don't want to run into it being picked up by someone who has no context, and then the company says "oh, yeah, please send here").

I got a new job, fairly quickly. No-one asked about my leaving there in any depth (the joys of COVID-era business).

As for my manager, I suspect like the other reply - probably not much happened to him, other than to provide at least token optics. It's one thing for it to be a foregone conclusion, but another if somehow the ex-employee turns around and sues for termination/discrimination and it's demonstrable that the company "had it in" for the employee (i.e. setting goals and not even attempting to review efforts and then documenting that they did review).

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

#76

Post by quackduck »

LinuxBender wrote: post #2

Corporate Slack instances are probably not a great place to discuss such things. One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. There is a demo documented in that git repo. People can ssh under a pseudonym rather than using a real name. The daemon uses private keys to track identity so make a new SSH key specific to that server.…

Oh btw the go SSH lib being old thing has been fixed for a while now.

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

#77

Post by itjustisthough »

yetihehe wrote: post #43
justinclift wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're reading this you're better off than half the world. And you call that "privilege"?

Sadly, most people using "privilege" word see "being better than half of the world" as privilege, thus devaluing the word to almost nothing.

[flagged]

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

#78

Post by daveoc64 »

gardenhedge wrote: post #50

Is PIP just an American thing? I don't think they could do it in Europe, right?

They are common in the UK.

Once someone has been employed at a company for two years, they can't be dismissed without going through a fair disciplinary process.

A PIP is a good way to demonstrate that an employee is not performing adequately, even after being given an opportunity to improve.

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

#79

Post by gurchik »

scarface_74 wrote: post #74
iaseiadit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What year did you leave? Was it when tech companies were hiring as many employees as possible, or after the industry-wide layoffs that that hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed and fighting for scarce jobs? Were you in the country on a work visa tied to your employer, or were you a U.S. citizen? I agree with your overall sentiment but some people will be in different circumstances.

It was two months ago. The tech industry definitely was not hiring like crazy. But I started laying the ground work for leaving Amazon the day I got hired. It was AWS ProServe - the consulting division. Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago. Focus on creating a…

> I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts.

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for another purpose. It will depend on the company and the contracts you signed, right?

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

#80

Post by scarface_74 »

gurchik wrote: post #79
scarface_74 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was two months ago. The tech industry definitely was not hiring like crazy. But I started laying the ground work for leaving Amazon the day I got hired. It was AWS ProServe - the consulting division. Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago. Focus on creating a…

> I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for…

Yes, all AWS contracts in ProServe had a clause that any IP that the ProServe team created belong to both the company and AWS.

Of course we had to strip out any proprietary information and then put it through the approval process to get it open sourced.

It’s the same at my current company. Anything we create that doesn’t divulge proprietary company information belongs to us and the customer.

If you come to AWS’s own Professional Services division , what are you going to do? Say you’re going to another consulting division that’s better?

I worked on mostly frameworks around AWS that are reusable across implementations and then put any custom business logic as a layer on top of it.

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