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I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

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Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#11

Post by aestetix »

This seems common in American companies.

I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager.

Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#13

Post by xvector »

I'd rather not work at all than work for that complete disaster of a corporate environment. The corpo speak in Callahan's note at the end is simply infuriating. Don't know how these people can lie and mislead with a straight face and sleep at night.

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#14

Post by antupis »

aestetix wrote: post #11

This seems common in American companies. I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manage…

Also if pips are constant it will just create a nasty culture which is very hard to turn back.

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#15

Post by bell-cot »

underseacables wrote: post #3

Amazon seems like a really awful place to work, at the warehouse or at the corporate office. Why do people still work, and want to work, there?

In the warehouses...well, nobody else is hiring those kinds of headcounts. And few of the people taking those jobs are in any position to be picky.

For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#16

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

> But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.

So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.

If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#17

Post by pjerem »

underseacables wrote: post #3

Amazon seems like a really awful place to work, at the warehouse or at the corporate office. Why do people still work, and want to work, there?

Sure.

But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide).

As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing.

You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#18

Post by glimshe »

satao wrote: post #5
underseacables wrote: post #3

Amazon seems like a really awful place to work, at the warehouse or at the corporate office. Why do people still work, and want to work, there?

high compensation for skilled workers, lack of options for the unskilled ones, probably.

This. For skilled workers, it's still a lot of money if you can't get a job at the other FAANG companies. In the few miserable years you'll be there, you can make a lot of progress towards buying/paying off a house, for instance. If you have a thick skin to not care about a PIP and just shrug off the nonsense, it might be a really good deal.

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#19

Post by aestetix »

antupis wrote: post #14
aestetix wrote: post #11

This seems common in American companies. I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manage…

Also if pips are constant it will just create a nasty culture which is very hard to turn back.

Well it seems that PIPs are not actually improvement plans.

An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals.

What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.

Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

#20

Post by thereisnospork »

aestetix wrote: post #11

This seems common in American companies. I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manage…

PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name.

[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.

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