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.
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I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
51–60 of 618 posts
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is absolutely not the same in Europe. Maybe it depends on the country. In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind. But the idea of taking a company to court for something like this in Germany is laughable.
>It is absolutely not the same in Europe. It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it. >In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind. You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates…
I chose the example I have experience with. I don't have experience with other EU countries, so I can't comment on those. I also don't have experience with massive large companies, so maybe this is a problem of scale rather than culture. Although it does seem like smaller American companies have the same problems.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#53> 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 wa…
If they did this even once how is that not criminal fraud? Proformance isn’t subjective, if an employee lies and says my proformance is bad that’s a crime.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
PIPs (at least in europe) are a way for company to prove employee was fired because they are incompetent. We tried to help employee X, see the paperwork? But they are not good enough. Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits. Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements I have only heard secon…
But the point is, would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP? If you give an employee guardrails for success and they flounder anyways, then it seems the employee was not a good fit for the role. It says more about the employee than the process.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#55This 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…
What are we not talking about 996 culture. Personally I feel like I'd rather jump off a bridge than work in toxic environments.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#56This has probably already been said, but places that mandate that X% of people need to be put on performance improvement plans are not great. This can force managers (or HR, depends on who decides the PIP) to put otherwise good engineers or staff on PIP when they are perfectly fine employees - they may not be 10x, perfect, and can just be doing what they need to do to do their jobs, but they still aren't doing anything wrong and end up on a PIP because the company is forcing them to put atleast some percentage of people on it each year
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#57> 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 wa…
I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while. While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#58I've heard so many terrible stories about working at Amazon that I'm not sure I would ever work there, both in the media and from friends who were severely mistreated.
It's a shame, because some of the tech they work on (like S3) is super interesting and high scale, but I do not want to acquire a mental health crisis from work.
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#59> My manager was super mad and asked me when I was leaving. I said two weeks.
Serious question for Americans as maybe this is cultural: They're an at-will employee, seemed to already have a new job lined up and the company seemed to have burned all goodwill with them, why not resign effective immediately?
Re: I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
#60The mindset is that you can always find new factory floor operators to push buttons on keyboards and operate ci/cd pipeline interfaces. Software "engineering" is the new factory work. To be automated soon so y'all can be freed to work on important things.