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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

#71

Post by aylmao »

> I still wonder about what happened to all the people that went through that process. How did it impact their life? I think it leads to a lot of mental-health issues.

IMO this is a key issue with this system. The company evidently only cares about the employee as long as they're employees, and can dispose them and forget about them, like they'd dispose any other leftover resource.

But evidently said people are still around. If every company adopted a system like this, in theory it'd be great for the economy. It's capitalism, and you're getting rid of the people who sell you the least effective labour in an easily scalable way.

In practice, all these companies are pumping out a lot of stress, and it's thus no surprise the USA is notoriously burdened by mental health issues when compared to other high-income countries [1].

[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2....

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

#72

Post by blitzar »

bilekas wrote: post #26

I will probably get some slack for this, but not ever usage of a PIP is necessarily a bad thing.. The example above and large companies in general do seem to use it as a firing tool or at least pretence. From experience we had one developer on our team who was gradually just showing less and less interest and quality of work was dropping so much so it was effecting the rest of the team. I wasn't involved but he was p…

The "scheme" as a general HR tool was designed to work like this, was likelky deployed successfully like this. Then someone (I am just going to assume they had a Harvard MBA) realised that it could also be used to save on costly dismissals.

Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.

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

#73

Post by andybak »

bsenftner wrote: post #57
miningape wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.

I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.

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

#74

Post by aestetix »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #61
aestetix wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that complicated. In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway. In short, it's not worth it for them, it's that simple. Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on…

> In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway.

Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.

I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.

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

#75

Post by bratbag »

So stepping back from the unreliable narrator of a person living through this with ptsd:

-person is suffering mental health issues due to strain of job.

-persons performance drops rapidly without warning as a result.

-boss takes workload off them without putting them on a pip process, to give them time to work through their issues.

-person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them

-person gives interview to justify their behaviour

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

#76

Post by bogdanu »

ddorian43 wrote: post #27
bogdanu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon pays less than local outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe. Faang salary my arse.

What numbers?

I haven't worked there, but I've seen salary reports online between 1.5k-2k euros for a senior, after taxes, per month.

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

#77

Post by rawling »

miningape wrote: post #21
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #16

> 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.

I read through the article expecting this, but... if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?

> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.

> ...

> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.

They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.

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

#78

Post by aylmao »

capableweb wrote: post #68
intunderflow wrote: post #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?

That's like a cultural quirk they have over there, where even though it's not stipulated by law, people need to stay at the place they're leaving for two weeks, no matter what, otherwise the optics are really bad, for whatever reason. But it only works one way, if you get fired you usually get fired immediately, no two weeks to find something else. In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short…

I had never thought of it that way, but you're right— firing is immediate but employees always feel the obligation to stick around for two weeks.

It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.

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

#79

Post by mk67 »

aestetix wrote: post #52
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

When I interviewed at IBM in Germany in the late 00s I was rejected and got crystal clear feedback on why - and that is a big American company in Germany.

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

#80

Post by murphyslaw »

_the_inflator wrote: post #28
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…

Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture. 1. Large numbers In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take c…

About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away.

So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.

Internal hiring websites are for show only.

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