Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 618 posts

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

#81

Post by secondcoming »

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've heard ancedotal stories years ago about Amazon trying to force employees out just before their share package vests.

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

#82

Post by bellgrove »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #56

This 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 anythi…

I completely agree. Plus, part of Amazon's candidate evaluation is to consider whether they are (or clearly have potential to be) better than 50% of your peers, as part of the hiring bar. Between that and stack-ranking/forced-attrition, even previously high-performing employees can one day find themselves on the chopping block.

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

#83

Post by LocalH »

HenryBemis wrote: post #31
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…

[flagged]

This is the spectre of infinite growth permeating everything, at every level.

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

#84

Post by civilized »

bratbag wrote: post #75

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 help…

It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?

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

#85

Post by wildfire »

cle wrote: post #42
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?

I worked there for 8 years (both retail and AWS) and loved it and never experienced a toxic environment. Consider that the anecdotes that are published by the media may not be representative of everyone's experiences.

AWS, like every company, is really the culture+ managers.

Some managers can deflect the culture enough for you to feel "loved".

Others can't. They embody the culture. The AWS culture really is that ruthless.

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

#86

Post by re-thc »

blitzar wrote: post #65
aestetix wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP 90%+ of the situations I have witnessed, extreme luck or act of god would be required to achieve the requirements. In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level. I have also had the misfortune to witness one where the employee didnt realise it…

> In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.

An examples on how those played out? Curious if the line managers then get punished?

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

#87

Post by iLoveOncall »

capableweb wrote: post #66
iLoveOncall wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're a director you will never come even close to $100K of stock vesting in a single event, and directors are not subject to PIPs. So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.

So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number? > I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. 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. > If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you woul…

No, she isn't necessarily lying but just making it seem as if she would have received $200K over a single vest while it would have likely happened over at least 2 years and 4 vests.

I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.

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

#88

Post by curiousgal »

bratbag wrote: post #75

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 help…

This!

People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.

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

#89

Post by curiousgal »

civilized wrote: post #84
bratbag wrote: post #75

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 help…

It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?

Narcissism.

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

#90

Post by morkalork »

intunderflow wrote: post #58

I'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.

I'm morbidly curious, like if I knew I had a solid job waiting for after and didn't have to stress over it going sideways. They'd probably smell my non-seriousness a mile away though and never hire me.
Post reply on HN