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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

#131

Post by anonymousDan »

RCitronsBroker wrote: post #33

this person should have left it at shafting Amazon with their soon vesting stock options, I’m all for that. But this account just feels disingenuous

In what way is it 'shafting' Amazon to leave with stock options you have already earned and are perfectly entitled to? Personally I find it very useful information to know the real implications of Amazon's PIP process, as I'm sure would many other less savvy/experienced employees for whom getting fired despite being perfectly capable must be a very difficult experience.

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

#132

Post by intelVISA »

aylmao wrote: post #97
gumballindie wrote: post #60

The 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.

> Software "engineering" is the new factory work. I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".

Unless you own the company you are never "in control".

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

#133

Post by bogdanu »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #112
bogdanu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seniors hit about 4-5k eur in Poland. Poland is far worse than Germany tbh.

On average, I would say a senior would get between 3k and 4k euros in RO, at a regular company. It depends a lot on city too. In bucharest salaries should be higher.

Obviously Amazon thinks that mortages can be paid just by flexing their employee badge.

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

#134

Post by saiadarsh99 »

murphyslaw wrote: post #80
_the_inflator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If not filled by then the req got taken away.

I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.

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

#135

Post by orwin »

rand_r wrote: post #100
CalRobert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is random but I was recently rejected for a role from a company I find very interesting - https://www.overstory.com/ - and when I asked, the engineering manager gave me clear, detailed feedback on why (I don't have experience with satellite imagery tools like STAC, I accessed dict members with x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}), and I didn't go in to depth on my takehome assignment.). I really appreciate it and me…

Depending on your perception, x.get is either error recovery (good) or a silent failure (bad). One is not necessarily better than the other; it depends on what you want. In my experience, x[] is usually the better choice because failing fast makes debugging easier. I hope no one is recommending x.get as a general practice, because that is pretty naive.

You're right, but actually...

If you're a very junior sw engineer reading this, who hasn't done a lot of python, use x.get(). Almost always, so for you, always. This doesn't apply if you're a scientist or mostly writing small scripts, but if you are doing SWE, always use x.get().

Once you've understood python you can use x[] in limited cases. Never in your unit or functional tests. I code using x[], but later on I replace a lot of them with getter (around my second refactoring, when I add type hints and tests) especially in library or code that'll be shared.

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

#136

Post by gumballindie »

aylmao wrote: post #97
gumballindie wrote: post #60

The 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.

> Software "engineering" is the new factory work. I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".

This truth got blurred by "solving hard problems" and "rock star developer" mantras. I'm sorry but plumbing APIs and building react interfaces is neither of the two. It's all about churning out features (or parts as they used to be called in old days of manufacturing). Even the agile methodologies used are essentially factory floor practices adapted to operating keyboards. The only way to ever be in control is to own a business.

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

#137

Post by itronitron »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #49
_the_inflator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply. Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post). "Can you give an example wh…

>> "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."

If that isn't already a Mitchell and Webb skit, it needs to be.

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

#138

Post by cool_dude85 »

ballenf wrote: post #119
bsenftner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In earlier times, they'd just fire you without any kind of PIP process. Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?

In many jobs "in earlier times" there were for-cause clauses negotiated into contracts and you could not be fired without management proving that you had done something wrong, even after you had been through a negotiated disciplinary process.

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

#139

Post by hyperliner »

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…

[dead]

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

#140

Post by H8crilA »

I do wonder if it would be easier if, say, 3% of people were simply fired each year, perhaps with a 1-3 month notice. It would save the pointless back and forth effort, you wouldn't have to pretend it's about improvement, and the fired people could work on their next steps immediately.

(this is orthogonal to the decision to always fire some percentage - I am merely discussing a different implementation of the same policy, not discussing the merits of the policy)

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