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

251–260 of 618 posts

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

#251

Post by astura »

steveBK123 wrote: post #228
philipwhiuk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.

Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?

Sure, I've seen plenty of very capable people put very little to no effort into their work.

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

#252

Post by jfindley »

steveBK123 wrote: post #204

One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and hig…

High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life.

With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.

I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.

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

#253

Post by izacus »

Taikonerd wrote: post #234
steveBK123 wrote: post #204

One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and hig…

> ... had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff. Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.

Yeah, but once X passes, your comp drops significantly - "down a cliff".

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

#254

Post by zhdc1 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #204

One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and hig…

> There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.

Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).

To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.

Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?

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

#255

Post by PoignardAzur »

francisofascii wrote: post #231
kinduff wrote: post #151

So its okay doing the evil thing for a while to several professionals, but when it was OPs turn, then its a no-go?

Reminds me of the bank robbery scene in "The Dark knight", in which every "clown" robber is supposed to kill the previous robber to increase the share, and each robber doesn't realize they could fall prey to the same fate.

(Nitpick: the second one does realize, he just gets killed anyway.)

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

#256

Post by scarface_74 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #228
philipwhiuk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.

Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?

Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon?

I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.

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

#257

Post by kortilla »

jameshart wrote: post #225
kortilla wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not nit-picky because the behavior of the two is completely different when ‘a’ isn’t present. If the assignment is dealing with dirty/partial data or implementing APIs with optional fields, [] can be a complete deal breaker.

Deal-breaker ? Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations? It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case. If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clu…

> Deal-breaker?

It’s a take-home test. I’m saying if the particular test called for dealing with a particular type of input and you didn’t do it, you failed. It’s that simple.

If it didn’t, then it’s a pointless nitpick and shouldn’t ever be brought up as interview feedback.

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

#258

Post by euix »

jzb wrote: post #239
ballenf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally yes. Being PIP'ed or otherwise softly managed out is worse than being immediately fired. Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done. PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager a…

I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.

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

#259

Post by wyldfire »

rgblambda wrote: post #207
wyldfire wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appeal process was handled by the employee themselves. so they probably had an idea of how effective appeals were. > And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.

That sounds like an internal corporate appeals process, which is as rigged as an East German court. I'm talking about an external state affiliated employment ombudsman.

Yeah for the most part in the US there's very little legal protections in the code that state authorities can use to vindicate an employee. I think the only protections are things like age, sexual, racial discrimination. The PIP itself is designed to gather evidence that the company has a cause to rebut any claim of illegal discrimination. But if you don't start out with one of those claims, it's moot to disprove the cause.

I could be wrong - some more progressive states may have more protections than this. And certainly folks who are employed under collective bargaining agreements have more protections. That wouldn't apply at Amazon, though.

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

#260

Post by CalRobert »

jameshart wrote: post #225
kortilla wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not nit-picky because the behavior of the two is completely different when ‘a’ isn’t present. If the assignment is dealing with dirty/partial data or implementing APIs with optional fields, [] can be a complete deal breaker.

Deal-breaker ? Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations? It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case. If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clu…

Fortunately I was in a situation where I'm not too bothered about not getting the job but admittedly it would have been nice to have this chat with them.

I am _very_ familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and would, of course, adapt to house style, but where I am now we set up a nice pipeline in Dagster with a whole lot of boxes for assets, and at the risk of being non-technical I want the box with the bug to be the one that turns red. If I use x[] I get that. If I use x.get the red box could be three modules downstream because of a NoneType Exception.

Post reply on HN