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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

#271

Post by mjr00 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #264
zhdc1 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Forced ranking in your use case doesn't work because it's generally firm wide cascade. Is 6% of every team in every department in every org unnecessary? No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go. Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arb…

> Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.

The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.

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

#272

Post by Jaygles »

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.

How often were your team members PIP'd -> fired and do you think it was deserved each time?

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

#273

Post by paganel »

eenell wrote: post #206
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…

"Radical Candor" calls it rocks & rock stars. You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks) just as much as you need highly motivated people looking to work up the ladder into leadership positions (rock stars).

> You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks)

Exactly, there was no winning at the early 2000s Real Madrid full of rock stars (Zidane, the original Ronaldo, Figo, Beckham etc) until a rock like Makelele came around in the midfield. I'm surprised that the business luminaries have stopped seeing this basic fact, maybe it's because of the monopoly/oligopoly positions where they've managed to put themselves in and which makes them impervious to how badly their teams are run.

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

#274

Post by me_me_me »

crote wrote: post #67
me_me_me wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't that be extremely bad for the company? If virtually all PIPs result in firing, wouldn't it be trivial to argue that either 1) the company is misusing PIPs as a stealth way to fire people, or 2) the company is completely incompetent when it comes to providing PIPs that actually work . With most European labour laws, neither option is very good for the company.

Trivial, how? A corpo lawyer will tell judge they agreed with employee on improvement plan to guide and help them prevent firing. They did all they could to help them.

How will you prove that you were fired before pip was put in place?

How will you argue the whole pip system is set to fire people?

(Similarly) It is open secret politicians steal public money, why don't we just lock them up for stealing?

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

#276

Post by wickedwiesel »

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…

I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls".

> underperformers lying about to cull

is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.

Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?

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

#277

Post by scarface_74 »

My perspective:

I was your everyday ordinary CRUD developer in 2020 with leading a few projects under my belt at mostly unknown companies who had two years of AWS experience and was 46 years old.

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for a software engineering position.

At 46 years old there were a number of problems I saw with that “opportunity”:

- I hadn’t done a real coding interview ever and had no desire to spend a few months “grinding leetcode”

- I had no desire to have the thought of moving from my nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to move to Seattle “after Covid lifted”

- I had no desire to uproot my life to work at Amazon knowing their reputation both from reading online and seeing what one of my best friends went through working in the finance department.

But we kept talking and she suggested I apply for a role at AWS Professional Services it would be fully remote and more inline with my experience.

I said sure why not? I got the job knowing from day one it wasn’t going to be a long term thing.

Long story short, I went in with a plan. It was my 8th job out of college and my sixth since 2008.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

I made my money, got PIPed 3 years later, got a nice severance package and had a job in 3 weeks. Yes it pays about 20% less in total comp. But the lack of stress is well worth it.

If I had known things were going to turn out like they did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988

I still would have worked for Amazon. It was just my 8th job out of nine and another method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Nothing more nothing less.

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

#278

Post by Kon-Peki »

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…

Learn! You aren't hiring people to learn. They must know everything they will ever need on day 1. (Forget what it says about your company - you only do things that people at other companies have been doing for years...)

I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.

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

#279

Post by Nimitz14 »

orwin wrote: post #135
rand_r wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

This is terrible advice LOL.

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

#280

Post by sleepybrett »

g-b-r wrote: post #216
sumtechguy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late stage? This is SOP for many large companies going back decades. The tech companies are just sort of new to it and gave it a new name. Many companies in the 70s/80s/90s famously had their 10% culling every year. Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'r…

I did know about Microsoft (in the 90s), and I think many companies took inspiration from them; do you have older examples?

invented at ge
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