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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

#301

Post by pc86 »

wickedwiesel wrote: post #276
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 grow…

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

Because this ignores reality. Especially at FAANG companies, growth is expected and the majority of compensation is stock. If you stop growing, and stop having a profit, your stock tanks, and future compensation - as well as compensation from years prior that is still in the form of company stock - becomes worth much less. You can't hire people who are as good because you're "in decline." Your products falter because talent leaves and you can't find new talent. Even if all the above is imagined (it's not) you now have real impacts in terms of declining application quality and shrinking user bases.

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

#302

Post by okaramian »

anyoneamous wrote: post #147
ballenf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it sounds like he won? He got his $200k and found a new job before any PIP was implemented? Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out? Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?

The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.

To the point here: I think people think these managers are in a position of real power. They are not. They are cogs in the wheel as are their subordinates. It's entirely possible this manager wasn't even the one doing the direct ranking, sometimes this roles up to levels beyond where the manager can give real input. Someone has to get pipped as the system demands it, it happened to land on the person in the article. The manager is then trying to get them out of it because they believe they don't actually require the pip.

So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).

I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

pc86 wrote: post #284

> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me. What exactly are people in HR doing to warrant getting over $200k in stock grants? Even spread over an entire vesting schedule (and it's not, it's just the final vest) that's lud…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by xivzgrev »

Why does anyone choose to work at Amazon?

Given all the stories of PIP, it sounds like a not great place to work

Go to other fang, or other tech. Lots of companies that pay just as well.

Amazon would be my last choice - my job search is going awful, gotten rejected from most big tech companies, and I have well paying Amazon and a long tail of little shit companies that don’t pay that great (think of the equity!!)

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

#305

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

My ancestors were coal miners in Tennessee. They tried to reason with their employers for a long time to establish reasonable working conditions. When it became clear that their employers were not going to listen to reason, they found other ways to establish reasonable working conditions.

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

#307

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

Even without worrying about lawsuit, it isn’t a good use of your time as interviewer to tell the candidate. It’s just like having a long conversation with someone you don’t want to go out with any more.

They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.

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

#308

Post by FrustratedMonky »

kortilla wrote: post #215
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}) This seems like splitting hairs. Sure, maybe x.get is better, but would that be a deal breaker? Know you are just giving quick example, but this just struck a cord. Are jobs really so hard to get that employers can be that nit-picky?

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.

It is completely nit-picky, as others have said, both methods have pluses/minuses, so how does the interviewer know the internal preference of the hiring company? Unless the question was specifically "how would you do this lookup if you have Dirty data". Then maybe missing using a default value is something. But even then, maybe you hit an invalid value, you should fail, or if you are providing defaults then there should be some follow up on, what is a good default, how will defaults be reported out, etc....

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

#309

Post by scarface_74 »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #296
scarface_74 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures. You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lo…

When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.

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

#310

Post by Firmwarrior »

capableweb wrote: post #121
trgdr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.

I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.

I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement
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