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

351–360 of 618 posts

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

#351

Post by babyshake »

no_wizard wrote: post #248
giantg2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it. Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/w…

You should file for disability accommodations. That is completely legal to ask. Sometimes you need to back it up with documentation, but i suspect that won't be a problem. They can't discriminate against you for this.

They can discriminate against you. They just need to make sure it's not obviously discrimination.

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

#352

Post by psunavy03 »

ep103 wrote: post #337
JackFr wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have posted this before, an argument in defense of stack ranking I had heard from a friend's father who was a long-time manager for a large industrial conglomerate from the 60's through the 80's. Simply put it was that they were far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone in 1-1.5 years and it would not be a ding agai…

Stack Ranking was pioneered by Jack Welch who was operating in an environment where labor was the dominant party in the labor-capital relationship, and he was taking over companies that had had decades of labor growth and power while capital was stagflating nationwide. Introducing stack ranking was a way of trimming excess fat from decades of build up within companies, while reasserting capital in the relationship wi…

> "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat.

There's a great long-form article on this called "Microsoft's Lost Decade."

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

#353

Post by yoyohello13 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #320
wyldfire wrote: post #195

> That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning. They blew a gasket — absolutely blew a gasket I don't understand how someone could be responsible for a policy that puts people's livelihood at risk under the headline of "just business things" and not expect the same treatment from their employees. "sorry boss - just looking out for my shareholder: me"

I once had a manager at a temp-to-hire job spend the first 10 minutes of my resignation call swearing angrily about the situation. He clarified that it wasn't anger at me specifically, but it was an impressive fit. Some people don't react well to failure.

I feel like having so little control over your emotions should be an instant rejection from any management position. Swearing angrily in any professional setting is just ridiculous.

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

#354

Post by karaterobot »

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?

I've put in two weeks notice a couple times. It's polite. It's not loyalty to the company, it's loyalty to my colleagues, and the opportunity to close out a chapter of my life with finality. It lets me say goodbye to people on my team, finish up projects which, for personal pride, I want to leave in a good place, and document things I've done for the people who will pick up my work. I could care less how it affects the company, but to the extent that I care about my own work, I don't want to just abandon it. The reality is that, if other people don't give two weeks notice, I understand, and I'm not mad at them. And sure, the company would not afford their employees the same respect, but then I don't expect them to behave with decency. I know how it works. But, it feels like the right thing to do for me.

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

#355

Post by verteu »

pyrale wrote: post #291
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…

You're mistaken in that you believe that the goal of culls is to cut underperformers. Stack ranking doesn't assess performance, it checks whether you're willing to do a little more to be ahead of your peers. The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.

Add the fact that "fired" means "deported" for H1B workers, and it's the perfect way to extract maximum labor from a sizable proportion of your workforce.

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

#356

Post by eschneider »

ghostoftiber wrote: post #243
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…

> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cli…

Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.

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

#357

Post by moate »

IKantRead wrote: post #345
JohnFen wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of thing is one of the big reasons why I would never work for a FAANG company. I prefer to work at a place that encourages good work rather than a weird cutthroat arena combat thing.

I feel the same way and would also never work at a FAANG. That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for them regardless of the talent of those individual people.

Exactly this. “Are you willing to kill another human? No? Sorry, there’s no place for you in the infantry”

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

#358

Post by IKantRead »

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?

Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group.

I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people.

So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.

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

#359

Post by ghaff »

jfindley wrote: post #252
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 i…

And for roles at companies with very quantifiable outputs--like sales for example--the approach at a lot of companies is not to sweat the hiring process too much and just let go people who don't make their numbers (whether it's really their fault or not). Someone I knew's shorthand for this was that sales managers have no trouble firing people.

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

#360

Post by leetcode5ucks07 »

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?

I can tell you Indian new graduates interview very well. They grind years on these DSA puzzles. But have very little engineering knowledge or skill in general.

It's all about gaming the system here.

I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume.

Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is.

On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA".

I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary.

I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure.

That's the case with leetcode problems.

It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.

Post reply on HN