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

371–380 of 618 posts

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

#371

Post by belval »

linster wrote: post #348
fatnoah wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to: Underperforming: ~12% Meeting or Exceeding: ~80% Better than exceeding: ~8% As for my own anecdata, for the roughly 100…

As a Canadian, “better than Exceeding” sounds like an American construction. I’d imagine the scale to be: 1. Not Meeting Expectations 2. Meeting Expectations 3. Exceeding expectations

It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything.

A lot of north american modern management theory seems to think that praising your employees is the best way to get them to perform. By telling someone who's good but not great a "You got exceed expectations!!" they'll feel like they are valued.

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

#372

Post by eschneider »

jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #176
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…

And don’t you end up with hire-to-fire practices as a result of this? Hire a lame employee just so they can be the one on the chopping block; preserving your actual valuable team members?

Yeah, but why do that when you can hire someone good, get good work out of them, then toss them on the chopping block, preserving your 'actual' valuable team members?

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

#373

Post by dudul »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #293
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?

If he was OK doing the evil thing, he wouldn't have gotten PTSD doing it.

What he claims is PTSD - unless medically diagnosed its just BS.

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

#374

Post by ghaff »

JohnFen wrote: post #344
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?

That doesn't sound like he won to me. It sounds like he managed to get a good consolation prize, though.

Most people are probably going to eventually leave their company anyway. If they can do so more or less on their own terms, that counts as more of a win than a loss.

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

#375

Post by BeetleB »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #87
capableweb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number? > I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. 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. > If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you woul…

No, she isn't necessarily lying but just making it seem as if she would have received $200K over a single vest while it would have likely happened over at least 2 years and 4 vests. I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.

> I have £110K coming up

The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.

A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.

And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.

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

#376

Post by kobalsky »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #156

Many years ago, when I worked in high finance, it was common knowledge that 3-5% of the staff would be fired every 1-2 years, all at once. This created a lot of tension every time rumours swirled that the "culling" was coming up. But, when you were fired, you were simply given a phone call, out of the blue one day, told to come to an office, and then offered a severance package based on your years of service, and esc…

> and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture)

Psychological torture is there by design and not as a side effect.

I've been working closely with Amazon sellers for more than a decade, when I first heard how they stressed out employees I thought it fit the image that we had from our end, as sellers, perfectly.

I've come to suspect that Amazon has behavioral scientists and psycologists working on how to build the most threatening way possible to communicate, to stress sellers out as much as they can, to have them broken at their feet.

They will send emails like "Action required: your listings have been deactivated", for simple stuff that require a couple of clicks to fix, and the problem is that it's not like the story of the kid who cried wolf, sellers are terrified when they receive those emails. Sometimes 20-30 families depend on that business and an email like that could mean everyone is out of a job.

That is just an example, this strategy is applied in such a consistent manner through their communications that it puts it beyond doubt that it's done on purpose.

And please, don't be heartless to say, that's what you get when you your company depends on a big corp. I've seen that thrown around here when so many can get their lives turned upside down by Google or Apple too.

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

#377

Post by patorick002 »

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…

Amazon eng manager here, at least for one more day. I think Amazon is easier to get into than the other FAANGs (I've worked at two of them and was very close to getting into another). This is partially because it's easy/required to manage people out, and partially because Amazon has a rotten reputation in the industry.

It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.

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

#378

Post by gangstead »

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"

The manager was probably mad because they wasted a PIP on someone else. From other accounts here I've seen that if your manager gets any inkling that you are leaving they will throw a PIP on you to meet their quota.

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

#379

Post by anyoneamous »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #246
anyoneamous wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can they be maintaining these completely antithetitical interests, like wjy do they want to arbitrarily fire the person at all if they have already evaluated that person to be worthy of retention? Why is this even on the table in the absence of any failure to meet whatever metrics? Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?

> Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?

This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.

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

#380

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN