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Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

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Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#121

Post by mattkrause »

BigBubbleButt wrote: post #36
mattkrause wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic math too. Suppose “ability” is normally distributed in the population and in your initial team too. Replace people when the new candidate improves the team’s median ability (supposedly what Amazon’s “Bar Raiser” checks). I kicked together a simulation of this process. The first replacement is pretty easy (50/50), but the hundredth hire on a team of ten often takes tens of thousands of interviews, and sometimes…

How many years does it take a team of 10 to get to their 100th hire? If they only replace 1 person a year, ~100 interviews a year sounds pretty normal to me (it actually sounds low compared to where I last worked where I sometimes interviewed multiple people a day).

I should have pointed out that it's literally an exponential growth, so it'll be fine for a while until, suddenly, it isn't.

It's also very vulnerable to "founder effects" if the teams are small: a few geniuses early on make it nearly impossible to hire someone new.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#122

Post by jkaplowitz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
trhway wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already an employee. I'm talking about requirements for candidates. As far as I see it is a relatively recent innovation, which I thought would be blatantly illegal in the US until I saw it myself - I suppose the AMZN lawyers found a loophole. When people talk about glass ceiling - well, now i know what glass bottom feels like :) If any requirements you don't directly match you can try to make a case in say co…

> which I thought would be blatantly illegal until I saw it myself it would seem to be: https://www.eeoc.gov/regulations/questions-and-answers-eeoc-...

That document can absolutely be interpreted to say that this is blatantly illegal, but it doesn't explicitly address the question of maximum years of experience, so it's a matter of interpretation. Have they explicitly addressed this question somewhere else?

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/insight-cap... is a more recent article summarizing a court ruling from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in which, at least for the states covered by that court, it was determined that job applicants (as opposed to transfer or promotion applicants) can't bring disparate impact ADEA claims against theoretically age-neutral rules such as maximum years of experience. State or local age discrimination laws can go beyond the ADEA, of course, and some do.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#123

Post by chartpath »

aaomidi wrote: post #18

Meanwhile Amazon recruiters keep spamming me to join their cult. No one *wants* to work for you anymore. You don't need to recruit. If someone is desperate enough they'll let you know.

Last time I responded with a polite message that once they treat their non-tech employees better I would consider. Never heard from them again.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#124

Post by rdtwo »

malfist wrote: post #64
gigatexal wrote: post #53

That Amazon or any company has such a plan is actually laudable. I was under the impression that folks who are not performing just get given a 2-week notice. But it's likely more profitable to rehabilitate or retrain an underperforming employee than to go through the process of hiring and onboarding a new employee. None of this is out of altruism -- it's a cost benefit analysis (see also the scene in the Fight Club m…

Sure, if they were only targeting poor performing folks then your statement has merit. The difference is at amazon managers have a 5-10% URA (Unregretted Attrition Rate) and must let go that percentage of their team each and every year. Doesn't take long to chew through poor performers and have to move on to people lower on the political totem pole, or worse at playing the political game/being friendly.

The bigger problem is that it discourages formation of high performance teams. The high performers know to stay away from established high performance teams because they risk getting cut

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#125

Post by traskjd »

mataug wrote: post #101
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that this culture will shift with his retirement, or do you think that this culture is so embedded within the fabric of Amazon itself, that there is no separating this kind of behavior from the company without a dismantling of the corporate structure itself?

Andy Jassy used to lead AWS before becoming Amazon's CEO. AWS has a reputation of being a difficult place to work, even more so than Amazon's other divisions. So no, I don't think anything will change. https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/he-l...

Yes, those poor AWS employees sure have it tough vs that warehouse division.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#126

Post by fsociety »

ozzythecat wrote: post #25

> “Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?” the question reads. The response: “Do not discuss Focus with employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.” The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you’re told you’re in Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manag…

I disagree, I think this kind of corporate mentality should be stomped out from existence. Employees should have a right to know if they are trending, or are on, a performance improvement plan.

Muddying the waters with corporate speak “your performance is not meeting expectations” is beating around the bush and not saying what is actually happening.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#127

Post by zug_zug »

ozzythecat wrote: post #25

> “Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?” the question reads. The response: “Do not discuss Focus with employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.” The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you’re told you’re in Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manag…

> One Amazon engineer, who joined the company in late 2016, said he found out that he had been on the development list for nearly 18 months only after his manager changed. His new manager, he said, inquired about his performance-management plan.

> “My response was, ‘Are you sure you don’t have your wires crossed?'” he said.

Headline seems pretty accurate to me. Nobody should be on a performance improvement plan without being told.

---

To further on this -- it's really the absolute basics of transparency. Imagine if students didn't get any scores on tests back until they were about to fail the class. It's super important to know accurately and early exactly what people think of your work so you can adjust.

Aside from every other reason, let's remember that nobody is perfect, including managers. At least 20% of the time in my experience, when a manager thinks somebody is doing poorly it's because they manager is missing key information or relying on outdated information. Just one anecdote I know a manager who was only assessing somebody based on Jira tickets, but that engineer was doing tons of important work outside the jira tickets. The manager needs to initiate that communication clearly and immediately to resolve the discrepancy.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#128

Post by crazygringo »

MattGaiser wrote: post #117

Are performance improvement plans actually genuine in most cases? If I were put on one or got a negative performance review, I would assume that I have essentially been fired but my boss is waiting on key paperwork.

They certainly can be.

I know multiple cases of bad managers who never clearly communicated job expectations/prioritization and then put employees on a PIP because they weren't meeting their hidden/secret expectations.

The beautiful thing about a PIP is that it forces a manger to spell out in excruciating detail what expectations are, and how meeting them will be measured.

Once an employee knows what they are concretely, it can make it really easy to meet them, and then no more PIP.

In all the cases I know, the employees went on to get "exceeds expectations" and then either left the manager or left the company, because the problem was always the manager.

Also, because many times you "game the PIP" -- to meet the explicit expectations you slack off on the stuff that you know matters more to doing a good job, but that isn't being explicitly measured. Write shitty code but deliver the features on-time, and let someone else deal with the bugs.

Of course I've heard of PIP's being intentionally vague so a manager can arbitrarily continue to say expectations weren't met no matter what -- but I've never seen that anywhere I've worked.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#129

Post by mrorbitman »

I've never seen anyone on a PIP bounce back. The smart move is to start your job hunt immediately when you discover you're on a PIP. Otherwise it's a long and stressful road to termination.

The second the people around you don't believe you can cut it, it's already too late and best to find a gig elsewhere.

Re: Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

#130

Post by Retric »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #97
mataug wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A toxic culture of fear is the intended effect here. People at amazon love to discuss the flywheel effect[1]. The flywheel here is the culture of fear that keeps employees on their toes. Bezos believes that employees are inherently lazy[2], and it seems like fear is tool the S-team have chosen to solve the problem of lazy employees. This has a lot of unintended consequences[3], but the executives with the power to ch…

Do you think that this culture will shift with his retirement, or do you think that this culture is so embedded within the fabric of Amazon itself, that there is no separating this kind of behavior from the company without a dismantling of the corporate structure itself?

Company culture always decays over time to reflect incentives. Not to denigrate Andy Jassy as a Harvard MBA turned Marketing Manager who moved up to become a CEO. But upper management always ends up with the kinds of people who tend to reach upper management in any company.

That said, Amazon’s culture is closer to the norm than most startups so in the short term things are unlikely to change much. At least until some new management fad becomes popular or they run into a significant issue.

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