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What are the effects of this list/Focus on employee? The article mentions performance hell but at the same time says people don’t know they are on the list so they probably don’t really feel the effects? Or is it slower promotion less bonuses that are somehow not obvious?
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> No one wants to work for you anymore. You're in quite the bubble. Lots of folks I know would work at Amazon. Friends have joined the computing groups (Lambda, ECS, EKS) to work on observability, scale, security. It's important work with broad impact.
Some of that impact is making the CIA more effective at the things the CIA does, as Amazon runs a special datacenter for them on-prem at Langley. It is quite sad how many in our industry are either sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally in the case I mentioned).
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Not really. The management team can make mistakes too. In those cases, it is not clear whether it is better for the employee to know. There is no clear cut obvious answer to this, unless you assume everyone is an emotionless robot.
It's not like management will just let the employer keep underperforming. They'll secretly PIP them, let them continue on their course, and then fire them with no warning.
There is some rationale for this, as why tip an at-risk employee off to what is essentially a foregone conclusion? Napkin math, if your salary is $100k/year - you are necessarily delivering at least $200k in revenue/value, so if you have a rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on the other part of that expected $200k value, the op…
Are you from the USA?
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There are teams building cool things, used by large customers, where you're paid decently. It's not really all that dystopian.
Thanks for the info. I come across more and more of these articles that paint a grim picture of Amazon's engineering departments. But as an outsider I get the feeling that's it's better than your average mid sized startup where you will be lucky to make 1/3 of what an Amazon engineer makes, while working more hours and getting your performance reviewed by equally sociopathic middle managers. I still wonder how it com…
Since Amazon interviews are similar to other FAANGs, people who pass an Amazon interview have a higher correlation of passing other interviews. Those FAANGs and associated companies tend to have a higher value proposition so people tend to choose them.
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.
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> No one wants to work for you anymore. You're in quite the bubble. Lots of folks I know would work at Amazon. Friends have joined the computing groups (Lambda, ECS, EKS) to work on observability, scale, security. It's important work with broad impact.
Some of that impact is making the CIA more effective at the things the CIA does, as Amazon runs a special datacenter for them on-prem at Langley. It is quite sad how many in our industry are either sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally in the case I mentioned).
Not all Americans loath their country and the institutions that help maintain it - imperfect though they may be.
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> If your manager is telling you you’re not meeting expectations, that’s plenty of signal of what’s going on. Isn't this the part that's not being made transparent to the employee? Asking the employee to constantly read the manager's mood to guess if you're on the "list" or not is incredibly stressful. What if your manager is just having a bad day?
LOL My manager used to discuss my promotion doc with me, and talk about who we can approach for promotion feedback. I found out about 'focus' or my 'performance issues' when I resigned from Amazon.
Thus, any indication that you have got onto such a list is a red warning: find another job somewhere else, and quickly. Do not wait to see if they will change their minds. They might decide not to fire you right away, but they will think of you, forever after, as a "problem employee". If you ever get off the list, you will go back on it the moment the length of your manager's list goes below quota. You may be sure that there is such a quota.
This is very much like the notion of "politically unreliable" in the Soviet countries, and in China. Corporate governance resembles nothing so much as Soviet governance. This is not an accident: Lenin was a huge admirer of the Ford Motor Company.
Being still-employed is a huge factor in how attractive you are to your immediate future employer. So, it is important to act fast. Part of why they try to keep the list secret is that they want to be who controls when you leave, not you. Managers typically only get points for firing you, not you quitting. (But Amazon's documented notion of "unregretted attrition" suggests it might be defined as somebody leaving who was on the list.)
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.
I saved my job by working during my ~two day vacation (and weekend) and building a bunch of things that I had talked with the non-eng cofounder about that weren't on the official roadmap but that had high value.
Turned out the way engineering was organized wasn't very compatible with me (didn't take advantage of my product sense and generally was focusing too much on reviewing things in code that really didn't matter.)
One of the people above me on the org chart (VP Engineering) lost his job instead. The lead at the time is now CTO and around that time adjusted the org to better match how I like to work.