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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#151

Post by crispyambulance »

tinyhouse wrote: post #75
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.

All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair = letting employees know months in advance that they are underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent severa…

It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6% of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various under-handed ways.

The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.

No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#152

Post by testing_1_2_3_4 »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #147
startup_excuse wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no…

That logic applies when you joined a while ago. However, with the stock sky high (P/E 66, double GOOG 33), joining Amazon right now may not give you that potential upside anymore. Your managers and long time careers will get a larger portion of the upside. It's already evident by the stock growth of GOOG compared to AMZN in the past one year/quarter. The P/E of Amazon is high, compared with the growth potential vs ot…

Amazon's PE has always been this high

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#153

Post by TFortunato »

renewiltord wrote: post #141
startup_excuse wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no…

That makes sense. I wasn't sure if SDEs get x units or y dollars worth of stock units each year. The former is most common, but everything about AMZN is unusual, including the vest schedule.

Amazon does it in dollars. Employees have a target comp figure in dollars, the annual stock refreshers are based on the price of the stock at that time, so if you got 100 units one year, and the stock doubles, all things being equal, you would only get 50 units the next year at refresh time.

In practice this means you can make good money off your hiring grant if price keeps going up, but you will also see your total comp hit a cliff / drop after a few years, since while stock going up is usually good, in Amazon's eyes, you've been lucky to be making more than your target comp those years and they aren't going to keep giving you the same amount of units if those units are worth more.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#154

Post by TameAntelope »

xibalba wrote: post #12
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

I would go so far as to argue our assumption about Amazon even wanting to "maximize" productivity may not be correct.

It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system goes for the former.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#155

Post by testing_1_2_3_4 »

ferdowsi wrote: post #130
lakevieew wrote: post #111

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

they don't

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#156

Post by kevstev »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #69

With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.

I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic?

I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity, and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just focused on filling this one specific role, but the process spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had already committed to another job, but figured I would see the process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you are interested I can dig it up.

But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but its much more recent that those stories started coming out from the engineering side of things.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#157

Post by amzn-throw »

ipaddr wrote: post #91
sokoloff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Amazon*, the "bar raiser" has to approve the hire though, so there's a pretty mechanistic control against the worst form of this. * - as I understand it; never worked there.

At Amazon you still hire good people you just mark them poorly because you don't want to break up your team.

No, you don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378836

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#158

Post by maybelsyrup »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.

It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#159

Post by testing_1_2_3_4 »

retrocryptid wrote: post #24

Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they ha…

100% agree with this.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#160

Post by nkssy »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #112
nkssy wrote: post #52

If you can get fired because of some messed up policy like this then you don't need to take ownership for being fired anymore. Also, why show initiative if you're going to be fired randomly anyway? Why even work hard at all? Why show loyalty or goodwill? Just show up, do the work, participate in the general workplace nonsense purely for appearances and have your parachute always ready. Not sure I'd care if fired from…

I understand your argument and it is an interesting given the technical source of demoralization. What I submit to you that this level demoralization already happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that is merely a 7 lette…

I definitely agree this isn’t a new trend.

What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain about retention and skills shortages and a host of other problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so temporary visas for acquiring talent.

Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a dark pattern.

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