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

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

#191

Post by kortilla »

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.

You’re just out of touch with how much people can make in the US.

An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.

This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.

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

#192

Post by pavel_lishin »

bratbag wrote: post #75

So stepping back from the unreliable narrator of a person living through this with ptsd: -person is suffering mental health issues due to strain of job. -persons performance drops rapidly without warning as a result. -boss takes workload off them without putting them on a pip process, to give them time to work through their issues. -person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into help…

> -person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them

That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.

It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.

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

#193

Post by sumtechguy »

bsenftner wrote: post #57
miningape wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while. While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.

How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.

Late stage? This is SOP for many large companies going back decades. The tech companies are just sort of new to it and gave it a new name. Many companies in the 70s/80s/90s famously had their 10% culling every year. Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no. But is something you should expect from companies. They are not your friend or buddy or partner, no matter what lies they tell you. They are the people who pay you to do work.

In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.

Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.

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

#194

Post by kortilla »

cpitman wrote: post #178
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at how their boss responded. If it wasn’t about the equity, why would they be so mad? The point of the PIP is generally to remove the employee.

Maybe it was that the manager was being pressured to PIP a certain percentage of people, and instead pushed back really hard to retain this person because they wanted to retain them instead. Before spending their political capital, they asked the employee if they were committed to the long haul. In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot…

If that were the case you wouldn’t even mention it to the person or strip them of their direct reports

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

#195

Post by wyldfire »

> 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"

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

#196

Post by rgblambda »

risfriend wrote: post #69

I'm a manager and have been forced to apply similar PIP process to my team and it is truly horrible when the folks are forcefully put in the lowest performance just to satisfy the projected yearly budget. The 2-3 month improvement process is hogwash and hardly anyone survives it, PIP means they're 90% going to be axed.

I wonder if fired employees could take a class action lawsuit against these types of procedures. If acceptable performance is altered relative to how many people need to be let go, and there is data showing that few survive the PIP (Employers claim that the intended effect is to help the employee improve performance) then surely that's evidence that the so called Performance Improvement Plan is a sham.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

regularfry wrote: post #91
aylmao wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never thought of it that way, but you're right— firing is immediate but employees always feel the obligation to stick around for two weeks. It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.

Assuming your last paycheck includes those two weeks, that's (almost certainly, in context) an $X,000 difference in what you walk away with. I could probably stomach hanging around for an extra fortnight even if X was quite small.

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by boffinAudio »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #166
boffinAudio wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I live in Vienna and have never had an issue with getting good feedback on why I didn't pass an interview - except from Qualcomm, who responded "we have no comment on the interview process, we just didn't feel it was a good fit", which actually just made me feel relieved to have not passed their criteria. Never been ghosted, either. So I dunno, our subjective experiences differ. I'm also a foreigner, but maybe…

It could also be the cultural differences between companies that are engineering driven first, versus companies that are primary sales/management/consulting driven first and the engineering part is a distant second. And the likes of QCOM and all these international big-tech pay so much above the low Austrian market rates, that they can afford to treat candidates as disposable commodities as they have virtually unlimi…

>But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you?

I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.

I'm not saying Austria isn't without its glib bureaucracies and Kafka'esque recruitment nightmares - just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..

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

#200

Post by NBJack »

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.

IIRC, truly well performing employees there can get very good stock. Amazon hates giving out cash. For a time, even during interviews, they would brag that even Bezos himself didn't make more than about $160k in base pay annually. Stock, stock, and stock are used for incentivization, and Amazon has indeed had some very good market performance over time.
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