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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

#201

Post by wyldfire »

rgblambda wrote: post #184

>there were no warning signs. There was no trail of communication saying, "You are underperforming." I don't know about the U.S but in many countries, I imagine this would be a valid justification to reject a PIP. Take it to an employment tribunal and say: "There was no indication that I was performing anything other than as expected until I was handed a PIP".

This appeal process was handled by the employee themselves. so they probably had an idea of how effective appeals were.

> And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.

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

#202

Post by pierat »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
aestetix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off. That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the fut…

> By "officially" do you mean legally? Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive. In the end, it's all performance theatre.

When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked.

For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities.

1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit.

2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP.

3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.

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

#204

Post by steveBK123 »

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 high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually.

So really it's overhiring BS that is then getting taken out on employees. Given that, I think as has been pointed out by another commenter - the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance, generally. Seems better than year round psychological torture of being at risk of a PIP, and then if being put on one knowing the most likely outcome is being fired. So you feel dragged through the mud and then having doubly failed (put on PIP & failed the PIP).

I knew a guy who moved from Wall St to Amazon and described the performance management / compensation system to be pretty rough and had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.

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

#205

Post by toiletduck »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #181
iLoveOncall wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's stock vesting schedule is 5% - 15% - 40% - 40%, so you're not new anymore by the time you reach any significant number of stocks vesting.

Convenient considering their average tenure is less than 2 years.

Given they backfill the first two years with grant value bonuses, this is irrelevant: the first two years just pay straight cash to make up those % to 100. First year is an up front payment, second is monthly payments. If anything that vest schedule retains people for those two years rather than being a way to pay less.

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

#206

Post by eenell »

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…

"Radical Candor" calls it rocks & rock stars. You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks) just as much as you need highly motivated people looking to work up the ladder into leadership positions (rock stars).

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

#207

Post by rgblambda »

wyldfire wrote: post #201
rgblambda wrote: post #184

>there were no warning signs. There was no trail of communication saying, "You are underperforming." I don't know about the U.S but in many countries, I imagine this would be a valid justification to reject a PIP. Take it to an employment tribunal and say: "There was no indication that I was performing anything other than as expected until I was handed a PIP".

This appeal process was handled by the employee themselves. so they probably had an idea of how effective appeals were. > And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.

That sounds like an internal corporate appeals process, which is as rigged as an East German court. I'm talking about an external state affiliated employment ombudsman.

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

#208

Post by LtWorf »

_the_inflator wrote: post #28
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…

Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture. 1. Large numbers In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take c…

If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.

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

#209

Post by rubyissimo »

The problem isn't so much the actual culling. The problem is the tax it puts on everyone for the rest of the year to self-promote and make sure they don't get caught accidentally.

If you put your head down and do great work, you just run the risk of getting out-politic'd, so you've got to do that too. But that makes the political players spend more time on it to make sure they're still ahead of the part time politicians. And it's an arms race of spending time making yourself look good instead of doing work.

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

#210

Post by jeremiahbuckley »

thereisnospork wrote: post #20
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…

PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name. [0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performan…

> proactive legal defense

From what I understand, PIPs and documentation save money compared to going through a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, the “at will” employment principle would mean that the company would almost certainly win the suit (assuming not-illegal-discrimination), but it would be expensive to go through with the suit. Comparatively, a PIP, lots of documentation, and keeping the employee around for 6 months longer is a cheaper alternative.

TBH, if AI makes a lot of legal action cheaper, this calculus might change. There’s a business product here: an AI mediator that all parties agree to use at the start of employment. Looks at all documentation at time of firing and says: “based on this, employee would average $X out of a civil suit. Company would average $Y to defend. Cut employee a check for func($X, $Y) and by cashing it employee agrees to relinquish rights to further legal action.”

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