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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

#211

Post by anonydsfsfs »

ggm wrote: post #188

Can anyone explain how this is not a breach of employment law? It reads like an on-the-face-of-it constructive dismissal case: if your manager has future intent to sack you, has no intention of helping you improve, is kpi rewarded for sacking you for reasons which don't actually relate to your performance and doesn't inform you of your status, surely it's premeditated? I don't understand how H/R and legal can sustain…

In the US, the burden of proof in constructive dismissal cases lies with the employee. How are you going to prove that you were placed on a secretive PIP list without your knowledge?

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

#212

Post by kjsingh »

potatolicious wrote: post #37
void_mint wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks, according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for managers. This is distinctly not a "Performance Management Plan", as the plan involves the employee and provides clear guidelines for success. If you're concealing that they're on a PIP…

> but it just seems silly to call something a PIP that is actually not at all a PIP. Or it's too good at being a PIP ;) Many PIPs (in my experience: most PIPs ) are not good faith attempts to allow a poorly-performing employee to improve. The decision to fire them was made before the PIP was issued, the PIP is just documentation to protect the company in the case of a lawsuit. Amazon's approach here - if correctly re…

To correct the point, this is about Focus/Dev plan which an SDM undergoes and all this is pre-PIP. In this case he just highlights the org leadership, not HR.

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

#213

Post by treis »

ctvo wrote: post #81
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.

> 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.

Yeah my big takeaway from the recent press is that they didn't even think I was good enough to be a patsy to fire. Definitely an ego hit

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

#214

Post by ethbr0 »

qqtt wrote: post #179
opportune wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have spent a lot of time on Blind where this is discussed often and I think I have an idea what is going on. At a high level, Amazon orgs have Unregretted Attrition (URA) targets/quotas for orgs. Not every manager needs to hit the exact target but under a certain level of middle management they do. Because of this built-in churn they need to have a pipeline of low performers - because once the current set of URA ta…

I can see how some small aspects of this policy could make sense objectively. Having a URA target + needing a pipeline to feed that at scale certainly makes sense - notwithstanding the proven misguided approach of having a URA target to begin with. But taken as a whole I cannot help but conclude that the program is meant to instil a culture of fear (and by extension toxicity). Considering the following: * A manager m…

Easy solution: apply the same process to management and C-level.

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

#215

Post by joshuamorton »

thor24 wrote: post #173
decafninja wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing all the letters of FAANG have more or less similarly competitive total compensation if you factor in RSUs, appreciation, etc. But then I hear things about "cliffs" and how extremely high TCs are possible only because of stock appreciation. In that sense, is Netflix basically untouchable in terms of compensation, if F/A/A/G (and other companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Microsoft, etc.) can only be compe…

To be absolutely clear, comp is not based on stock appreciation. You get your grant (aka no. of stocks/RSUs) that vest at some cadence. By the time you vest a tranche and share price has increased is an added bonus (though generally people in tech think 4x in 4 years is their birth right.) As for Netflix, they do give you option of choosing to split your salary every year i.e all cash, all options, some cash and some…

> To be absolutely clear, comp is not based on stock appreciation. You get your grant (aka no. of stocks/RSUs) that vest at some cadence. By the time you vest a tranche and share price has increased is an added bonus (though generally people in tech think 4x in 4 years is their birth right.)

This depends on the company. My understanding is that Amazon does keep stock price in mind when doing vesting of stock. If your personal projected comp is above the "intended" level (due to a large share price increase), your stock award in a given year will be smaller.

So your stock vest in year 3 might be smaller because growth was high (or your initial offer was above-market). Google and Facebook don't do this. Each year is modeled independently. Microsoft also models years independently afaik, but their stock vests slightly differently.

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

#216

Post by comfysocks »

qqtt wrote: post #13

I never understood the secretive nature of these Amazon "devplan" / "FOCUS" lists. If an employee has a performance issue, they should know. Period. If they are on a formal list, they should know that too. The only "positive" here is that it can affect the individual's moral to know you are not meeting expectations - but that has to be communicated regardless. If it's understood it has to be communicated and there is…

Amazon is the company that created a button you can push to reorder toilet paper. It takes all of the friction out ordering from them, and gives you the option to purchase right at the moment of greatest need.

FOCUS is a "button" managers can push to fire employees. Once you push the button, the employee is on track for termination and all of the CYA for-cause documentation happens automatically.

From my reading of the article it sounds like the part where the manager is to "... 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." is completely optional and in fact requires that the manager take the initiative to actually do this. I could be wrong about this, but why would these instructions be in a FAQ if they were baked in to actual procedures?

To me it seems like FOCUS is a dark pattern meant to encourage managers to implement stack ranking. It also seems like a tool that could be abused to make arbitrary firings seem like they are for legitimate cause.

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

#217

Post by Noumenon72 »

mattkrause wrote: post #110
vorticalbox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see this code if you don't mind sharing. Mostly interested on how you even create a simulation like this.

Mine is super-dumb, but let me walk you though it. First, you need to a way to generate candidates of varying abilities. There are all sorts of tough questions related to measuring intelligence, but let's side-step those and make something like IQ. By construction, IQ is normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. function generate_candidates(;n=1) return 100 .+ (15 .* randn(n, 1)) end Wit…

The model might work better if you assume an increasing median among the population of candidates over time. This could be true if:

* Amazon's stock price and profits made it a more desirable place to work over time

* The increasing supply of computer science graduates improved the hiring pool

Another thing that could happen is the most skilled x% of each team leaves over time for better positions, so that the median slips back. Then raising the bar each time only keeps it in the same place.

Or candidates could be rated on multiple dimensions, so while you can't find someone uniformly better than your median employee, you can hire one person to raise the bar on build systems, one on microservices, and so on.

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

#218

Post by warmcat »

Amazon and places like Amazon can go to hell. Life is too short to work in such shitty places. Ultimately everyone is just working to make investors and owners rich. Employees will only earn a fraction of what higher ups earn even after working themselves to death. Having worked in such an environment, I will be honest that I have earned and progressed more than I would have had I stayed in that shitty toxic workplace.

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

#219

Post by JCM9 »

One way I look at this all though is do you honestly believe there are not ~5% of employees at your company that really aren’t cutting it and shouldn’t be there? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a place in my career where that was the case… and often the number that should go was usually higher. Thus at some level is Amazon not just solving a problem (albeit probably imperfectly) that other companies just choose to ignore?

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

#220

Post by sneak »

avalys wrote: post #147
sneak wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would be proud to go work directly for the CIA, but I’m too selfish to do so, because the pay would be worse than what I’m doing now. Not all Americans loath their country and the institutions that help maintain it - imperfect though they may be.

I'm going to assume ignorance here, versus malice.
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