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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

#231
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

[deleted]

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

#232

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…

    function generate_candidates(;n=1)
        return 100 .+ (15 .* randn(n, 1))
    end
How does this yield a Gaussian distribution?

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

#233
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The management team can make honest mistake. After preliminary investigation, they find they are wrong. No need to tell the employee in this regard. I did not say they should never tell the employee. I think sometimes it's unnecessary.

Shouldn’t that investigation happen before they are considered a performance problem and put on the list? Giving the employee a chance to rebut any performance problem assumptions would be an important part of this, and would also require they know.

Yes. At some point the employee should know. But there is a process, and I don't think they should inform the employee right from the start.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

function generate_candidates(;n=1) return 100 .+ (15 .* randn(n, 1)) end How does this yield a Gaussian distribution?

`randn` returns draws from a standard normal distribution (i.e., a Gaussian with mean 0 and standard deviation 1); the n is for normal.

It's then stretched to have an SD of 15 via multiplication, and shifted to have a mean of 100.

This is Julia, but it's the same in Matlab and Numpy (np.random.randn); it'd be rnorm in R (which also lets you specify the mean and sd directly).

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

#235
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

[deleted]

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

#236
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

They could just mean "the CIA's record, specifically". There's plenty there.

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

#237

I'm curious if any Amazon (ex-)employee have experience with this that they can share. A lot of Amazon's practices get really severe backlash online, and yet if working for Amazon is as bad as they say, how is Amazon one of the biggest employers of software engineers? I personally buy into the hivemind and would not work for Amazon, but it seems to me like there is an incongruity between how bad their practices are a…

Sure, I work at Amazon. Amazon's HR principles get vilified in the press. I'm not going to claim they are all perfect, but most of these principles presents a position on an interesting tradeoff. Let's focus on the unregretted attrition (URA) notion. Isn't firing 5% a year really high? What about teams of top performers?

I promise if you look around at a team of 20 people, there's a high chance one of them is not very good. If you DON'T have a URA target in place, managers may let these low performers stay, especially since firing people is actually quite difficult. This leads to what Bezos would call "Day 2" culture. It's hard to overstate how much damage a single person can cause to a team's output or morale.

If you look at Amazon's implementation, it's really not that bad. If you have a superstar team of 10 people under one manager, great, the 5% is resolved at the 50-100 person level, so make a case and keep your team. Or even better, hire some junior engineers so your superstars can lead and teach others. Some of those junior engineers will be bad; others will be great. This isn't hire to fire, rather, hiring is noisy. What if the whole 50 person org is amazing? Umm, this is just statistically unlikely. Everybody I've personally noticed leave after PIP has been, in my estimation, a poor performer.

Amazon has one single HR policy that is amazing: you can change teams any time for any reason (unless you're on a performance plan). If your team sucks, get out! I've been able to land on teams with good WLB, smart coworkers, and fun, interesting, meaningful projects -- except for my first team, which I left after 2 months.

Lastly, of course there are tons of anecdotal stories from people with miserable experiences at Amazon. Can we at least accept Amazon is a massive employer, and these are bound to happen?

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

They could just mean "the CIA's record, specifically". There's plenty there.

Claiming that things are their historical record leads to fighting the last war and not the next one.

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

#239
I mean this in all sincerity: don't treat an Amazon interview seriously. If you must, use it for practice.

Employment stability is much more important than what I call "alleged compensation".

They hire you promising $160,000 base and all this stock, and 6 months into stringing broken libraries together you are suddenly getting the feeling you won't be welcome at the company anymore.

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

#240
I recently left my employer after about an year and half. I was on the edge of a PIP - so I thought - and constantly felt like an imposter. Making it past the year-mark surprised me.. and it was getting better when I quit. My manager would insist on the bi-weekly 1:1s that I was not on a PIP.

In comparison, I can only imagine what a hell Amazon must be, a soul-destroying place to work for most people who aren't in the top 25% or something like that. As an employer, Amazon sounds like an evil machine.

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