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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

#241

Post by _the_inflator »

pierat wrote: post #202
mschuster91 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 des…

I can relate.

A very specific profile means it is crafted for a certain person.

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

#242

Post by mrbgty »

steveBK123 wrote: post #228
philipwhiuk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.

Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?

Yes. Difficult doesn't mean good.

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

#243

Post by ghostoftiber »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #16

> 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. So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just wa…

> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

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

#244

Post by ghostoftiber »

jzb wrote: post #239
ballenf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In earlier times, they'd just fire you without any kind of PIP process. Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?

Generally yes. Being PIP'ed or otherwise softly managed out is worse than being immediately fired. Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done. PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager a…

> Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.

Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.

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

#245

Post by steveBK123 »

Taikonerd wrote: post #234
steveBK123 wrote: post #204

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 hig…

> ... 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. Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.

There was something of a cliff at certain levels if you didn't get promoted around the third year. Something about the offer package would subsidize your base pay for a limited number of years until your stock started to vest, to smooth out your pay. However on the third year that subsidy would go away, and depending on the stock performance, your future stock grants could adjust down as well. In practice because the stock had been running up so much pre-2022, by the time the stock vested it was up a good amount.

So if your stock grants & stock price performance after the third year weren't "just so" you could see your TC slip because the salary subsidy went away.

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

#246

Post by Obscurity4340 »

anyoneamous wrote: post #147
ballenf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it sounds like he won? He got his $200k and found a new job before any PIP was implemented? Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out? Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?

The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.

How can they be maintaining these completely antithetitical interests, like wjy do they want to arbitrarily fire the person at all if they have already evaluated that person to be worthy of retention? Why is this even on the table in the absence of any failure to meet whatever metrics?

Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?

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

#247

Post by ghostoftiber »

apwell23 wrote: post #180
ballenf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In earlier times, they'd just fire you without any kind of PIP process. Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?

i was given the option to take 1 month PIP or take 1 month severance. I took severance but not quite sure why they offered me pip. I am guessing something do with unemployment benefits?

You did the correct thing. The PIP is to cover their butt that you really were a bad employee and you were not wrongfully terminated. The laws vary wildly state-to-state but generally if you're PIP'ed out you can't claim unemployment or wrongful termination.

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

#248

Post by no_wizard »

giantg2 wrote: post #235
steveBK123 wrote: post #204

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 hig…

One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it. Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/w…

You should file for disability accommodations. That is completely legal to ask. Sometimes you need to back it up with documentation, but i suspect that won't be a problem.

They can't discriminate against you for this.

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

#249

Post by euix »

It's all about the money, the writer himself mentioned he had 100k's of stock that would vest. When you get into the 100k range of windfalls, people will do all sorts of things, even people you have known for years. That's why sometimes you only see people's true nature when their parents die and estate settlement comes into the picture.

If you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, don't allow the almighty dollar to control your life.

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

#250

Post by steveBK123 »

giantg2 wrote: post #235
steveBK123 wrote: post #204

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 hig…

One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it. Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/w…

Agreed that what is left unsaid in a lot of performance conversations is the person-role match. Someone isn't a high/low performer globally, just at that time in that role.

Wall St firms I have worked at typically try to find different roles for people before marking them as at risk of a layoff. Not sure FAANG behaves the same, but from all these PIP discussions it seems not.

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