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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

#251

Post by [deleted] »

tlogan wrote: post #203
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…

I bet this FOCUS list is used by managers to prevent good engineers moving to a different team. Also my experience tells me that all these mega corps have very similar culture.

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by temp8964 »

CamTin wrote: post #183
temp8964 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Sometimes the employee didn't underperform at all. Why do you assume the manager always know the truth?

Management effectively does know the truth, for the trivial reason that they get to decide what the truth is. They are the ones who get to decide what counts as performing and underperforming. It's not as though there is some objective way to determine who is and isn't a desirable employee.

Not sure what you mean "truth". There is a discovery process, before they form their opinions.

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

#253

Post by chris11 »

treis wrote: post #213
ctvo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Have you applied to Amazon? Talking with recruiters who've left it sounded like Amazon incentives were different than other places. So internal recruiters spend more time contacting people already in their system. Sometimes not even doing a basic fit check.

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

#254

Post by decafninja »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #167
decafninja wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I see being touted is F & N > G > A & A for TC? Obviously there are many factors in play so that might not always be the case. Also per my other comment on this thread, sounds like Netflix really blows away all others because there is no shenanigans around RSUs, cliffs, unexpected appreciation, etc.? Correct me if I'm wrong since I am definitely no expert at this game.

This is probably true, but socially Apple seems like it gets a better reception/superior people. Folks at Amazon are pretty normal. Disclaimer - I’m very average and work at Amazon

Not sure if this is the reason, but I've heard Apple (and also Netflix) give individual teams much more autonomy on how they select, interview, and hire candidates, so maybe the fit between each person and their team is better? i.e. you may even not get leetcoded depending on the team and hiring manager.

Versus Facebook, Amazon, and Google having a more one-size-fits-all approach to hiring.

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

#255

Post by pseudalopex »

arcticbull wrote: post #249
pseudalopex wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targets the employee doesn't know about aren't a plan. The low probability of reversing the bozo bit is why the employee should know when the manager flipped it.

A PIP doesn't have targets the employee doesn't know about - not formally, anyways. The targets are the same whether you're on a PIP or not: meeting expectations for your level. At a company like Amazon these are going to be well defined and published. The manager would have also more than likely, if acting in good faith, found you a mentor by this point. If they weren't acting in good faith, then it doesn't matter w…

We were discussing Focus. I can't tell if you're calling Focus a PIP or talking about Pivot.

I've read Amazon performance evaluations. The expectations and how they were evaluated were as subjective as anywhere.

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

#256

Post by mannykannot »

arcticbull wrote: post #89
mannykannot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting aside everything else, having a formal performance-management plan, in which those put on it will be informed of that fact, normally means that most employees will have some evidence for not feeling afraid that each day they walk into the office may be their last.

There is a plan, and the manager will hold employees to it, the difference is they aren't proactively saying "if you don't complete these steps, you can see yourself out." At that point the manager has usually already, for better or worse, flipped the "bozo bit" on the employee and is very unlikely to attribute any successes and instead over-index on the failures. The vast majority of employees put on a PIP do not su…

I see you are completely avoiding the issue of what effect the nondisclosure aspect of this plan has on the employees who are not on it. You yourself raised the negative aspects of not knowing if every day will be your last.

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

#257

Post by DevoidSimo »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #206

Amazon is a strange company. After having spent 4 years there I am convinced that they hate their employees. They want you to burnout. Just look at the stock vesting schedule, its 5, 15, 40, 40. First two years you barely get any stock, and I believe the average time someone stays at amazon is around 1.5 years (I don't have latest data so maybe this is wrong) On top of that, you have the pathetic 401k match (50% upto…

I find this vesting schedule being brought up strange (I see this somewhat frequently). On hiring you get a signing bonus, in my case the value of this bonus made my comp almost flat for those 4 years if the share price remained constant. If anything, this additional cash, which was given each month, was a positive when starting out. Vesting is inherently lumpy, and makes managing cash flow a bit more tricky. I also received base increases despite a very large stock price increase.

On 401k, I'm not in the US so cannot comment.

Your other points around timelines and pages don't match my experience, but I assume that in such a large company they do exist. I have certainly heard of a team where the high sev counts were similar to the numbers you give. Perhaps I am lucky to have missed them, or others are unlucky to have experienced them.

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

#258

Post by ir123 »

amznthrow9999 wrote: post #237
billllll wrote: post #204

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 ver…

How about acting in good faith and genuinely try to make the low performers perform better?

There's always a reason some people don't perform well and its very very rare that the reason for this is something inherent in them.

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

#259

Post by tdeck »

dilyevsky wrote: post #164
tdeck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash bonus is taxed at a much higher rate, isn't it?

No it’s just income on your w2 same as rsus and salary. You’re thinking of long term cap gains which is entirely different matter

Bonus fits into the category of "supplemental wages" which Google suggests has a special 22% tax rate. However that rate also apparently applies to RSUs most of the time.

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

#260

Post by CamperBob2 »

mattkrause wrote: post #234
CamperBob2 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n ormal. 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).

Ah, thanks, I was reading it as "random number."
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