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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#341

Post by decker »

unethical_ban wrote: post #316
acituan wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are…

Oh, come on. The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment. Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#342

Post by itsathrower288 »

slumpt_ wrote: post #206
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

Morons at Google do it, too. I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review. He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself. Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty man…

Any manager at Google who quotes "lines of code" in any context other than actively defending someone or noting something truly exceptional is doing so because they have no idea what their report actually does, or whether it matters.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#343

Post by hiyer »

unethical_ban wrote: post #316
acituan wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are…

Oh, come on. The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment. Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

The damage they're doing to themselves will eventually trickle down to those they live with - spouse, kids, parents, friends, etc.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#344

Post by itsathrower288 »

hintymad wrote: post #132
joshe wrote: post #43

The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have…

Companies implement stack ranking because the management does not have necessarily visibility to valuate each employee. Those who can't stand stack ranking should either join a small startup, where visibility is not issue by nature, or join a team with explosive growth, so each person's productivity and impact can easily be gauged.

Google's perf tools used to support stack ranking and layering. I used to love it...because it was completely open ended. You could stack rank on any dimension you wanted to, and you didn't even have to say what the dimension was. You could stack rack anybody, over arbitrary sets. AFAIK the results were only ever used in aggregate -- without the dimensions there really wasn't any other way to use it.

You could stack rank how nice you thought people were, making two layers -- like "really nice" and "mostly nice" (of course, there were no labels in the tool). Or you could use it to highlight two particular team-mates who really stood out by making a layer for them, and then a layer for everyone else.

It could also be used to stack-rank the entire management chain, which was fun.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#345

Post by subsaharancoder »

VRay wrote: post #161
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a…

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

Zune music player?

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#346

Post by madrox »

As a former Amazon manager, I don’t like how this characterizes management as a mustache twirling Machiavellian. I don’t know what they saw, but I totally believe they predict a third of people on pips to fail. I’m actually surprised it’s that low of a percentage. It’s been my experience from more than Amazon that pip failure is higher than that. I was never encouraged to do anything that would contribute to something that looked like stack ranking. However, maybe this practice was not in place with engineers. I don’t really know, but it wasn’t my experience.

However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#347

Post by chris11 »

codezero wrote: post #327
chris11 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.

I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies ( Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?

I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff.

Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#348

Post by rejectedandsad »

dlp211 wrote: post #284
rejectedandsad wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.

Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.

True, there isn’t a real concept of a bonus of any kind* at Amazon. They definitely lean on the stick more than the carrot.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#349

Post by YZF »

VRay wrote: post #240
kapp_in_life wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

haha, this was at Microsoft, and the dash button was a glowing success compared to the project I'm talking about I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA.. What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering…

Just ask why they like working there. Ask for specifics. Ask for things they don't like. Ask for specifics.

Best idea is not to go somewhere without having friends on the inside who you trust and can tell you what it's like.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#350

Post by raxxorrax »

paxys wrote: post #214
EarlKing wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.

Logistics workers aren't stack ranked, so that's a completely different problem

Where I live engineers aren't stack ranked either. Doesn't speak highly of the engineers to be honest to accept such conditions. Why should you? Money? Not really a problem in the industry, is it?

Although I do think that Amazon probably pays much more, it just doesn't seem worth it. It is hard to work with people in an eternal dick measuring contest. It just isn't fun.

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