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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#381

Post by wongarsu »

zelos wrote: post #359
the_amzn_race wrote: post #353

I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively an…

What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.

If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards. At the beginning your worst cards are probably below average, so any new replacement is statistically likely to be better. But even when you reach the point where all your cards are above average it can make sense to keep redrawing a small percentage, since that's the only way to get more aces.

Of course teams of employees with emotions and institutional knowledge are a bit more complex than a hand of cards, but that has never stopped bad management strategies.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#382

Post by ldiracdelta »

tyingq wrote: post #270
amrocha wrote: post #157

And in case anyone thought this was an isolated incident, I have heard from 3 different people about this happening to them. As soon as they try to transfer they get put on a PIP.

It seems like a loophole if there's a PIP quota. Doing a PIP on someone leaving means you don't have to use a quota slot for someone staying. Though it may also be common to request a transfer when you sense your boss doesn't value you.

"Rank-and-Yank" always produces this kind of outcome. A system that rigid can never handle a team that has no losers.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#383

Post by melzarei »

flr03 wrote: post #189

This echoed so much what my girlfriend is experiencing at Amazon (London) that it is scary. She was not put on pip but one of her co-worker was last week. According to her the guy is competent and hard working. Everything about the toxic culture, the (unpaid) on call every 4 weeks, management doesn't care about estimations they just set you impossible deadlines, lots of turnover in the team, custom, unstable not docu…

Oncall is paid in Amazon Europe

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#384

Post by [deleted] »

grumple wrote: post #343
murderfs wrote: post #85

Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true: > The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package. > 50% of his CRs are merged without approval. > So, yeah, there you go !

Is CR a merge/pull request?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#385

Post by abledon »

greatpostman wrote: post #3

I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…

Having all that responsibility were you SDE-2 ? SDE-3 ?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#386

Post by zzbzq »

taneq wrote: post #345
alistairSH wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s roughly equivalent to 120,000 Euro/year once normalized for taxes (~50% for self-employed, ~30% for employees). I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.

Is it low-mid for "much of the US" or for much of the Silicon Valley venture crowd?

From the Stackoverflow survey, it would be below the national average (the mean), but I don't think there's actually many regions that pay the national average. SV pays more and most of the rest pays less.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#387

Post by peteradio »

dorianmariefr wrote: post #321
dininski wrote: post #180

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's wor…

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture. It's wor…

Thank you I could tell it was a good read but my morning eyes kept getting lost in the paragraph.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#388

Post by matthewowen »

zelos wrote: post #359
the_amzn_race wrote: post #353

I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively an…

What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.

The devils advocate answer:

Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out.

By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.

Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#389

Post by pnutjam »

hughrr wrote: post #188
greatpostman wrote: post #3

I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”. I ended up switching teams…

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

Bingo, you find a problem that's been broken for 6 months, it's not an emergency. It will still be broken tomorrow.

Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is....

The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#390

Post by thecleaner »

odonnellryan wrote: post #369
the_amzn_race wrote: post #353

I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form. Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively an…

Lazy? It seems like you were not doing the job Amazon wanted you to do but rather some other job that you decided was better to do. I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.

Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.
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