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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

#61

Post by plank_time »

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…

> So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like.

This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch’s book. He was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.

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

#62

Post by frumper »

void_mint wrote: post #23
xibalba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

If Amazon downsized by 90% then they couldnt drive by my house two to three times a day so I can quickly get my prime widgets.

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

#63

Post by trhway »

retrocryptid wrote: post #16

This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want. It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry.…

>This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want.

Diabolical thing. I remember laughing (other place, other times) as my manager friend told me about a manager in the org practicing it. It was an exception though, and I see how it may be a regular practice at AMZN.

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

#64

Post by silicon2401 »

the_jeremy wrote: post #4

I don't think this is news to anyone. Yes, Amazon has an "unregretted attrition" target. The only surprising thing was this: > The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show I assumed it was much higher.

From personal contacts, the same happens at Facebook. If your performance is good, it means you're not being pushed enough and you need to increase your workload. What a despicable work culture that you have to expect to be told that you're not meeting expectations and that you have to be worked to that extent.

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

#65

Post by Brian_K_White »

retrocryptid wrote: post #26
xibalba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

and then you divide it by # of employees and get something kind of low.

Doubt it

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

#66

Post by weimerica »

jandrese wrote: post #51
retrocryptid wrote: post #24

Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they ha…

Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only the best"?

Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was stated explicit in the interview.

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

#67

Post by Sevii »

julianeon wrote: post #27

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.

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

#68

Post by nunez »

retrocryptid wrote: post #30
julianeon wrote: post #27

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.

Amazon hires at an insane clip.

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

#70

Post by retrocryptid »

xibalba wrote: post #12
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

Worker productivity is measured as "amount of goods" over number of employees. If you say "revenue" is the same as "amount of goods" then Amazon gives you:

386.1b dollars / 798k workers = $483,834.58 / worker

That's impressive, but... Alibaba: $717.3b / 251k workers = $2.8m / worker FlipKart: $436.2b / 30k workers = $14.5m / worker Texas Instruments: $14.38b / 30k workers = $468k / worker G.E.: $75b / 174k workers = $431k / worker

I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to fire them later.

And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.

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