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Amazon Pip Horror Story

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Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#611

Post by mistyislands »

anon7725 wrote: post #581
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 manager. No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.

He has to push the big red button on someone. That's the problem.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#612

Post by throwaway22032 »

Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a "performance plan" and then gone on to be successful in the company?

My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it'd be time to get out. Like what's the point?

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#613

Post by steveBK123 »

mistyislands wrote: post #605
allochthon wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.

hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).

As soon as the C Suite has the same PIP / stack rank / % attrition forced, the policy will be ended.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#614

Post by matthewowen »

matthewowen wrote: post #388
zelos wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Too late to edit, but I just want to reiterate: I don’t actually agree with this, I’m just trying to make the case.

All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#615

Post by minhazm »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #597
aaviran wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be the case here. As the OP theorized, they were already on the way out of the team, so why not use them to fill up the PIP quotas? The manager might not be incompetent, but they sure are an asshole

If you get PIPed at amazon, you can't transfer teams. It locks you to your current team until you "improve"

The logic there is that this person was already going to leave your team either way, so if you PIP them they will just leave the company and you don't need to PIP someone else instead. Still a sociopathic thing to do though.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#616

Post by steveBK123 »

matthewowen wrote: post #388
zelos wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, at a given point with low attrition this may be true. However if you are forcing the "bottom" 10-15% out every year, you tend to run out of "bottom" people to exit.. unless you are very bad at recruiting (or purposely hiring to fire).

Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#617

Post by steveBK123 »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #607
efitz wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

Amazon's hiring criteria is that a candidate must be better then 50% of current employee in their role (the bar); this is where the "bar raiser" concept comes from. So from their perspective statistically, half of their current employees wouldn't make it through the interview process if they went through it again.

This is magical numbers thinking by shape rotators.

How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what?

Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output.

The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#618

Post by muskmusk »

I smell bullshit

> I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective"

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he works 10 hours 6 days a week. Of course he takes no bio breaks, doesn't eat or drink and is not required to attend any standups or status meetings or design reviews.

This nets you 15600 minutes to code. So even under these absurd conditions he has managed over 3 lines of code per minute. What a god.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#619

Post by ingres »

mistyislands wrote: post #595
desi_ninja wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are forgetting Facebook. it is Amazon culture on steroids

I'm suprised to hear Facebook is this way. Almost everyone in Facebook that I know is chilling 50% of the time :)

I'm at FB currently, maybe it's a problem on other orgs but my experience has been very good (2 years). It's not perfect but I haven't heard horror stories like this, and my manager and pms are happy to let eng set project estimates.

Re: Amazon Pip Horror Story

#620

Post by slopirate »

mistyislands wrote: post #572
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…

Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience. Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR. This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.

URA?
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