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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

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Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#71

Post by rockinghigh »

sssilver wrote: post #49

Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago. When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will…

You can still judge company-wide policies like vacations, 401k match, or health care.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#72

Post by euyyn »

linkregister wrote: post #43
kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.

I did. I truly wasn't performing as my peers, and my manager was pretty awesome about the whole situation.

He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones. We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with which I'd be evaluated.

If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going strongly for years.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#73

Post by selectiveshift »

dmoy wrote: post #30
discodave wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon aims for total compensation, cash + stock. So, the package for a typical SDE I will look like the following: Salary: x Starting bonus year 1: 0.2x Starting bonus year 2: 0.15x RSU grant is 0.6x, vesting 5/15/40/40 (4 years). So when you add it up, assuming a constant stock price, you get: Y1:1.23x Y2:1.24x Y3:1.24x Y4:1.24x So at a basic level the back loading of stock is just making up for the starting bonuse…

Wait there are no refresh equity grants at Amazon? I'm at Google and making over double what I was when I started, almost all from additional equity grants every year. It worked out to more like 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.8x, 2.4x, ...

Yes, you get additional stock grants every year.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#74

Post by outworlder »

cwilkes wrote: post #54
amzn-336495 wrote: post #11

Amazon tries to trap people through control by visas, and they will go so far as to relocate people overseas to Seattle. They have a fucked up system where rank and file get the darwin treatment but management gets the rewards. They will pay bonuses around $250k, $500k, $1 million to senior managers, directors, and VPs respectively to abuse the shit out of employees. The "PIP someone who is trying to get away from th…

What really angered me about that article was Amazon trying to say that this was a "colleague" -- he was on a PIP. Which is pretty much Amazon speak for a dead man walking (no pun intended).

Pretty much everywhere

The most sensible option is to do the bare minimum acceptable work and use all the leftover energy to find some other place, as the clock is ticking. Depending on the company, you have until the next quarter or the next performance review. Or the next headcount reduction.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#75

Post by jonathankoren »

vonklaus wrote: post #36
u489utaa wrote: post #19

Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and grow. To list a few things: - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it. - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you…

I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure; they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google. Also, according to the article 20k people work for them, although I am not sure if that was total or engineers. I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am d…

> I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure;

I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#76

Post by ible »

kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#77

Post by RexetBlell »

rbcgerard wrote: post #59
SuperPaintMan wrote: post #15

>The man survived the fall from Amazon’s 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said. Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.

Try 47 stories... http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/nyregion/08collapse.htm...

http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/window-washer-survived-47-story...

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#78

Post by sssilver »

rockinghigh wrote: post #71
sssilver wrote: post #49

Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago. When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will…

You can still judge company-wide policies like vacations, 401k match, or health care.

I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in an Amazon warehouse doesn't have the same vacation options as the person coding the internals of Simple Queue Service.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#79

Post by outworlder »

ible wrote: post #76
kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.

It works like that at many companies. Sometimes a PIP is not even needed, a low performance review is all it takes. I do not fully understand the logic behind it, other than facilitating the process of reducing headcount in the company as a whole.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#80

Post by gumby »

linkregister wrote: post #43
kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.

I can remember three employees who survived a PIP. Two took it as a wake up call and turned into good team members (one turned back into a good team member, the other just got their act together).

The third was a master at reading the PIP, pulling just above the written requirements, then six months later was back in the same stew. Was delighted when they finally accepted a job at our main competitor.

There are others, I just remember three in particular right now. You have to take the PIP seriously: of course it's designed to protect the company, but it should really be the message of last resort rather than a formality.

Also if you have to issue a PIP you need to go back to the manager to see what went wrong. Did you have a hiring mistake or a management mistake or what? Every time I have fired someone I have felt sorry for them (not that I tell them -- they don't want to hear that at that point!). We shouldn't have brought them on, perhaps causing them to quit their previous job or forego another offer, if in the end they didn't work out.

I know some companies assume that if you're on a PIP it's impossible for the emp to recover. If a company is like that I don't see how the PIP would protect them from a lawsuit. It's like H-1B: if you take it seriously it costs you a lot more to hire one than to hire a local. It's again, an action of last resort.

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