One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull.
There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually.
So really it's overhiring BS that is then getting taken out on employees. Given that, I think as has been pointed out by another commenter - the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance, generally. Seems better than year round psychological torture of being at risk of a PIP, and then if being put on one knowing the most likely outcome is being fired. So you feel dragged through the mud and then having doubly failed (put on PIP & failed the PIP).
I knew a guy who moved from Wall St to Amazon and described the performance management / compensation system to be pretty rough and had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.
One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it.
Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/work and the technology shifted. My disability isn't suited to the new working style/process (or lack of). However, I do excellent work outside of my regular day to day responsibilities, like my secondary role as an ASC. My manager even said that I'd I could just speed up my regular work I would easily get the highest rating and a promotion. Hearing him say that really sucks because I unable to just speed up with my disability in the given work environment. The company/managers have made no effort in helping me find a role that works better with my skills or is impacted less by my disability. It seems there may not be any of the traditional roles/teams left. So now I fill midlevel roles and move team to team trying to find somewhere that I fit in. If I can find a place I fit in like before, then I would easily excel.
Another example was a dev on another team that I worked with a few years ago was sloppy, slow, and just all around seemed like a poor performer - and even our tech lead and manager talked poorly about him. He was even considerably slower than me. About 3 years after that he's now the head of data and analytics for our international operations.
Agreed that what is left unsaid in a lot of performance conversations is the person-role match. Someone isn't a high/low performer globally, just at that time in that role.
Wall St firms I have worked at typically try to find different roles for people before marking them as at risk of a layoff. Not sure FAANG behaves the same, but from all these PIP discussions it seems not.
Leadership was asked why not find new roles for people getting laid off due to project cancellations at a time when we were still hiring like crazy in the immediate run-up and aftermath. The response was “we need to move fast.”
They encouraged those laid off to apply for open roles. But of course it read to employees as a monumental “fuck you.”
Well, but to mention that once, at least at amazon, you enter the pip processs. You are no longer able to move teams. And if you get removed. Not able to apply to return.
It's surprising companies don't seem interested in understanding their employees well enough to know that the cost of re-hiring and re-training vs trying to find a better fit in the org is not a good idea.
Some industries coach the employee into a different role, or help them exit more openly.
I've even seen articles about how Amazon chews through so many people that they're having trouble finding "virgin" hires. Everyone in their pool is already fed up with them or were PIP'd.
I left a company years ago because I didn't feel I was a good fit for the team/project - skills/goals/etc. But wasn't allowed to leave because it would hurt the image of the team to be seen to have people leaving it for other teams. But... apparently, leaving the company altogether doesn't affect the image (and yes... I've left the team, and people internally knew why, so... how does it really save face?)
Perhaps if the employee leaves the company entirely, all parts of the company get a chance to pretend the deficiency was in the employee. [0]
Like some weird inverse of the "You can't fire me, I quit!" trope.
[0] P.S.: Even if the employee left for a more prestigious role in another company, the social-circles in the old company aren't forced to acknowledge that the same way as if it were an internal move: HR will just say "they left to pursue other opportunities", and that permits the assumption that that the worker--their incompetence discovered--has fallen into ignominious chronic unemployment.
If I was able to forego the scam of 'unemployment insurance's, and put that cash in savings myself, I could do a hell of a lot better.
In reality, our unemployment insurance is a scam of how pathetic it pays. Again, it's another example of how the middle class gets squeezed both ends, and little care expended on the actual problems.
I can see why republicans get elected - they lower taxes on my bracket so I keep more money in hand. But that's because the very policies that should help everyone don't help everyone cause of shitty means testing.
Now , when I got fired from shitty food service job, unemployment was close to in parity with what I made, so it was useful then. (I just want it useful for everyone, not just low paid.)
I've absoluttely been in a position where the ground moved under me. I went from doing (based on evaluations, RSUs, etc.) from doing a very good job to bouncing around a bunch of managers and groups in roles that I wasn't really suited for and didn't have much real interest in. The only saving grace was that I was pretty close to semi-retiring anyway.
I can't change jobs now due to home life responsibilities and having specialized in dead tech.
I have picked up responsibilities. In the past I've filled the role of a senior dev for a year and a tech lead for another. I volunteered to be an ASC. I volunteered for all sorts of other responsibilities.
Perhaps the world doesn't work in the way that you think. It's not possible for everyone to successfully job hop, especially with a disability and home responsibilities. Just picking up responsibilities doesn't mean you'll get rewarded.
> Just picking up responsibilities doesn't mean you'll get rewarded.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to attack, or otherwise offend you. I was attempting to say that one can look for an opportunity to work in an environment where one can feel appreciated. I'd employ a person with such experience as long as they'd know some basics. What's TLS, how does it work, roughly. What's DNS. TCP vs UDP. At least understanding of what problems are solved (or created, if you are in that camp) by Kubernetes. Docker basics. Read open source code.
Those are interesting subjects. I'm sure there is a ton of hypothetical past problems one could attempt to modernize and have fun while doing so.
It's just a free opinion of someone on the internet!
> I can't change jobs now due …having specialized in dead tech.
Then don’t do that?
I’ve been working professionally for 27 years and have been aggressive about keeping pace with technology. I saw what happened first hand when I didn’t between around 2002-2008 and I said it would never happen again.
For reference: I didn’t know “cloud” from a hole in the wall at 44 years old and I got my first and hopefully last job in BigTech at 46 working at AWS in the ProServe department (where I got PIPed see my top level comment)
It is completely irresponsible for anyone in tech especially with a family to not always keep themselves employable and depend on the whims of thier current employer to support their families addiction to food, clothing and shelter.
And how does a disability preclude you from getting a remote job?
And if you “can’t job hop”, would you not look for another job if you got laid off or fired or would you just give up and be on the street - homeless and hungry?
> Just picking up responsibilities doesn't mean you'll get rewarded.
I’m always rewarded for picking up additional responsibilities - if not by the current company by the next. It’s what allows me to aggressively job hop with a family and not be stuck with dead technologies on my resume.
I have responsibilities and problems at home that greatly limit my non-work hour freedom. My disability is not a physical one, but a neurodivergent one, so remote would only hurt me more. I would look for another job if I lost this one, but it would probably pay less - again, no real time to upskill. Sure, I've gotten new certs and other BS over the years and started working with new tech. That hasn't been helpful. I've worked roles above my official position and not been rewarded. In fact, I haven't seen any of my hard work or extra responsibilities pay off after my first promotion about 3 years in. I don't expect another promotion for the rest of my career either. That's just the way it is for me.
Not everyone's life is as easy as you make your's out to be.
Again if you lost your job you would do what it took to get another one wouldn’t you? So what’s the difference between changing jobs when you do have a choice and waiting until you don’t have a choice?
If you don’t make time now to upskill, what do you think is going to happen if/when you don’t have a choice but to look for a job and be stuck with in your words “dead tech”.
"So what’s the difference between changing jobs when you do have a choice and waiting until you don’t have a choice?"
The difference is that if I lost this job I would then have time during the day to look for jobs or study when I would have been working.
I don't really care what will happen. My area is shitty for tech work, my wife won't move, and I'm ill suited to remote work. I'm just coasting now. There's no point in upskilling until I would know what skills the other company would want because there are so many different things they could wanting the tech changes so fast.
That’s not how it works. Given a choice between hiring someone who learned on the side with no real world experience and hiring someone with real world experience - the latter wins.
That’s why you do volunteer for opportunities where you can up skill on the job and while you are still employed you find another job where you can get in based on what you know and then transition
"Given a choice between hiring someone who learned on the side with no real world experience and hiring someone with real world experience - the latter wins."
Lol so I'm in a catch 22 and your precious advice does not apply.
"That’s why you do volunteer for opportunities where you can up skill on the job"
This is just how companies operate today. Burn furniture to heat the place for a quarter. Sell your property to a for profit entity you lease from instead to save a line item today and no doubt get screwed when its time to renegotiate the lease (long after whoever made this decision has left the company I’m sure). Fire staff and rehire instead of retrain. Its all myopic thinking that you’d find in any MBA program sold to you as the best practices in modern business.
I think managers in tech companies are very often just really untalented as leaders. Good leaders create more leaders. Growing talent and getting the best out of people should be the goal for any leader, and I've seen so little of that from the ones I worked with.
After a point it just becomes part of the landscape, a pervasive culture of not recognizing what good leadership looks like, and people filtering out of the industry because they're over it.
You should file for disability accommodations. That is completely legal to ask. Sometimes you need to back it up with documentation, but i suspect that won't be a problem.
I have documentation. They don't care. HR said to just work with my manager on accommodations. My main problem is dealing with ambiguity and context switching. That's something they can't change given their chosen work model.
The old model of working was that you supported 1 main app and maybe a smaller 1 or 2 that were related. These were usually in 1 stack and well documented. The new model is that teams are typical supporting 6-10 apps in multiple stacks. I'm slow when switching between apps and stacks, and without consistent exposure to a single app/stack, I won't get faster.
It's funny though - they talk a big game and even hire in Auticon contractors, but then refuse to do anything for existing employees. I assume a least some of those contractors have similar difficulties as me.
I don’t have any (diagnosed) neurological disability but I would do poorly in that situation too. Excessive context switching is a major source of stress: adrenaline, fast heartbeat, high blood pressure. Makes it almost impossible to stay focused and motivated.
Yeah, that was a risk I was willing to take by disclosing my disability. So far it doesn't seem like it made anything worse, but it hasn't made anything better either.
I'd speak to an employment lawyer and see what they advise. A couple hundred bucks for the piece of mind might be worth it. You'd get an opinion on what they can and can't do and what you can do to proactively manage the situation.
So exactly what do you think he’s going to accomplish spending years working with an employment lawyer? A reinstatement of his job at a toxic company? Some monetary compensation that probably won’t be worth the headache?
That energy can be better spent looking for a new job. My granddad use to tell me to never chase after old money or old girlfriends.
Thanks but I don't think I will. The thing about disabilities is that they have to provide reasonable accommodations. What is reasonable is wildly subjective. There's really not much to be done.
Unfortunately, there's a HUMONGOUS difference between "not allowed to" and "can't" when a company optimizes for profit at the expense of human well-being.
could've picked a better analogy that don't reinforce the fitness myth that fat "turns into" muscle.
fat is fat. muscle is muscle. one does not convert into another. it can be broken down into energy to be used but ultimately each cell starts from scratch.
You're mistaken in that you believe that the goal of culls is to cut underperformers. Stack ranking doesn't assess performance, it checks whether you're willing to do a little more to be ahead of your peers.
The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.
This sort of thing is one of the big reasons why I would never work for a FAANG company. I prefer to work at a place that encourages good work rather than a weird cutthroat arena combat thing.
I'd still work there. For those comps I'd do a lot of things. My current job is already torture and doesn't pay nearly as well. But I guess that really a fictional problem for me since I'd never pass the interview.
As someone who has been there done that - read my other replies - I can say both that I don’t regret doing it and that I would not sacrifice my life now to ever go back to any large tech company or for the money.
I very much made two decisions this year after being Amazoned that prioritized my stress level over money.
1. Deciding not to put my shingle up and go independent. I have the network, the credentials and the knowledge to make more than I was making at Amazon going that route
2. Turning down a position that was going to be created for me by a former coworjer now director to be responsible for the cloud migration and infrastructure for a $7 billion public non tech company that would have also paid more in cash than my total comp at Amazon.
No, I never struck it rich in tech, I was a journeymen CRUD developer/architect when I got hired with two years of AWS experience and above average soft skills.
I feel the same way and would also never work at a FAANG.
That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for them regardless of the talent of those individual people.
I feel a better analogy would involve (A) a demand that is outside the official job-description or duties and (B) isn't a fixed-bar but instead makes multiple employees fight each other in an indefinite race to the bottom.
Ex: "Are you willing to spend your free time becoming the General's #1 personal servant? No? Sorry, there's no place for you in the infantry."
I don't find better but more vague perhaps in attempt to sound nuanced.
If one goes by job description Amazon is acting strictly within those parameters. And that race to the bottom is not really hunger games.
On the other hand if one goes by unsaid rules of games, everyone including management, HR, employee know FAANG salary is multiple times of equivalent IT workers. And perhaps 95% of FAANG employees are not really developing new algorithms, hauling terabytes of data on their shoulders or being the force of good whatever that means. Just keep doing made-up work and wait until reach x million dollars goal. After that leave quietly or loudly by writing a nasty blog post lambasting management.
So mostly people understand they have to keep up the facade because talking about what's really happening will make it rather awkward for everyone.
I did a DiSC (corporate Myers-Briggs-esque personality test) assessment and dominance was listed as one of the core motivators for people. I'm not sure I actually believe that; it feels like that was retconned into truth so it'd get past the decision-makers who may actually have that tendency. But maybe it is!
However, on the bright side, it is kind of nice that FAANG attracts the type of people who actually think this sort of constant stack ranking arena fighting is okay. Think about it: if they really hated it, they'd leave. Obviously the pay is a huge motivator, but if it was as distasteful as it was to many others, they wouldn't hang around.
I do appreciate that FAANG companies are a bit like fly traps, collecting those sorts of people somewhere else so I don't have to work with them personally.
But understand, I am not asserting that FAANG companies are places nobody wants to work. I'm asserting that they are places I am not willing to work at. It's because I would be utterly miserable in that sort of working environment, and there is no amount of compensation that could make that tolerable to me.
This is happening not only in FAANG companies but also a lot (if not, all) of companies. Unless you are in a hyper-growth company, you are more likely to see this kind of performance management process to continuously review and cut.
It has. I went through this exact same PIP process with subjective improvement goals at Twilio. It was extremely stressful and I met all the goals but got fired anyway. In hindsight it was just a layoff.
I've never been through a PIP, but based on what I've seen with people who have, if I were put on a PIP that would be a strong signal that I'm not wanted there, so I'd just quit and save everyone the aggravation.
Add the fact that "fired" means "deported" for H1B workers, and it's the perfect way to extract maximum labor from a sizable proportion of your workforce.
> It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.
This, exactly. The world is full of lies, lies people honestly believe.
For example, have you seen a situation when parents feed a child, and try to get the kid to eat a bit more even when the child is full? What do they tell the kid - eat some more, it's good for you. Why do they really do it?
Because kids get hungry more often than adults, it's annoying / sometimes not possible / practical to stop to feed them as often. So we lie to them.
Meh. Going to a FAANG is like joining an Olympic sports team; it's not a place you'd want to be if you aren't hell bent on going for the gold. The irony is that the pressure cooker works; an unhealthy degree of ambition, competitiveness, and willingness to work their tails off are all assets in the business world. I know a, at least to me, surprising number of people who successfully navigated these environments who later became founders/CEOs and high level executives.
> Going to a FAANG is like joining an Olympic sports team; it's not a place you'd want to be if you aren't hell bent on going for the gold.
Not according to everyone I know working at a FAANG company. This is mythology. You're at a FAANG because you did the LeetCode grind and passed the interview.
Tts almost the opposite.
Olympics has a bunch of objective measures of performance.
For individual sports its winning, for team sports theres various scoring/assist/defense/etc metrics that can be used.. plus if your team wins.
> Going to a FAANG is like joining an Olympic sports team
I guess, if the discipline is corruption. My company doesn't feel the need to tell me how to avoid discussing sensible topics with my teammates on group chat.
Yeah, because technical merit isn't the only way you get ranked in the stack. For instance, would you say no to an ethically questionable order if you're on a PIP?
This feels like the tech version of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire meme: it's something people need to be true so they can justify their ambitions of making it. So they repeat it, and say it enough to believe it.
FAANG employees are no different from you and I in the aggregate. That's not a dig, that's just statistics.
My ancestors were coal miners in Tennessee. They tried to reason with their employers for a long time to establish reasonable working conditions. When it became clear that their employers were not going to listen to reason, they found other ways to establish reasonable working conditions.
The coal miners' solution was to get a bunch of guns and/or gasoline, and either pump bullets in the bosses' house, or to torch it with gasoline. Usually both.
That was responded to by bringing in the Pinkertons (private military), along with the US military. These got horrifically bloody.
And it got to a point, that by the 1920's, the USA had a strong representation of US Communist Party. 1927 really cemented that they were right in the long run. However, FDR sold the Communists out with "labor reforms" that paled in comparison to what the Communists wanted.
Now, FDR's reforms lasted until the late 60's and 70's. Capital was able to get enough property and money, that they ended up *buying* the governmental reforms one politician at a time.
Well, perhaps heads will have to roll again, to reset Capital. They're not going to willingly cede property/money/power. And this time, they bought government. And it's obvious that the NLRB and the DoL is going to do diddly. But whatever it is, I hope it's peaceful. But knowing labor history through the ages and US specifically, it will be anything but.
There was serious labor abuse in past years, and capital doesn't have as much power in the new info-WFH-open source economy. Mineral rights and office space and expensive yearly software support contracts are gone. Stop waiting on government regulators for action on white collar issues.
How does that relate to capital and jobs? Unlike physical mining and physical manufacturing, capital is not a gating feature of bits and bytes tech startups.
We saw violent destruction during covid lockdowns by BLM. What did that accomplish?
Does 'tech' just mean software to you? like what about 95% of the economy, you need capital even for ebikes
> We saw violent destruction during covid lockdowns by BLM. What did that accomplish?
I am not spokesperson for BLM, and not from US.
But UK had similar riots when the Government made a pledge not to raise univeristy fees, and in the first 3 months they raised them, and then killed a student at a protest. So protests turned into riots.
Iam not sure whats new here, we knew for thousands of years -
You fuck around and piss off like a million people, eventually you are gonna find out.
Saying that capital doesn't have as much power in the new economy is bullshit.
The WFH thing is the only maybe, but you see how companies don't want that? It is much more about control than performance, as is usually the case with Capital.
> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent
It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.
Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?
I can tell you Indian new graduates interview very well. They grind years on these DSA puzzles. But have very little engineering knowledge or skill in general.
It's all about gaming the system here.
I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume.
Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is.
On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA".
I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary.
I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure.
That's the case with leetcode problems.
It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.
Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon?
I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.
The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures.
You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.
When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.
I think this is really important point. Somehow lot of folks are missing it. As if each engineer is responsible for launching a new Amazon service every year. I have heard and met many current Amazon software engineer. Most of their job description sound rather crappy routine work even for me earning 1/3rd salary of Amazon.
I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.
That’s not just true of engineers. It took years for a friend who worked there as an L6 in the finance department for Amazon Retail to match his compensation after he left and it took him becoming a director at a manufacturing company.
Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work.
Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon.
It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation.
I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.
Yeah, to be fair.. the people I know from Wall St tech that left for Amazon were not the best tech people I knew. The best tech people would have found more well compensated roles within Wall St tech.
Generally a mix of people who exhausted other paths to higher compensation by their mid 30s - mid 40s (senior management track / trader track) and this was the next big thing.
I agree with you and my interviewers that I conduct are always more behavioral. Most of the positions I interview candidates for are for bog standard CRUD jobs that anyone can do technically. The deciding factor are the traits you mentioned.
Technical skills can very much be the barrier to delivering CRUD projects, but it is usually more like troubleshooting, debugging, unscrewing your dev environment, understanding the behavior of your framework and database engine, leaving yourself good log messages, etc.
Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group.
I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people.
So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.
Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case.
Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those who made it through were absolutely qualified and great to work with. There certainly wasn't 30% to cull. In my opinion there wasn't even enough people to fill the percentage quota that need to be given ratings lower than satisfactory - before the layoffs. After them, the fact that they're still enforcing these quotas on teams is absurd cruelty that kills morale.
I mean looking at Googles abysmal track record compared to its peers when it comes to creating and sustaining new products and product categories over the last two decades is not exactly an argument for their hiring process.
That's an interesting question camouflaged as a boring question.
The assumption is that though interview processes are acknowledged as imperfect, they're largely considered to measure something like productivity or worker value.
Under that assumption, then it should be exceedingly difficult to "cheat" the interviews such that a person could do great at an interview, and be of low "worker value". Not impossible, but difficult. And I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but if we were to do a survey here on HN, the most likely consensus on how difficult that is would be something like "it's actually more difficult to fake it in the interview than to just be good enough at what you say you're good at".
Imagine if you were one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but to be "hired on" to the Olympic team they decided to interview you for it. Sure, they'd probably ask in the interview what your latest 100M times were, stuff like that, but after the interview they'd all talk privately about whether or not you were a good "culture fit", and whether your smile was sincere or fake, whether you were too nervous or smooth and a "real go-getter". In such an environment, the Olympic team might well have 30% of its members that could be safely culled. The only jobs interviewing is even a good process for are those jobs where the actual work itself resembles interviewing... sales positions, PR, being the "public face" of an organization (news anchors, I dunno). The reason we use interviewing for technology jobs is because that's what the big bosses know works for their jobs, a CEO is the public face of the organization.
Their stated goal is for each person they hire on a team to be better than 50% of their peers. For a company that professes to think a lot about the long term, I'd suggest they need to go to math school before they go to manager school.
Well you are right. But reality here is company is printing boat load of money with their cloud infra monopoly. So what to do? Blabber non sensical bullshit that no one will question because again everyone is making money and if they are so smart to challenge leadership dictates why wouldn't they just leave and apply their ideas some place else that needs them.
This is not on the managers. This is HR gone wild. Most managers close to the frontline understand perfectly well what an incredibly stupid idea this is.
I have posted this before, an argument in defense of stack ranking I had heard from a friend's father who was a long-time manager for a large industrial conglomerate from the 60's through the 80's. Simply put it was that they were far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone in 1-1.5 years and it would not be a ding against the hiring manager. Further, at least in that day, it was an environment where everyone was going in with their eyes open -- people were not blindsided by it, they expected it. But as you point out, the FAANG's are doing the opposite of this. They've got extremely difficult hiring processes and are pretending that it's not stack ranking.
Stack Ranking was pioneered by Jack Welch who was operating in an environment where labor was the dominant party in the labor-capital relationship, and he was taking over companies that had had decades of labor growth and power while capital was stagflating nationwide. Introducing stack ranking was a way of trimming excess fat from decades of build up within companies, while reasserting capital in the relationship within the company.
Long term, it has been a disaster in every company. Because eventually you run out of fat, and then what you describe as "far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone" becomes "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat.
In short, stack ranking makes some sense if you have a fat organization, not unlike restricting calories to lose fat when working out. But once you've lost fat, continuing to restrict your calories results in losing more muscle than fat.
Jack Welch also mostly made his mark by juicing earnings via both financializing the whole company going into the GFC, and by doing various forms of (probably illegal then, definitely now) accounting tricks to smooth earnings to always make his number.
Having been a Navy officer for 20 years active and reserve, one of the other overlooked flaws of the stack rank is that it's a vehicle for cultivating egos. When the only way up is through many levels of being "1 of X, Early Promote," it's fascinating to watch a bright-eyed humble flight student turn into a condescending jerk of an instructor over the years. Turning the performance review system into "winners" and "losers" and telling a subset of people they're the winners tends to break some people's brains.
Because why should they have to listen to anyone who hasn't gotten as good performance reviews as them? Obviously, they care more and those other slackers just couldn't cut it.
I have a friend who is getting out (technically going reserve). It sounds like there are lot of factors impacting retention and most of them are being ignored. Why should the leaders focus on things they are a part of and admit fault if they can simply blame stuff on civilian cultural issues or subordinate "weakness"?
I heard some of the cyber warfare units are proposing to bring in people in as high as O5. No way that causes any related problems...
IMHO there's a huge blind spot in leadership exactly due to the stack rank, because how do you recommend changes to the system to someone who succeeded and owes their whole career and professional reputation to that system? The answer's going to be "well it worked for me, so it must not be that bad."
The other part of the problem is yes, there are times when the military has every right to expect folks to endure hardship. I mean, the whole point is to send folks into combat if needed, and combat sucks. Being in the field or underway for months at a time sucks, but they're necessary. But because of this, it's easy to slip into "just suck it up" as a response to a whole bunch of hardship, stupidity, or inefficiency that isn't necessary.
The reserves have their own breed of stupidity revolving around reserve center staff enforcing Kafkaesque bureaucratic "readiness" requirements on the drilling reservists. At some point, taking 1/4 of your weekends off to come in and be told you're delinquent on something you turned in three times already, or having to flail to complete some late-breaking tasker gets old. I loved supporting my gaining active duty commands. I retired because I got sick of the hoops I had to jump through to keep doing it.
Cyber is having to bring folks in at a high level to get the experience base they desperately need. This isn't totally unusual though. Surgeons have come in at that level when the military has needed their expertise. And in WWII, FDR brought in an automotive executive as a general officer to supervise wartime production.
I don't, even for the surgeon thing, they probably shouldn't be skipping ranks. If the MOS needs a specific level of pay, they should address it by changes to that duty pay and revamping the retirement system to look at that pay too. The automotive executive is a little different since you do what them to oversee everything since they are an industry expert, not just a individual contributor or midlevel manager.
Funny thing about the surgeon part. I know a surgeon who served and had a unique specialty with aerospace occupational preventative medicine. They didn't fight too hard to keep them other than offering a promotion. Even at O6, they could have been making 3x the money if they were a civilian. Bringing people in at a higher rank isn't going fix the pay issue and isn't necessarily going to place them in the right level of authority. They need to make some changes to how that's managed to ensure the right people are at the right levels. I'm sure there are career guys who would not be happy to have someone with limited experience come in over their rank and pay if they're doing the same job.
Docs in the military have a bonus structure based on their specialty area that's supposed to at least try to keep their pay from being ridiculously behind. And the idea behind bringing a surgeon in as an O-5 is that a surgeon has that level of seniority as a medical practitioner, so it aligns with their field. To bring an O-5 cyber person in, they would be expected to have enough experience as a cybersecurity professional to rate that rank. If they were entry-level but DOD needed entry-level cybersecurity folks badly enough, they would add a bonus but keep the rank lower.
"Docs in the military have a bonus structure based on their specialty area that's supposed to at least try to keep their pay from being ridiculously behind."
Tries is the key word there. Most of the time it's not even close unless you're a family practicioner or other lower paid specialty. On the other hand, there is a retirement program (although that's based on base pay and not as great for roles like this) and they don't need mal-practice. At least to me, it seems the biggest way they get docs is to pay for their med school if they commit to 8-12 years or whatever it is for them now.
"To bring an O-5 cyber person in, they would be expected to have enough experience as a cybersecurity professional to rate that rank."
I mean, that makes sense in a general sense, but doesn't really make sense the way it works now. There are plenty of people with experience that if they were external would come in at a higher rank than they are now. I'm not sure how you would design a good system for an industry where people jump companies every 2-3 years, are expecting high pay (at least O5 with 10 years), are used to rapid promotions, and are used to lots of perks. I mean, you could have someone with 5 years of internal experience with a great record be something like O3 and have someone external be called a senior analyst/dev or lead in 3-5 years and come in as an O5 with basically no difference in duties or performance.
Although I'm not sure how you would even measure performance in that role. The industry doesn't have clue how to measure it - just look at the article or all the stuff about interviews and leetcode. The military might set some more objective standards, but they're not going to remotely apply to external candidates.
I don't know, I guess in general I would imagine the best thing for stability, readiness, and even morale, would be to train and promote from within while focusing on retention. It sounds like they're already providing bonuses for all levels and saying they're focusing on retention, but clearly they have other issues. I doubt bringing people in at a higher rank will fix that.
Replying to this 3 days late, so likely this won’t be seen, but I assure you the retention factors are not being ignored. (Well … see my last sentence.). For 2 years in the early nineties I worked in software with an extensive, sophisticated retention model.
Direct pay, benefits, promotion velocity, source of commission were all extensively tracked and modeled. The problem at that point was that you can claim you want a 600 ship navy, but if you don’t have enough surface warfare officers with the right number of years (or dentists or chaplains or JAG lawyers) it’s not going to work.
On the other hand despite our multimillion dollar contract to work on this software, I have no idea if BUPERS actually used it.
I'm sure they're tracking the shit out of it. It just seems like they aren't doing anything effective with all that data. At least thats the vibe I get from the guys I know and the articles I've read.
I guess it's not all that much different than what we see in some areas of civilian industry. The lower paying companies know they can't compete on salary so they start implementing what I call "naturally capped" benefits. Stuff like parental leave, fertility help, etc. Stuff that, while excellent to have, either effects a small minority or where people only get to claim it an average of 2.5 times in their life (eg costs the employer less than higher pay). It's something recruiters can use in their pitch to distract from pay.
Part of the problem is that for all everyone (rightly) drags the Bureau, they also have their hands tied by Congress. You can only promote and move around officers as prescribed by Federal law, and until the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act gets reformed, you're ultimately stuck in the land of up-or-out where folks' promotion clocks are ticking the moment they commission. It's an industrial-age model that's strangely like a union seniority list, but without the employment guarantee.
As a flight attrite who ended up running a division on something grey, the Navy knocked me down more pegs than I was thought possible. Appreciate the forced opportunities to grow, but there's got to to be some better ways. Sounds like you're doing some good Sir.
I retired at 20 to make my way in my civilian tech career. I looked at the amount of effort you'd need to put into make Captain or above, and the knock-on effects on your civilian career, and said "nope." Tried to do the best I could. One of the best officers I worked with in the reserve dropped on request from helo training due to family issues, and ended up making a career as a support guy for the reserve Naval Special Warfare folks.
> One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull.
FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to:
Underperforming: ~12%
Meeting or Exceeding: ~80%
Better than exceeding: ~8%
As for my own anecdata, for the roughly 100 person cohort where I was part of performance management, there would be 1-3 people each cycle that were in the "cull" bracket. That said, people with a couple consecutive cycles of not meeting expectations were likely to be put on a PIP. I managed 4 people in that group, and all were able to successfully exit the PIP.
All that said, every company and even org within a company have their own goals, targets, processes, and flows, and my experience was pre-COVID, so I'm also sure that any needle movement has been in the direction of harsher evaluations.
It's worth clarifying that by "Meeting or Exceeding" or "better than Exceeding", I wasn't referring to the actual rating names, but indicating what buckets of ratings. i.e. Better than Exceeding means a rating that was > "Exceeding Expectations"
“Meeting or exceeding” is the American construction. If I’m exceeding I expect a big raise, or at least talk of a promotion (maybe next year). Starting a phrase with “meeting” puts a iscount on it.
Of course we are talking about companies that are paying too much in the first place, so maybe they’ll be forgiven for trying to bring the slope down a bit.
It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything.
A lot of north american modern management theory seems to think that praising your employees is the best way to get them to perform. By telling someone who's good but not great a "You got exceed expectations!!" they'll feel like they are valued.
> It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything.
It's actually the opposite. The ratings themselves are associated with multipliers for your annual bonus and stock grants. IIRC, the full spectrum of ratings and multipliers was:
Meets None (0.0) -> Meets Some (0.5) -> Meets Most (0.85) -> Meets (1.0) -> Exceeds (1.25) -> Greatly Exceeds (2.0) -> and Redefines (3.0)
Ignoring the company multiplier, which was always a value slightly greater than 1.0 when I was there (that may not be true now), for a Senior Engineer (L5) with a $175k salary, 15% bonus target, and annual stock grant of $110k vesting over 4 years , the value of the rating to them at each exceeds level would be:
Exceeds: ~$12k / year
Greatly Exceeds: ~$53k / year
Redefines: ~$107k / year
The top 2 buckets only account for about 8% or so of employees, but the number for Exceeds was around 20% of employees during my time.
It's a way to correct under-leveling rapidly. Google at least aimed to hire at the level of fully demonstrated and sustainable competency; if there was any doubt you'd be hired at the lower level. That can be corrected in a ~year with greatly exceeds or redefines ratings. There was a bit of step function in yearly raises depending on the rating as well but promotion was a substantial raise.
Quite the opposite: getting into the top brackets is directly tied to large pay increases, larger bonuses and stock grants, and puts you in line for promotion.
it's a bit logarithmic. the upper end needs to be 1% 0.1% 0.01%, for the same kind of reasons we went from "MTS" to staff, sr staff, principal, distinguised, fellow.
> here are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.
I've worked on many high-performing teams where you couldn't find 6%, or 1-in-18 of people who shouldn't be there.
However, I've never worked for an entire fast growing company where I couldn't readily pick out 1-in-18 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone knew it.
Hiring is far from perfect and these companies are growing quickly. Combined with turnover, you're bringing in a large number of new developers every year. Some people are really good at Leetcode and interviewing, but don't actually like to do work at jobs, for example.
IMO, the problem comes when these arbitrary thresholds are applied at low levels like individual teams. If you take a group of 18 people and declare that 1 of them must be fired every year no matter what, it's terrible. On the other hand, if you were to look at a large department of 1000 people and went through everyone's performance closely, I don't think it would be hard to identify 60 people who weren't working out.
The other problem is that some people have become really good at gaming this system. Every time I've worked at a company that does arbitrary culling of employees, there was always a contingent of old timers who had mastered the system years ago and never found themselves up for consideration to PIP. Either they were friends with management, had some arcane knowledge that they refused to let anyone else access, or they were really good at buttering up their manager come performance review time. I can think of one guy who was always fighting with everyone and refusing to do work, but would become the sweetest, most helpful hero a couple times a year when some high profile issue came up. He'd work 16 hour days for a couple weeks, emergent triumphantly with some solution, then disappear again for another 6 months. Untouchable, yet clearly the lowest net performer on the team.
If you work for a company that lays off 6% of the "fat" every year and then still continues to have 6+% of the company considered "fat" then the issue isn't the 6% of the people, it's the structure, culture, and practices of the company.
> If you work for a company that lays off 6% of the "fat" every year and then still continues to have 6+% of the company considered "fat"
Most tech companies I've worked for in the past years have had about 30-40% new people every year through a combination of natural turnover and growth.
You're right that if a company never grows and nobody ever leaves yet they still try to isolate 6% to fire every year, that's a bad practice.
However, nobody gets hiring perfectly right. When you're hiring hundreds of people every year into a department, you're going to get a couple people who don't work out.
I think people on HN get nervous around these discussions because they imagine companies as static collections of individuals, but at a high growth company you actually have a lot of new people coming through all the time.
It's also bad when companies never fire anyone. If you just let everyone stay until they quit, you accumulate a lot of people who aren't working out while their high performing coworkers get frustrated and leave. I've seen this situation too and it's not good.
It’s only 1 in 18 if you have the attention span of a goldfish.
If your hiring quality is uniform, there’s only about a 5.6% chance the new guy gets fired next year. Instead they’ll go after someone else. For an average tenure of 3 years that’s closer to 1/6 chance of ending up on a PIP. Higher if they hand out extra PIPs in order to hit the quota.
> There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.
Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).
To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.
Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?
Forced ranking in your use case doesn't work because it's generally firm wide cascade. Is 6% of every team in every department in every org unnecessary?
No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go.
Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.
Think - Google Bard vs Search vs Ads vs Youtube vs their 27 different chat/video apps vs .. etc.
> Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.
The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.
Yes, that is my point. Past a few iterations, there is not a lot of value in doing this company wide over and over.. versus making hard big picture decisions on resourcing departments properly.
I don't understand what you mean. The 4-6% URA target is for continually managing out low performing employees. It may not be the most effective way, but that is the intent. It has nothing to do with resourcing departments properly; that's a totally different process and conversation.
Again, I think you are confusing layoffs, which are a reduction in headcount for a department/team, with attrition, where the people themselves are let go but the headcount remains so you can hire to replace them.
High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life.
With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.
I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.
And for roles at companies with very quantifiable outputs--like sales for example--the approach at a lot of companies is not to sweat the hiring process too much and just let go people who don't make their numbers (whether it's really their fault or not). Someone I knew's shorthand for this was that sales managers have no trouble firing people.
Right. FAANG interviews generally aren't even trying to figure out if someone will be good at their job. Leetcode tests for IQ and being willing to sink tons of hours into bs to get the job. FAANG companies have decided those are important qualities needed to succeed, but they clearly aren't the only ones.
Amazon eng manager here, at least for one more day. I think Amazon is easier to get into than the other FAANGs (I've worked at two of them and was very close to getting into another). This is partially because it's easy/required to manage people out, and partially because Amazon has a rotten reputation in the industry.
It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.
I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route).
There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.
I completed them. All of them.
My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).
I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...
What really ground my gears?
"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."
I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."
And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.
I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.
Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
About this point he turned his camera off.
Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.
He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.
HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
I'm often confused by folks going to great lengths to "prove" stuff to HR. Why? HR works for the company / manager.
Focus on yourself. Your greatest power is not in arguing with a boss who doesn't like you. You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch. Start interviewing and work for another company and find someone who does like working with you. Maybe even go work for yourself.
Even when working for yourself, this actually still holds. When it's miserable working with a client, don't "PROVE" to them they are idiots. Do you really want to keep working with someone you've had to do this with? Again, move on.
I've had this happen a few times where the previous boss / client remembers me fondly - and I don't hate them either at the end of it.
> I'm often confused by folks going to great lengths to "prove" stuff to HR. Why? HR works for the company / manager.
In this case, if they had fought unemployment, there was factual and objective evidence against their case. "On review, his work output was unsatisfactory". "According to Google, you never reviewed said work output."
> You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch.
This pissed me off - I could easily have switched teams, even per my manager. Until he announced that I was now on a PIP. No manager is going to approve a transfer to their team, then.
Like I said, I had no expectations that any of this would change anything with respect to my termination. I'd moved on, and wouldn't want to keep being there.
But worst case scenario: "The employee's plan said that they could do X, Y and Z. You stated that they were terminated because they didn't do X, Y and Z." "Yes." "How did you determine that?" "By reviewing those things." "But it can be demonstrated that you conducted no such review."
In my state, that would mean they'd have to demonstrate that I was actually fired for misconduct, not performance, to make me ineligible for benefits.
How did we get to this? WTF happened? To treat another human being like this. The pathetic little weasels cannot even straight out tell someone they’re fired. They have to play this humiliating game of pretending you can affect the outcome and that there’s something wrong with you. Satanic.
100% - I would have taken a simple "This isn't working out for us. We appreciate your efforts. Today will be your last day." over all this.
For insult on injury, they declined severance "as we do not offer severance for performance-related termination", after acknowledging that it had been shown that my manager had done nothing to actually assess my performance in the PIP (I suppose their claim will be that the performance issues led to the PIP).
That's what I never get. Management ALWAYS sides with managers, no matter how toxic or illegal they act.
Whereas a terrible manager is worth their weight in radioactive drum of sludge. They will poison products, projects, AND people.
It's my belief that only when management IS the labor, will this be settled (worker cooperatives). Unions are only a band-aid to what amounts to arterial spray and broken bones.
Oof. I wonder if the outcome could have been different if someone from legal had been on the line. Hostile work environment, constructive dismissal, etc.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate even though I agree with your point.
Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff.
Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.
Their interview process, while thorough, isn't failproof. Additionally, it primarily assesses candidates at entry, overlooking potential changes in performance that may emerge after a couple of years within the company.
If 6-30% are failing year after year after year, you can't blame the interview process. You could blame the leadership failure that didn't fix the interview process, though.
Really it's indicative of Amazon treating their employees as disposable. They have enough employment market power still to attract enough great talent to burn through individuals in 2-3 years. Eventually they run out of meat or they soften the process.
Of all the FAANG, I almost admire Amazon for chewing up & disposing of their white collar work force the same way they do their blue collar.
The other guys are all pretty bad to work for at the bottom non-SWE tiers, but have cushy SWE adult daycare office environments. At least Amazon treats all their employees as disposable?
> they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull.
There's no contradiction. No interview process can avoid low performers. There will always be unmotivated people, people who are difficult to work with and so on...
But yes, this isn't cool, but at least, people working there have very high compensation and know it's a competitive environment.
> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually.
Interview process doesn’t test for everyday laziness. A lot of very smart people who easily solve leetcode are just coasting at their jobs.
To play devil's advocate, the flaw in your logic is assuming that because someone passed the interview at a FAANG, they must be good.
No interview process is perfect. Companies, no matter how 'high the entry barrier' make mistakes when hiring. This is how they've decided to correct it.
>> they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process
You mean ... Leetcode?
I would categorize it as an artificial high barrier to entry that is based on how much you study and a bit of luck. If anything, it is designed to make employees believe they are top-tier.
I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls".
> underperformers lying about to cull
is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.
Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?
> Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?
Because this ignores reality. Especially at FAANG companies, growth is expected and the majority of compensation is stock. If you stop growing, and stop having a profit, your stock tanks, and future compensation - as well as compensation from years prior that is still in the form of company stock - becomes worth much less. You can't hire people who are as good because you're "in decline." Your products falter because talent leaves and you can't find new talent. Even if all the above is imagined (it's not) you now have real impacts in terms of declining application quality and shrinking user bases.
I was trying to point out that not every company ownership model is a publicly traded stock company. Your point is totally valid in the context you give.
> "Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?"
Do you have a retirement plan that contains stock or get any options/stock grants as part of your compensation? Those shares are your ownership stake in corporations and your retirement quite directly depends on those shares increasing in price faster than inflation.
Your point is valid but also quite obvious. As soon as you own stock you will want them to increase in valuation. My point is a different one. Publicly traded stock companies have very specific (growth) and often bad (growth, disregarding other impact) incentives.
Other forms of ownership can provide a stake for talented employees and safeguard their financial Fortune. I believe a cooperative may better align everyone’s incentives for example.
> ... had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.
Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.
There was something of a cliff at certain levels if you didn't get promoted around the third year.
Something about the offer package would subsidize your base pay for a limited number of years until your stock started to vest, to smooth out your pay. However on the third year that subsidy would go away, and depending on the stock performance, your future stock grants could adjust down as well. In practice because the stock had been running up so much pre-2022, by the time the stock vested it was up a good amount.
So if your stock grants & stock price performance after the third year weren't "just so" you could see your TC slip because the salary subsidy went away.
Devil's advocate: no matter how "high barrier" your interview process is, you are 100% going to hire duds, and that's only going to be apparent after a couple months at least. "Ideally", the interview process would be those first couple months, but that is illegal and/or not socially accepted.
There’s plenty of people who lose motivation to work hard and want to just coast while taking very high salary. Happens in professional sports teams, happens in tech.
There's something to be said, after an initial "reduction in force" happens, for the remaining employees to look ahead and go: OK so I and my team may be at X% risk of layoffs, but with decent-to-good-to-sometimes-excellent severance pay and at least no prospect of dehumanizing PIPs/whatever, I am happy with those odds.
Better than a pervasive dread amongst the whole workforce.
> But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.
If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.
I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while.
While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
I read through the article expecting this, but... if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?
> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.
> ...
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.
> if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?
I don't think you get it. The way this stuff is done is just as described - totally blindsiding, and potentially flat-out gaslighting. There's no actual metrics or data until they fabricate a paper trail and force you out.
You don't win these things. Rather, you take your money and go elsewhere. Then turn down the subsequent job offers you get from them, using them only as leverage to juice your pay elsewhere with a competing offer ;-)
But it sounds like he won? He got his $200k and found a new job before any PIP was implemented? Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?
Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?
The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.
I disagree, this is not some junior manager drinking the company cool aid. They are a middle manager with hundreds of indirect reports - in HR, no less - fully aware of what they're doing and with a metric to hit.
So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
So, good? The employee recognizes that the employer is just screwing around with everyone, seems like a FAFO situation; I hope Amazon has this happen endlessly.
To the point here: I think people think these managers are in a position of real power. They are not. They are cogs in the wheel as are their subordinates. It's entirely possible this manager wasn't even the one doing the direct ranking, sometimes this roles up to levels beyond where the manager can give real input. Someone has to get pipped as the system demands it, it happened to land on the person in the article. The manager is then trying to get them out of it because they believe they don't actually require the pip.
So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).
I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.
How can they be maintaining these completely antithetitical interests, like wjy do they want to arbitrarily fire the person at all if they have already evaluated that person to be worthy of retention? Why is this even on the table in the absence of any failure to meet whatever metrics?
Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
I assume there are different competing priorities at play that converge in particularly dumb ways sometimes.
Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.
Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.
Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.
Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.
> Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
> Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?
The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.
The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".
To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.
His manager was likely upset because the guy left before he was put on the PIP and so wouldn't count towards the HR VP's (and by extension his manager's) 6% goal.
Most people are probably going to eventually leave their company anyway. If they can do so more or less on their own terms, that counts as more of a win than a loss.
Bingo. Remember, one of the key points of a PIP is to gather documentation. When they sit you down for The Meeting, the 'evidence' is already on record, reducing your leverage should you decide to pursue them legally later for something like wrongful termination. Then, they often dangle a pittance in the form of severance pay if you go ahead and exit right away, of your own free will and volition. This gets even worse if the person is on a H1B.
How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
Generally yes. Being PIP'ed or otherwise softly managed out is worse than being immediately fired.
Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done.
PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager and maybe the employee. (Depends on whether they are actually even aware they're a bad fit or not, and whether they're well-intentioned or not.)
Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Suddenly (as described in the parent article) they're being hit with complaints they've never heard before. Maybe there's substance, maybe not. It's a major blow to self-esteem and it's a dragged out process. They're not even given the satisfaction of a quick firing where they can be angry and done. It's a long suffering.
And to make the managers do this stuff - it's awful. Having to lay somebody off when a company RIFs people sucks. Having to fire people usually sucks unless they've really earned it. But telling a manager they have to PIP a percentage of their team arbitrarily and participate in this gaslighting process is simply evil.
> Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.
I went through the process
there. The process gave me months to prepare for another job and by the time the official PIP happened, I was more or less waiting on it to get my severance.
I could have quit anytime during the process and had other opportunities waiting for me. I was offered another job before my 10 days of paid time off elapsed let alone my 3+ months severance and I survived through a vesting event.
At almost 50 years old and Amazon being my 8th job out of now nine, why would I wrap my esteem on my job? It was just my 8th time to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.
My dad had a government job where the move was to enforce all contractual obligations rigorously, remove any benefits provided, and give them absolutely 0 work to do.
He had a disagreement with his manager (let's leave it at that, heh), and over the next week, his arrangement to work from a different office (the rest of his team were based in this office too, just his department's office was technically somewhere else) was removed, his flex was removed, he was taken off all projects, and told that using his computer for non-work purposes was a disciplinary offence.
He had a 90 minute each way commute, was required to be clocked in between 9:30 and 4:30 every day (not 9:31, 9:30), required to work 37.5 hours, requests for using TOIL due to commute or other issues were immediately denied, no work to do, and not being allowed to use the computer in his office. The resolution was he found someone in a different department in the city we lived in that had the exact same thing happen to them, and they negotiated a swap with each other and things got better again.
==
Point being, these processes are a combination of ass-covering, parallel construction, and outright abuse. Nobody deserves to be treated like he was (or like people are being treated in these PIP programs), it would be more humane for everyone if we did something different.
Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.
If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.
To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.
And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.
This reminds me of the big piece years ago talking about employees crying at their desks from the pressure. People joked about it, and to be fair, it wasn't that common.
Reality is, you wanted to find a conference room or the bathroom for that.
Let's not forget that in order to use said documentation legally later, you would potentially run the risk of violating company policy on confidential information disclosure.
i was given the option to take 1 month PIP or take 1 month severance. I took severance but not quite sure why they offered me pip. I am guessing something do with unemployment benefits?
You did the correct thing. The PIP is to cover their butt that you really were a bad employee and you were not wrongfully terminated. The laws vary wildly state-to-state but generally if you're PIP'ed out you can't claim unemployment or wrongful termination.
In many jobs "in earlier times" there were for-cause clauses negotiated into contracts and you could not be fired without management proving that you had done something wrong, even after you had been through a negotiated disciplinary process.
Late stage? This is SOP for many large companies going back decades. The tech companies are just sort of new to it and gave it a new name. Many companies in the 70s/80s/90s famously had their 10% culling every year. Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no. But is something you should expect from companies. They are not your friend or buddy or partner, no matter what lies they tell you. They are the people who pay you to do work.
In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.
Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.
> Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no.
Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).
And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.
> demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.
If you instead move laterally and look at other "modern" countries, instead of temporally, it's easy to see how the working class and more is getting exploited in the US.
Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.
I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.
I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement
I'm guessing you're a US-native then? Where this salary/work obsession seems a lot stronger than around here (South-West Europe).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
You aren't sitting on a beach playing guitar with your friends if you get a tech job in Germany, you're doing the same boring pain-in-the-ass dead-end work either way. Just with less threat of being randomly fired or mistreated, which isn't even particularly intimidating or stressful when you're sitting on an enormous nest egg
Since you avoided the question, I'm guessing I was spot on :)
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
> How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.
We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.
This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.
You're going into a bad, boring place for 8 hours a day. You're pissing away your precious time on earth while lying to yourself that it's a "balance" and you're happy about it.
If this was real, then the people I know at the companies paying Valley money wouldn't be handcuffed to continuing to work late into their lives. And that's not to omit the many, many software professionals throughout the United States for whom a $70K USD salary is actually pretty good due to accidents of geography and credentialism.
As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.
> This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
They're being paid half as much but they're much better off because world-class health care and education are effectively free. And if they have a job it's much harder to fire them and leave them twisting in the wind.
This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.
It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
I'm not comparing this against history, this is clearly illegal behavior, yet no legal professionals will touch it because Amazon has just so much money to throw at their legal defense it is not possible to combat their clearly illegal behavior.
There was a brief moment in North America where almost every worker belonged to a union but employers hadn't figured out offshoring yet. The adjustment definitely was hard on American workers, but the fact that it came with a huge benefit to developing country workers is conspicuously overlooked by most of the 'late stage capitalism' narrative.
Amazon has a weird vesting schedule (40% in the third and fourth year IIRC) and it has gone up quite a lot over the last few years. It also appears to have yearly vests. This doesn't seem implausible under those conditions.
They used to have a salary cap of $165k until 1.5 years ago, I’m not sure what the cap is now but it’s significantly higher.
I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.
So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.
So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.
After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.
So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number?
> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
No, she isn't necessarily lying but just making it seem as if she would have received $200K over a single vest while it would have likely happened over at least 2 years and 4 vests.
I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.
You’re just out of touch with how much people can make in the US.
An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.
This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.
I'm very aware with how much people can make per year in the US.
A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.
6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.
Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.
The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.
A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.
And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.
IIRC, truly well performing employees there can get very good stock. Amazon hates giving out cash. For a time, even during interviews, they would brag that even Bezos himself didn't make more than about $160k in base pay annually. Stock, stock, and stock are used for incentivization, and Amazon has indeed had some very good market performance over time.
Well, it seems what the interviewed person is saying is that "Day X I didn't have the money in my bank account. I waited for Day Y, and now I have \"couple hundred thousand dollars\" in my bank account", which sounds like it didn't happen over 2 years and 4 vesting occasions. But maybe it's just worded weird.
They had direct reports in HR so you might be on the mark in terms of ladder just more in the HR camp with OP as a senior manager where they combined their bonus and vest payouts? You'd just have to be a bit above Staff to hit 200k with bonus and a single vest.
I was offered a position with near-enough 100k per quarter.
With amazon, a quarter is the financial decision making resolution.
And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.
But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.
(obvious throwaway account) I had a similar experience in Amazon, ngl the thing about "precendent caching" is real. People have to be put on PIP regardless of performance so management set crazy standards that people will fail.
Maybe it was that the manager was being pressured to PIP a certain percentage of people, and instead pushed back really hard to retain this person because they wanted to retain them instead. Before spending their political capital, they asked the employee if they were committed to the long haul.
In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.
The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.
No, a PIP is about creating a culture of fear, so that management can PIP anybody with no or manufactured reasons, and control workforce with loss of job.
And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.
> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term
That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.
Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.
Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.
The mechanism I'm trying to describe is when employers pay a base in X dollars and stock in Y dollars which takes Z years to mature. AWS sounds like they're being somewhat reasonable about it by giving an employee cash before their options mature, but I have interviewed at places (Envestnet in New York City) where I was offered a base comp which was meh and then options which were gonzo. The offer, if I remember correctly, was $105k/y base and then $100k/y in stock which took three years to vest. I passed on the offer because $105k/y in NYC was cutting it too close for me. They did not have a "cash float" mechanism.
Amazon typically offers cash bonuses during the first 2 years that bring total comp up to a similar amount in the years where 40% of stock vests. They manage towards a target compensation number. The stock vest schedule just changes the mix of cash vs. stock.
Given they backfill the first two years with grant value bonuses, this is irrelevant: the first two years just pay straight cash to make up those % to 100. First year is an up front payment, second is monthly payments. If anything that vest schedule retains people for those two years rather than being a way to pay less.
The last two 40% chunks vest at 6 month intervals. Amazon’s RSU comp also vests in 6 month intervals (May and November). If you’re in year 3, you could be waiting on a vest that includes signing bonus comp and regular comp RSUs.
If this isn't an open admission that it's such a shitty place to work, that they have to withold your pay to trap you there once you work it out for yourself, I don't know what is.
Places that provide good working environments don't need to trap their employees into staying.
If they did this even once how is that not criminal fraud? Proformance isn’t subjective, if an employee lies and says my proformance is bad that’s a crime.
I was your everyday ordinary CRUD developer in 2020 with leading a few projects under my belt at mostly unknown companies who had two years of AWS experience and was 46 years old.
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for a software engineering position.
At 46 years old there were a number of problems I saw with that “opportunity”:
- I hadn’t done a real coding interview ever and had no desire to spend a few months “grinding leetcode”
- I had no desire to have the thought of moving from my nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to move to Seattle “after Covid lifted”
- I had no desire to uproot my life to work at Amazon knowing their reputation both from reading online and seeing what one of my best friends went through working in the finance department.
But we kept talking and she suggested I apply for a role at AWS Professional Services it would be fully remote and more inline with my experience.
I said sure why not? I got the job knowing from day one it wasn’t going to be a long term thing.
Long story short, I went in with a plan. It was my 8th job out of college and my sixth since 2008.
I made my money, got PIPed 3 years later, got a nice severance package and had a job in 3 weeks. Yes it pays about 20% less in total comp. But the lack of stress is well worth it.
If I had known things were going to turn out like they did:
I still would have worked for Amazon. It was just my 8th job out of nine and another method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Nothing more nothing less.
Yep, Assuming you will be fired eventually and will have to fall back to a normal CRUD job is the right play when taking these high pressure, high salary roles. Any idea why you were PIPed after 3 years?
I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better.
On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements
Honestly, I didn’t look at the reasons why I was put on PIP on the remedies to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the paperwork.
As soon as my manager starting discussing them, I interrupted them and asked how much was my severance. After they told me 40K+ and paid out vacation, I asked where do I sign?
I knew someone would hire me. By the time the conversation came up, I already had a side contract with a former manager/CTO waiting in the wings for $135/hour. I also knew the director of a major non tech company who was willing to create a position paying more in cash than I was making in all at Amazon to lead the cloud transition and architecture.
We had worked together at AWS and he was the one that suggested I wait for the PIP. I ended up not taking his offer because I didn’t want the stress of the job even though I would have loved working with him again.
My compensation now is somewhere on the high side between CRUD developer and BigTech software dev. I can easily go up after a couple of years if I care too.
I’m working full time at a consulting company because I really don’t want the hassle of going independent.
I also just signed as soon as I knew what they were after. I just asked how much I was getting. No need to put yourself through this. I was a high performer and had been juggling up to 4 jobs by that time and was about to go on my first vacation after 14 months. They said "I looked a bit tired."
Obviously my vacation became an extended vacation instead.
I got a text a few months afterwards where they asked how I had made it look so easy. I'm still perplexed by the whole ordeal. But it was probably for the best anyways.
I don't know if this feels like I'm diminishing your accomplishments, but it's nice to hear your advancement out of CRUD development in your 40s. I'm mid 30s now and have always struggled to get out of this web development rut and jobs that pay $100k despite having 8+ years experience (which is admittedly lackluster) and multiple senior titles.
Thanks for link - it sounds like you had some good non-CRUD experience to be able to discuss that intelligently with him.
Honestly I wish I could find a place to work where I felt like I was friends with people there. I've never had a coworker that was a friend :( But I also work at pretty small companies and they've tended to not have great culture. I'd take a $100k coding job there
> I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better.
Quite similar for me at Red Hat, as a Product Manager in what the company loves to tout as being an Engineering-led company.
Engineering had an idea for a smaller product that would be a part of our platform. They created some requirements docs, did a little planning and got approval from Engineering leadership to allocate some resources for a 3 month development of a prototype/POC. At this point, PM did not even know of the existence of this project.
At the end of the three months, it was decided to continue exploring it for another three months. That was when PM was introduced. I was told to do all the research and prep work, product/market fit, customers, even identify potential stakeholders the product could use (there had been none until then). I expressed concern about shoehorning things into what they'd already been building, versus actually doing objective research and planning. I was told that I needed to be a "passionate advocate" for my products.
So I went through the process as best I could, and I saw some potential for it starting to emerge. But not enough to continue beyond the six months. When that was agreed, I was then talked to about how I'd "wasted" six months of engineering resources on a product that "should never have been started". There were a lot of references to "I" over things and decisions that I'd never been a part of.
This was common at Red Hat, in my area. It even happened to me another time. During an Engineering reprioritization/resource allocation, it was decided by Engineering leadership that they had no resources to allocate to a feature a small team had previously been working on. I shopped around, tried to find a new home for it (the feature) but without success.
So I as the PM made an announcement that we were discontinuing our support of this feature. After all, an engineering product with no engineers is not a viable product. That at least got some people interested, and some fired up. "We didn't know this would be the result!" (How didn't you know? You decided to allocate zero resources to it).
And then I got told by PM leadership "You incorrectly decided to cancel this product, leading to the BU having to scramble to find resources to undo your decision."
Bet your ass PM leadership received a flurry of forwarded emails where it was made very clear that Eng had removed resources, and that that had caused the cancelation, not the other way around. And that they had not consulted Product prior to doing so. But still, these things also then lead to my PIP.
> On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements
My PIP, which was also a setup. Documented by me elsewhere here, but essentially, my manager actively lied to me and HR that he'd reviewed all my work products through the PIP process, when Maury voice GDocs access review determined that was a lie (most of them had a "Never viewed" next to his name).
ProServe has different specialities - security, DevOps, mainframe migration, call centers (AWS Connect), ops, migrations etc.
Not all of the specialties require coding. Mine happens to be “application modernization”. Which really means that I had no specialty and that I could meld application development/architecture with cloud technology and jump into anything if needed on a high level and bring in specialists when needed.
There are some areas of AWS where I was really good and one specific niche where I’m objectively the best in the industry when it comes to automating a very complicated service - I worked with the service team to beta test the APIs and I did and open sourced the reference implementation around it.
My interview process was all behavioral. The “system design” portion was my walking through real world implementations I did and explaining choices and tradeoffs. Heck one of the interviews I spent the entire time discussing an earlier Hashicorp Nomad/Consul and Mongo based Master Data Model project that had nothing to do with AWS.
Many years ago, when I worked in high finance, it was common knowledge that 3-5% of the staff would be fired every 1-2 years, all at once. This created a lot of tension every time rumours swirled that the "culling" was coming up. But, when you were fired, you were simply given a phone call, out of the blue one day, told to come to an office, and then offered a severance package based on your years of service, and escorted out of the building. At the end of one of those days, everyone not called breathed a sigh of relief. (And some who were not called, but didn't really want to stay either, secretly wished they were called.)
As cold-hearted as this practice is, it seems downright humane vs putting 3-5% of staff on a PIP or "Pivot" or whatever, and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture) that this has something to do with individual performance rather than systematic payroll cost control at the corporate finance level.
> and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture)
Psychological torture is there by design and not as a side effect.
I've been working closely with Amazon sellers for more than a decade, when I first heard how they stressed out employees I thought it fit the image that we had from our end, as sellers, perfectly.
I've come to suspect that Amazon has behavioral scientists and psycologists working on how to build the most threatening way possible to communicate, to stress sellers out as much as they can, to have them broken at their feet.
They will send emails like "Action required: your listings have been deactivated", for simple stuff that require a couple of clicks to fix, and the problem is that it's not like the story of the kid who cried wolf, sellers are terrified when they receive those emails. Sometimes 20-30 families depend on that business and an email like that could mean everyone is out of a job.
That is just an example, this strategy is applied in such a consistent manner through their communications that it puts it beyond doubt that it's done on purpose.
And please, don't be heartless to say, that's what you get when you your company depends on a big corp. I've seen that thrown around here when so many can get their lives turned upside down by Google or Apple too.
If you are put on a PIP, at least you have some time to start looking for a new job. The takeaway seems to be, one on a PIP, put all your effort into finding the next job rather than trying to keep your current one.
I guess there's also a chance of someone snapping and doing something bad in bad faith as an act of revenge. Especially that from what I understand PIP/Pivot basically means you're out.
if you don't pass the PIP, you often get blacklisted and won't ever get hired again. so if you get another job and quit, say good bye. If the new company you work for get's acquired, you will be let go and won't be integrated back into the fold.
It's about liability management I think. The company can show a judge that "they did all they can" while like the same time gathering a paper trail on the employee.
This has probably already been said, but places that mandate that X% of people need to be put on performance improvement plans are not great. This can force managers (or HR, depends on who decides the PIP) to put otherwise good engineers or staff on PIP when they are perfectly fine employees - they may not be 10x, perfect, and can just be doing what they need to do to do their jobs, but they still aren't doing anything wrong and end up on a PIP because the company is forcing them to put atleast some percentage of people on it each year
"Radical Candor" calls it rocks & rock stars. You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks) just as much as you need highly motivated people looking to work up the ladder into leadership positions (rock stars).
> You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks)
Exactly, there was no winning at the early 2000s Real Madrid full of rock stars (Zidane, the original Ronaldo, Figo, Beckham etc) until a rock like Makelele came around in the midfield. I'm surprised that the business luminaries have stopped seeing this basic fact, maybe it's because of the monopoly/oligopoly positions where they've managed to put themselves in and which makes them impervious to how badly their teams are run.
I completely agree. Plus, part of Amazon's candidate evaluation is to consider whether they are (or clearly have potential to be) better than 50% of your peers, as part of the hiring bar. Between that and stack-ranking/forced-attrition, even previously high-performing employees can one day find themselves on the chopping block.
And don’t you end up with hire-to-fire practices as a result of this? Hire a lame employee just so they can be the one on the chopping block; preserving your actual valuable team members?
Yeah, but why do that when you can hire someone good, get good work out of them, then toss them on the chopping block, preserving your 'actual' valuable team members?
> That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning. They blew a gasket — absolutely blew a gasket
I don't understand how someone could be responsible for a policy that puts people's livelihood at risk under the headline of "just business things" and not expect the same treatment from their employees. "sorry boss - just looking out for my shareholder: me"
The manager was probably mad because they wasted a PIP on someone else. From other accounts here I've seen that if your manager gets any inkling that you are leaving they will throw a PIP on you to meet their quota.
Yes. In the story it sounds like they talked their manager out of putting them on Pivot (aka PIP):
> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me
So the manager probably put someone else on Pivot to meet their quota and when the author left now they are down two people. If they knew the author was leaving they would have ranked them dead last, put on PIP, and then part of their quota is met.
Also this quote shows the farce that Pivot is. It sounds like the manager did a PIP-before-the-PIP because they actually wanted them to stay and Pivot is just CYA performance for someone on the way out.
I've never worked at Amazon but people talk about Pivot coming with severance, but the author chose to leave for free. Maybe there's some disadvantage to accepting the severance? Not eligible for future rehire if you accept? Maybe it's just too hard to time getting a new job right at the conclusion of the PIP?
I refused to resign when I got put on pivot. But I did prepare. Why walk away from in my case an additional vesting event and 3+ months salary as severance and getting reimbursed for my unused paid time off?
I once had a manager at a temp-to-hire job spend the first 10 minutes of my resignation call swearing angrily about the situation. He clarified that it wasn't anger at me specifically, but it was an impressive fit. Some people don't react well to failure.
I feel like having so little control over your emotions should be an instant rejection from any management position. Swearing angrily in any professional setting is just ridiculous.
Context: yes I got Amazoned a few months ago, see my top level comments.
My livelihood is based on my ability to get a job, keeping my skills current and keeping my network strong. I would never base my livelihood on the whims of one company.
A job is merely transactional. I exchange labor for money. When the company decides my labor is not worth the money they are paying me or I decide that the pay/bullshit ratio is going in the wrong direction, I change jobs and find another company that will give me money for my labor.
I’ve done so 9 times in my career and 6 since 2008.
I'm genuinely curious about this - my best guess is there may be some measurement on the manager's employee retention numbers or similar that would make the manager look bad to have an employee quit.
I've heard so many terrible stories about working at Amazon that I'm not sure I would ever work there, both in the media and from friends who were severely mistreated.
It's a shame, because some of the tech they work on (like S3) is super interesting and high scale, but I do not want to acquire a mental health crisis from work.
I'm morbidly curious, like if I knew I had a solid job waiting for after and didn't have to stress over it going sideways. They'd probably smell my non-seriousness a mile away though and never hire me.
That's just leverage. Nothing non-serious about it. No reason to sacrifice one's life for a corporation when you have better options. They generally don't want people like that, they want people who will sacrifice. People without options.
That's the draw for me. Now that I've adequately licked my wounds from a life where I just never quite had the stability I needed (and got that stability too ofc), I now really want to work for Amazon just to see how hard I can push myself. I've told my wife the current plan is, once she has her degree finished, I'm going to crowbar my way into one of their software engineering departments by any means necessary.
Like what if it turns out you join a team that ranks you more based on politics/caste/luck than any sort of talent or motivation and you just feel trapped in a weird game?
Not really, at least not right now. I know my workplace and a few others are weary of ex-Amazon employees. Usually get picked for interview if there's no one else and gets an extra behavioral round.
For management positions, it better be a internal referral who is willing to vouch for you very highly.
There is an ocean of difference between a workplace located on the West Coast where you have your pick of the litter enough that you can filter out ex-Amazonians, and where I currently am, working as a tech lead on railway software in some city in Finland.
We should normalize tech companies vesting monthly.
Everything else is a scam to pretend like you have good wages when you really don't.
I get at startups - there's some artificial need to keep the number of people on the cap table low. I'm not sure why one of the cap lines can't be "EMPLOYEE EQUITY" which is a company (like a VC company) where the shares are distributed by that company to the employees in accordance with their contracts...
This is a problem that could definitely be solved, but like most "problems" - it's working as intended - to give employers the optionality to clawback your equity if it ever really does become worth a ton and they don't like you.
I don't really understand how someone can work in HR at a place like Amazon for so long and then claim to be surprised that Amazon is actually very evil.
Or that we are somehow supposed to feel sympathetic for someone who has profited to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars perpetuating this soul-crushing machine. No.
I'm a manager and have been forced to apply similar PIP process to my team and it is truly horrible when the folks are forcefully put in the lowest performance just to satisfy the projected yearly budget. The 2-3 month improvement process is hogwash and hardly anyone survives it, PIP means they're 90% going to be axed.
I wonder if fired employees could take a class action lawsuit against these types of procedures. If acceptable performance is altered relative to how many people need to be let go, and there is data showing that few survive the PIP (Employers claim that the intended effect is to help the employee improve performance) then surely that's evidence that the so called Performance Improvement Plan is a sham.
There's no grounds for a lawsuit, not in the states. They can legally fire you for nearly any reason or for no reason whatsoever. All PIPs do is help the company fend off claims that the employee was fired for an illegal reason (e.g., for being a member of a protected class, retaliation, etc.)
PIPs would do that if the process was valid, but as pointed out, they are not. So if they defend against a claim of racism, sexism, castism, or ableism, with “but PIP!”, then it helps if we can show that PIPs are bullshit.
Pretty much like clockwork when the company I'm at gets large enough to have an HR "department" that does more than process payroll, I'm making calls and doing interviews. It's never worth it. When the headcount gets over Dunbar's number I don't have a place there.
> My manager was super mad and asked me when I was leaving. I said two weeks.
Serious question for Americans as maybe this is cultural: They're an at-will employee, seemed to already have a new job lined up and the company seemed to have burned all goodwill with them, why not resign effective immediately?
You can, and I have, but it's customary for 2 weeks so there is time for finishing tasks, writing docs, performing knowledge dumps, etc. I've left a toxic job effective immediately. But, if it's an "ok" job that I'm leaving, giving 2 weeks is a good way to keep a positive relationship. I've left just for more money, or to have a shorter commute. In which case, I'd like to keep a positive relationship with those companies in case I ever want to go back. Not giving 2 weeks is a red flag for our HR friends
Also, as an employee, those two weeks are easy-street. Leaving early and long lunches are the norm.
That's like a cultural quirk they have over there, where even though it's not stipulated by law, people need to stay at the place they're leaving for two weeks, no matter what, otherwise the optics are really bad, for whatever reason. But it only works one way, if you get fired you usually get fired immediately, no two weeks to find something else.
In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short stick for so long that they don't even know what fair working conditions look like anymore.
I had never thought of it that way, but you're right— firing is immediate but employees always feel the obligation to stick around for two weeks.
It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.
You may have colleagues or reports who you genuinely like and don't want to burn or over-stress by just leaving without warning. That's the way I see it. If I truly despised everyone I worked with I'd consider just leaving immediately if I had to opportunity, otherwise 2 weeks.
Also if you just leave it may be harder to get a decent reference from your colleagues for future jobs.
Assuming your last paycheck includes those two weeks, that's (almost certainly, in context) an $X,000 difference in what you walk away with. I could probably stomach hanging around for an extra fortnight even if X was quite small.
Personally, if it's a job I really dislike, I don't mind losing the extra $X,000. I've discovered through the years my mental health is worth a lot more. Once you leave a high-paying job for one that pays less, or even to just take a break and earn nothing, you start thinking about these sorts of little extras as inconsequential at best.
If the next job pays more than the last one, you could say it's a net loss for the employee too, since that's an extra two weeks one could've earned more.
But if neither of those apply, it's probably worth it to hang around and get some extra cash, or just get a couple more weeks of hanging at the job with "graduation goggles" and little work stress, yeah.
Having the end in sight is a huge factor. Two weeks of just more grind in a terrible job? No thank you. Two weeks of counting down the days until freedom? Definite maybe. But yes, NPV of the first couple of weeks of the next job might be important.
yes, showing up and doing nothing and getting paid for it. imo worse deal for the company than the employee but gives company opportunity for project handoffs.
Oftentimes companies that lay employees off (i.e. fire them) offer a severance package where the company continues to pay your salary and offer some benefits for a period of time after you no longer work for them. Just like the two-week notice, it is not mandatory where I live in the US. I just wanted to highlight that a company paying severance as a reciprocal perk to the employee giving a two-week notice.
Of course, severance is not universal, but, in my experience in the tech sector, having survived five lay offs at three companies and having been laid off once myself, it has been the case.
> I mean, it depends on what you need. If someone quit without notice, I’d still be a referral for them if they were good.
But wouldn't you claim that this is not a very common view to hold about the process of quitting, in the US? I've lost count how many times I've heard managers/executives being pissed off because an employee left without a two week notice, and they treat that happening as some sort of failure, instead of just a normal thing.
Of course you get let go immediately. Who wants a fired employee to linger for 2 weeks? That would be an awkward half month. Otoh, companies usually pay a minimum of 2 weeks salary.
I've put in two weeks notice a couple times. It's polite. It's not loyalty to the company, it's loyalty to my colleagues, and the opportunity to close out a chapter of my life with finality. It lets me say goodbye to people on my team, finish up projects which, for personal pride, I want to leave in a good place, and document things I've done for the people who will pick up my work. I could care less how it affects the company, but to the extent that I care about my own work, I don't want to just abandon it. The reality is that, if other people don't give two weeks notice, I understand, and I'm not mad at them. And sure, the company would not afford their employees the same respect, but then I don't expect them to behave with decency. I know how it works. But, it feels like the right thing to do for me.
If in a PIP you can actually improve the thing in question, then the PIP is useless and your manager failed to communicate it to you properly.
In all other cases a PIP is not passable. Nobody becomes a significantly better engineer in 2 months if they haven't in their career so far, with the only new factor in the 2 months being "now you have extra pressure and a clock ticking".
Well, you also have the case of very competent engineers underperforming due to stuff happening outside home.
Martial problems, family problems, health problems, depression, addiction, and what not.
Not saying that two months is enough to resolve those problems, but if for whatever reason such engineers are able to finally block those stressors, and bring their A-game to "beat" the PIP, then that should absolutely be a good reason to keep them aboard.
A PIP should not be a delayed 2-month firing process. It should be a legitimate chance for someone to improve.
I disagree, having been on both sides of PIPs. Not all PIP reasons are about not being a certain level of engineer. Sometimes it's about behaviors or the lack of them. In some cases, the forcing function of a strict timeline with high stakes attached is what people need. Usually not, but sometimes yes. Anyway, it's a tool that's to be used as a last resort, 99% of performance cases should have a much lighter solution before they escalate.
If you told them clearly about the behaviors and you need to start a PIP, I assume you took a few weeks to tell them and waited at least a few more weeks until you started the PIP, and if the behavior kept going for all this time, again, I can't see how the PIP will help anything other than being "this is what we do before we fire someone".
2. Involves a 3rd party (yes, yes, we can argue that HR is not your friend, etc.), which _can_ help with the trust (it's not just you & me anymore, you not knowing how I twist my story of you)
I get all the skepticism. I simply have different experience.
Yes I agree it does does 2 things, but remember my argument was to qualify that in the cases I mentioned I didn't think a PIP was passable. It doesn't mean you don't still have to do it, and yes, I guess in some extreme cases this raising of the stakes could be the thing that finally makes it "click" for the person that this is important. I just have seen enough PIPs and their pass-rates over a few years that I doubt them as a practical tool to actually get people to pass it. If that was the point companies wouldn't come up with a process with such a low pass-rate and would always be working to tweak the PIP process to increase pass-rates. Of course you might have different experience than this and I'll probably also change my mind if I see different outcomes in other contexts later on in life.
I appreciate the context, and I definitely wasn't trying to say you're not right with your experience! We simply seem to have different experiences, I probably got luckier a bit.
I once had a kind, capable and hard-working boss, who hinted that a few years previously he'd been on a PIP due to being out of his depth in the role, and had managed to claw his way out of it. While I was in his team, he got a, IMHO, well deserved promotion. To my mind, the company basically mistreated him, made him wait years longer than he should to get the promotion. The reason he probably couldn't was lack of formal academic qualifications to job hop with, and possibly risk averse because his wife had walked out and left him with 2 kids. Its seems to me in this case, a bunch of game-playing which helps nobody. Also other people will have noticed how this guy was treated, and responded with the amount of "loyalty" that that employer deserved back.
I will probably get some slack for this, but not ever usage of a PIP is necessarily a bad thing..
The example above and large companies in general do seem to use it as a firing tool or at least pretence.
From experience we had one developer on our team who was gradually just showing less and less interest and quality of work was dropping so much so it was effecting the rest of the team.
I wasn't involved but he was put on a PIP that was quite well layed out and measurable. After the process he was better than before. I can't put it down to the PIP only of course, but as he said it was a way for him to focus on what was wrong and get back into being consistent.
Super rare I'm sure, but just thought I'd at least five one good example of its use case.
The "scheme" as a general HR tool was designed to work like this, was likelky deployed successfully like this. Then someone (I am just going to assume they had a Harvard MBA) realised that it could also be used to save on costly dismissals.
Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.
I work at Amazon and you're right that PIPs are not an issue. But having a certain percentage of people that you HAVE to PIP is.
It simply doesn't make any sense. You can have a team of only high performers and your manager will tell you to fire someone, and if you don't do it it will be you.
This looks like raw material for quotes that would be sprinkled throughout a normal piece of journalism.
Why was this person talking to BI (instead of, say, the NYT or a major metro area news org)? And why did BI publish this sometimes unclear monologue, rather than do more journalism?
(Did BI not want to allocate resources to do a proper piece? Did the source talk to multiple news outlets, and BI wanted to be the first to publish anything at all from it? Did the source insist that BI do this as a condition, and BI didn't tell them to take a hike?)
I worked there for 8 years (both retail and AWS) and loved it and never experienced a toxic environment. Consider that the anecdotes that are published by the media may not be representative of everyone's experiences.
In the warehouses...well, nobody else is hiring those kinds of headcounts. And few of the people taking those jobs are in any position to be picky.
For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".
But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide).
As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing.
You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?
The narrative on HN is almost always driven by negativity so I wouldn't presume that things posted here are representative of the actual working conditions at corporate, or exclusive to Amazon.
Of, both things can be true you know? I worked there, left for various reason, don't regret my years there and even considered going back. Why? Because most other places, and I have seen quite a few, are similar, Amazon is just up front, hobest and open about it. And, even more important, they follow their own rules, meabing as an emoloyee I can play the game as well since the rules are kind of known. Most other places, there either are no rules, or they are used totally at will by management.
I prefer honesty, even or especially, when cruel, about being stabbed in the back by axe.
Romania? That’s why companies go there and other distant countries. To pay below market rate with huge press support. I experienced it first hand from Continental and Hella. If I have the same job in Germany, I will get normal salary. If I take job in eastern branch, I will get 1/3 salary. And local companies offered me 1/2. Obviously I stayed in Germany.
Faang salary only exists on the US. Even the richest countries in Europe don't have those salaries for programmers (maybe if you work on finance or some niche subject).
On average, I would say a senior would get between 3k and 4k euros in RO, at a regular company. It depends a lot on city too. In bucharest salaries should be higher.
Obviously Amazon thinks that mortages can be paid just by flexing their employee badge.
This. For skilled workers, it's still a lot of money if you can't get a job at the other FAANG companies. In the few miserable years you'll be there, you can make a lot of progress towards buying/paying off a house, for instance. If you have a thick skin to not care about a PIP and just shrug off the nonsense, it might be a really good deal.
This completely tracks with regards to some folk I’ve interviewed recently. But then again it’s not an Amazon-specific thing (the process and targets, even if they seem to be a lot more aggressive than what I’ve experienced and talked about with peers in other companies).
A certain Y Combinator startup (two-sided labor marketplace in healthcare and nursing homes) requires that its frontline managers PIP or fire at least half of their team each year and sometimes more frequently. "If you're average, why are you here."
And the managers do because they are terrified about losing their jobs. It has one of the worst cultures, and code bases, in the world, because nobody knows how things work or why decisions got made, and no one trusts their team mates enough to ask questions.
This sort of “manually induced churn” is absolutely god awful for a code base. I’ve seen the exact product of this type of management.
And then, because the code base is so awful, the only productive people are the ones who have been around long enough to avoid the culling, but they’re also dealing with how bad it is, so even their productivity comes to a near-grinding-halt.
and management wonders why nothing is getting done. It must be because they need more engineers… and the cycle continues.
that would make sense - they've reached out to me frequently over the years - seemed a bit desperate. Stopped the interview process the first time after learning what their PM salaries across a couple of levels were from an acquaintance who had recently interviewed there and realized they didn't value engineer's time.
I never worked at Amazon, but I did work at other companies known for toughness and "places you can get fired from" - most notably Bridgewater (from where I did get fired...)
These places are not for everyone, but there are very good reasons why people consciously join a place with an "elevated risk of a PIP."
Most notably, these places execute very well. Amazon is crushing it in vastly unrelated fields from Retail to Cloud. That seems to suggest that their philosophy on performance is more helpful vs hurtful to them in contrast to what others do. Doesn't mean it's perfect, but that perhaps the imperfections are worth it.
Since no system is perfect, a company has to either run the risk of letting good people go, or bad people stay. Amazon has chosen which risk to run and it seems to work for them.
As an employee, there's risk both ways. If you want to grow your skills and comp, your best bet is a place that errs towards strength. In the long run, it might be worth the small risk of let go, to be surrounded by strong performers.
On the flip side, if you are really worried about underperforming and getting fired, Amazon is probably fine with you self-selecting to not apply.
Personally, I took the risk of working at Bridgewater. While I did eventually get fired, those couple of years made me for sure a stronger performer (and person overall) so I am grateful for it. It was the right call but not for everyone.
I work at Amazon and I can tell that it depends on the organization and politics.
Of course nobody is untouchable when it comes to the layoffs, but quite many people have made their spot pretty much resistant to firing. They are crucial for business to continue. (Again, maybe my organization)
Also, it is very common at Amazon; Nobody is doing the job they are hired for. As a developer, you are responsible for anything and everything. Management only deals with PIP and crunching out weekly/monthly/quarterly documents where their management doesn't give a damn about except the summary part.
I do wonder if it would be easier if, say, 3% of people were simply fired each year, perhaps with a 1-3 month notice. It would save the pointless back and forth effort, you wouldn't have to pretend it's about improvement, and the fired people could work on their next steps immediately.
(this is orthogonal to the decision to always fire some percentage - I am merely discussing a different implementation of the same policy, not discussing the merits of the policy)
It’s a terrible place to work but not for the reasons people think.
Being green and fresh is priceless, you can take on any challenge because you don’t yet know the reality of it, and once you get in it, your only way is out, which can be really powerful if put to the right uses.
Amazon puts a good price on that to juice the best years of your life.
Please don’t squander your best years to go from L4 -> L5 or L6 -> L7
That’s not my point. It’s nothing to do with the number.
It’s just not worth the best years of your life, unless you think it is, in which case maybe you should do it, or.. maybe you are undervaluing yourself.
It’s all the same recipe, take on more work, grow L(n-1) under you, be lucky, kiss up to management, and.. be lucky. Even then it’s 4 years at a minimum of grueling work.
I’m not against grueling work, but why not put that effort in for yourself? What are you going to get as an L8, maybe 1M? Is that worth 4 years+ of your prime time life ? Are you really learning all that much? Are you really having all the impact you want in the most meaningful way?
If you think your ultimate purpose is playing the games to get the L(n+1), maybe it’s the right place. But if not.. maybe not?
Given all the stories of PIP, it sounds like a not great place to work
Go to other fang, or other tech. Lots of companies that pay just as well.
Amazon would be my last choice - my job search is going awful, gotten rejected from most big tech companies, and I have well paying Amazon and a long tail of little shit companies that don’t pay that great (think of the equity!!)
When I was at Google, I talked to people who have worked at both.
The general gist of it was: while one got treated better at Google, you got more done -- and had more freedom to choose how to do it -- at Amazon. So depending on the team, potentially higher job satisfaction.
I don't know if that's still the case. Personally if I'm going to sell my soul and work on stuff which isn't my personal passion, it's going to go to the highest and best bidder... but I will admit after 10 years at Google, the slow pace and boredom got to me enough that I quit. Maybe I would not have done that if I'd felt more emotional attachment and productivity in my work, and maybe a place like Amazon could have provided that. But I've heard too many dark tales. (I sure miss that level of money.)
A big name on a resume that can be leveraged into a better, well paying job.
Remember, people who are content don’t leave reviews. I worked with Amazon a lot over the years. There are people there who have been there for a decade+. It wouldn’t happen if they were treated abysmally.
Most of my time there was pretty good, even given the fact I got put on a PIP at one point, which I realistically deserved (lazy kid right out of college). I graduated from the PIP and stayed another couple years, and by the end had paid off a substantial pile of student loans.
One thing I liked was that Amazon puts up less of an act that everyone is one big family. I knew they saw me as a "human resource", and could behave accordingly. It was only when the stress started to follow me home that I got out, only sticking around longer than that to take advantage of the great health insurance for a big procedure.
I've never worked there and never tried to work there ... I dont consider myself anywhere good enough to even try
I have the impression that if you can survive for 4 years, you get some very lucrative wealth building stock options. But I also believe that most people don't actually make it all the way to the end. Kind of like a winning lotto card you get for standing in a boiling shower for an hour
They offered me more money in exchange for my labor than any other company was willing to offer a CRUD developer with AWS experience and above average soft skills. It was also remote. (Professional Services).
The mindset is that you can always find new factory floor operators to push buttons on keyboards and operate ci/cd pipeline interfaces. Software "engineering" is the new factory work. To be automated soon so y'all can be freed to work on important things.
I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".
This truth got blurred by "solving hard problems" and "rock star developer" mantras. I'm sorry but plumbing APIs and building react interfaces is neither of the two. It's all about churning out features (or parts as they used to be called in old days of manufacturing). Even the agile methodologies used are essentially factory floor practices adapted to operating keyboards. The only way to ever be in control is to own a business.
I’ve been telling people on this forum for years that when Jeff Bezos looks down at them from on high (literally from space at one point), he sees them as barely differentiated units of labor. The talk about passion and innovation quickly struck me as just another part of a system to keep employees from thinking too hard about what the job really entails.
If you own the company you are still not in control - you have to worry about customers and a larger company throwing a few people at your product and squashing you like a cockroach
> You had visa-sponsored employees who, once we Pivoted them and moved them out, no longer were authorized to work in the United States.
One of the main reasons I staid out of working in the US, maybe it's just sour grapes at this point (as I'm already in my early 40s that train has long passed) but seeing as how I would have basically been considered just a modern work slave it makes me think that I made the right choice. Also, all the best to the poor people affected by this insanity, I'm sure that they deserved much better.
The problem isn't so much the actual culling. The problem is the tax it puts on everyone for the rest of the year to self-promote and make sure they don't get caught accidentally.
If you put your head down and do great work, you just run the risk of getting out-politic'd, so you've got to do that too. But that makes the political players spend more time on it to make sure they're still ahead of the part time politicians. And it's an arms race of spending time making yourself look good instead of doing work.
It's all about the money, the writer himself mentioned he had 100k's of stock that would vest. When you get into the 100k range of windfalls, people will do all sorts of things, even people you have known for years. That's why sometimes you only see people's true nature when their parents die and estate settlement comes into the picture.
If you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, don't allow the almighty dollar to control your life.
>there were no warning signs. There was no trail of communication saying, "You are underperforming."
I don't know about the U.S but in many countries, I imagine this would be a valid justification to reject a PIP. Take it to an employment tribunal and say: "There was no indication that I was performing anything other than as expected until I was handed a PIP".
This appeal process was handled by the employee themselves. so they probably had an idea of how effective appeals were.
> And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.
That sounds like an internal corporate appeals process, which is as rigged as an East German court. I'm talking about an external state affiliated employment ombudsman.
Yeah for the most part in the US there's very little legal protections in the code that state authorities can use to vindicate an employee. I think the only protections are things like age, sexual, racial discrimination. The PIP itself is designed to gather evidence that the company has a cause to rebut any claim of illegal discrimination. But if you don't start out with one of those claims, it's moot to disprove the cause.
I could be wrong - some more progressive states may have more protections than this. And certainly folks who are employed under collective bargaining agreements have more protections. That wouldn't apply at Amazon, though.
That was my first reading — in every country I've worked (that is not the U.S.), the burden of proof on the employer is very high. Which is not to say that organisations can't find their own ways to fire staff that align with the regulatory environment in which they operate — just, it's very hard for this kind of U.S-style ultra-capitalistic culture to develop.
I largely think that is a good thing. Employers have a disproportionate power over the employees, and having to go through the hurdles to fire a few troublesome employees is well worth the protections afforded to everyone else.
> "Like most companies, we have a performance management process that helps our managers identify who on their teams are performing well and who may need more support. For the small number of employees who are underperforming, we use performance management programs to help them improve, and many employees do just that."
That language is so disrespectful. If I were an Amazon employee reading that, it would feel like being in a toxic, violent relationship and hearing my partner at a party tell others "They're so clumsy; they need my support. They fall down the stairs a lot."
Stack ranking biggest flaw is that it results in managers gaming the system by over hiring to create strategic buffer ftes they can drop if they need to. Which leads to a reoccurring need to use stack ranking and more over hiring.
When you take a job with a large company (and potentially smaller companies too) you are not joining The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, you're a character in The Hunger Games.
Glad I’m not smart enough, nor care to put the work in, to pass a FAANG interview. I’ll stick to stupid crud land tyvm. This PIP behavior is just one more reason I consider their employment a kind of abuse. I’m human and I refuse to be compromised so easily. Pathetic (to me).
Closest I got was an interview at what I’ll call a molar company (want to be FAANG). I asked the HR screener if the technical code interview was based on real world code or just puzzles (I was going to walk if it’s just puzzle code, not good at fake stuff, haven’t practiced, and I wouldn’t be a good fit if that’s what they are looking for). She assured me the eng lead doing the interview used real code. So I call in, get on camera, where they used a coding interview website and it was a small sample with no context. It may have been from their code base but it was scrubbed and meant nothing to me. I asked for context but he said i don’t need it. I asked if i could change integer types to dates but he said no. Oh, and I was recorded but wasn’t told about that until I called in. So I was pretty pissed because I’m staring at a damn puzzle but this guy thinks the whole setup is a-ok. Well, fine. It might be. For them. I felt like I was lied to them provided no concession. So I hummed and hawed with no intention of solving his puzzle. I made him stick out the whole hour. I even explained at one point I wouldn’t write code like that because multiple conditions and multiple code paths converge on 7 lines. I explained the conditional logic was hidden and it would be better if it were more explicit, not just so it’s readable but because simplifying it by expanding the conditions makes it modifiable, supportable, and testable. Nope. I was told it was Ruby and it’s a Ruby thing to reduce logic in fewer lines of code. Yeah I get it. Inventing a complex trick makes you feel smart. I’m so sorry life is so boring to you.
I’m certain I looked like a fool to him. I don’t care. He had mannerisms that screamed “on the spectrum”. I think that’s fine…until smart people are put in charge and never get an ego check. Leading means leading people, not writing code more complicated than everyone else.
I’m obviously still salty about the whole thing. There’s another situation with people from a much larger software company came in and took a big dump at one of the smaller software companies I worked at. At this point I just don’t trust corporatized anything anymore. I think they’re liars. I think they chew up and spit people out. I think they put profit over humanity. I also think I need to go for a walk. Sincere apologies if I’ve offended anyone. Guess I just needed to get that off my chest. I do hope you have a good day.
If anything, calling these abusive companies' practices out is what's needed, including the name of the company and the roles.
When they can hide behind "molar company", yeah, they will never change that practice. Instead, if you said the name, at least we'd know what to keep an eye out for.
Amazon has been known to be a relatively undesirable place to work for those with options. So I’m not surprised at all by this article’s content. If it wasn’t part of the arbitrary FAANG acronym, they’d have a really hard time finding talent.
The Blind app seems to discuss this quite often in the Amazon employee posts that go up. If anyone wants more context and conversation about this topic. I’ve never considered Amazon a place to go after reading some of those posts.
Although I think mandatory rankings and assuming the bottom x% should be exited isn’t great approach, I also don’t think it’s a company or managers job to coach you into being a productive employee.
Yes, they should have direct feedback but overall you are expected to be a professional. This means you are accountable for your work - you do what you say you will. That you express concern early and not late in the process. That you deliver quality outputs that your peers respect. That you assimilate to team culture and participate it and that you are a net positive to morale - your team wants to work with you.
Managers lay out expectations but they aren’t babysitters. Not all managers are good of course. A good one should be able to nudge you back on course and build a rapport, but they can’t be expected to make you a professional.
I know you are getting downvoted but the real question is: What is a manager's job? If it is not to code, not to understand systems, not to design, not to coach, not to help the team - what is it exactly?
"It depends". A managers job is to understand the business and what the strategy and ultimate goals of the business are and to direct their organization in such a way that contributes to this. This means staffing, equipping, training a team and then ensuring that the best possible objectives are being met that contribute to the larger organizational objectives. To ensure their cog is functioning optimally. That their KPIs are being hit effectively and that they make sense.
They should ensure the right code is being written and that it's of high quality and know who is contributing what. They should design and use metrics to measure this. They should nurture, yes, but they aren't a parent. But yes they should identify when a team member is coming up short and help them get on track but the contributor needs to come equipped with the basic skills - which is the managers responsibility to judge during hiring. To be sure, a manager who tends to have trouble with low performing contributors they've hired usually shows the managers is ineffective at hiring.
It's naive to think that these decisions are made by HR, and not, your organistion's leadership — your building stuff set by the leadership, and the HR team are executing policy as set by the leadership.
100% of all the departments they seem to be the ones who have the least amount of clue about the business, the product, etc.
At my current company we had a massive, make-it-or-break-it deliverable for the spring. It was literally all departments coming together for a whole year and trying to get this thing done on time.
All, but HR. All HR cared about was to make sure managers would pester their report to put their 3 annual goals in [random HR system] before [random day in March]. HR like to see people as interchangeable cogs but that's because that's what they are themselves.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
What exactly are people in HR doing to warrant getting over $200k in stock grants? Even spread over an entire vesting schedule (and it's not, it's just the final vest) that's ludicrous for the work they do.
If someone in HR can save a company hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars by removing underperforming workers, and replacing them with better workers, shouldn't that warrant some bonus?
In the same way that if some engineer discovers a bug that is costing the company a lot of money, and fixing it, should also get a bonus?
Neither is laying concrete but those guys aren't getting a quarter million in stock every 4 years, despite having a more positive effect on the economy.
Reminds me of the bank robbery scene in "The Dark knight", in which every "clown" robber is supposed to kill the previous robber to increase the share, and each robber doesn't realize they could fall prey to the same fate.
In the UK you can be fired for any or no reason, except a specifically illegal reason, until you have 2 years of service. It's like at-will employment but with a notice period.
Given they worked for Amazon for several years, I assume they would no longer fall in that category. At which point some of what they allege happened would probably fall under constructive dismissal.
> I still wonder about what happened to all the people that went through that process. How did it impact their life? I think it leads to a lot of mental-health issues.
IMO this is a key issue with this system. The company evidently only cares about the employee as long as they're employees, and can dispose them and forget about them, like they'd dispose any other leftover resource.
But evidently said people are still around. If every company adopted a system like this, in theory it'd be great for the economy. It's capitalism, and you're getting rid of the people who sell you the least effective labour in an easily scalable way.
In practice, all these companies are pumping out a lot of stress, and it's thus no surprise the USA is notoriously burdened by mental health issues when compared to other high-income countries [1].
Yes, managers do. This article is about a manager who got PIPed. From the article, "So my manager took away all my direct reports, and shoved me into a small box, and said you could do this and try to work yourself out of it."
No? I've seen it work countless of times, employees either getting fired and the PIP is cited as the reason why, or the PIP process is so toiling on the employee that they quit by themselves.
Seems to work exactly for the purpose it was created, to force out employees one way or another.
I'm sorry, but this is why FAANG are such trash companies that can't achieve anything of substance. Their employees are too busy playing games to get anything done. This practice is like setting up a museum with priceless artifacts and explicitly saying to the night watchman "if you can get away with stealing from us you can have it, also you're probably going to get fired next quarter"
In any normal sized business this would be an absolute disaster. FAANG has to spend like triple on talent for people to be ok with this nonsense. Why not just treat people like people?
Google doesn’t have the attention span of a crack addled flea, I’ll be the first to admit that.
But Microsoft is doing some interesting things to productize its partnership with OpenAI.
You think all Apple did was “build a CPU?”. You can literally walk around with a 64 bit computer on your wrist that has cellular, WiFi, BT, GPS, a bunch of sensors and it can track workouts.
When I first got into fitness over a decade ago, a humongous much less capable Garmin was the state of the art and you had to wear a chest strap to monitor your heart rate.
If all a company has to do is license ARN tech, why is Apple so far ahead?
I got Amazoned a few months ago (I got a job in three weeks, don’t cry for me). While they are a shit company to work for, were you around before AWS when it took months and tens of thousands of dollars to build our infrastructure and you can now provision infrastructure by writing some yaml? They are also designing thier own processors.
I know first hand the type of technology that AWS has. Even Amazon retail and the logistic it takes to ship at that speed and volume is a modern miracle .
Facebook basically stopped competitors like TikTok and Snaps growth by rapidly competing with Reels.
I mean, HR is disgusting in general. You're basically a double agent. The companies tell employees that HR is there to help them, but HR is only there to help the company.
Hmm, most top comments appear to construe this as some sort of anti-labor tactic. As someone who has seen them in action and actually sorta been on one, that seems super alien to me. If anything these plans are way too soft and pro-worker...
1) My own story is that in mid 20ies I was arguing a lot with teammates. I think there's some blame on both sides but most was on mine. There was one person who I think was a not very competent schemer (~confirmed later anonymously by other coworkers) who really set me off with poor technical decisions pushed thru with what I saw as dishonest ways, but overall the team was fine... being a junior developer I was willing to die on way too many hills and I wasn't nice about it either. So they put me on this thing where my coworkers would assess me anonymously, and it came out saying I am great to ok all around but my communication skills are terrible. Then they gave me a bad review and started pushing me towards some online courses and stuff to improve, and saying how it's a risk for my career etc. The job was getting boring and I didn't want to climb uphill from the bad review so after 6 months or so I just left. And I definitely saw the errors in my ways and the negative impact on the team and ~never behaved like that again on my future jobs.
But my point here is... why would they do it if they were anti-me? The most logical way to deal with this situation is to fire me and forget about the whole problem. They actually ended up helping my career in other companies cause if they just fired me, instead of doing the plan song and dance, I'd probably be filled with rightful indignation instead of learning. I don't see how the whole perf plan was some sinister anti-labor move.
Another 2 situations, to contrast.
2) In a big tech co, joined a new team and there was some guy doing almost no work. Like I'd walk into his office to ask a question and he was fiddling with fantasy sports. I am pretty sure he had to be on some plan... but as far as I understand (it was before me) it took at least a year for him to leave/be fired. As opposed to...
3) In a small Russian co, we hired a guy and he was not very productive. Getting ahead, similar to (2), we found when cleaning his desk later he was doing tons of puzzles at work. Anyway, I was a junior team lead with no power. After the tickets assigned to him languished one too many times, a manager asked me what's up. I said I dunno, he seems competent but very slow and I cannot get him to speed up. Manager: "well why not just fire him" me "I can do that?" manager "just say a word" me "hmm, let me talk to him, let's give him another chance" manager "ok you know what, I'm gonna fire him right now, problem solved"
I'd rather not work at all than work for that complete disaster of a corporate environment. The corpo speak in Callahan's note at the end is simply infuriating. Don't know how these people can lie and mislead with a straight face and sleep at night.
In what way is it 'shafting' Amazon to leave with stock options you have already earned and are perfectly entitled to? Personally I find it very useful information to know the real implications of Amazon's PIP process, as I'm sure would many other less savvy/experienced employees for whom getting fired despite being perfectly capable must be a very difficult experience.
I personally enjoy the number of times Amazon's PR has to call out the tens of thousands of complaints from tech and non-tech employees as "not representative of the experience of the vast majority of our employees."
The other employees are too scared to speak up, else lose their job. Or, they are sociopaths.
I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager.
Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?
Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture.
1. Large numbers
In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.
This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.
2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes
Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.
Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.
Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".
> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.
That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future.
> Also there are processes to be met officially
By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.
First of all, I side with you. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I encourage these practices, I talk about them and I fell pray to them many times when applying to other jobs as well.
> That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person.
Not really. It is about network not performance.
What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?
That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out.
Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other.
Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
> By "officially" do you mean legally?
Yes.
But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending.
What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there?
And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide?
Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.
> What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?
Hold on, is this during a layoff? What's this about ratings? Why would you need to kick X% of the workforce? Is the company having money issues? It seems that there are quite a few other things to address before you get to an individual employee's performance.
> Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
The more I read, this is sounding like a company which is trying to fit itself into some kind of management system they read about in a book, rather than taking an existing system and adjusting it to serve their purposes. Why fire someone if there is nothing bad going on and the company has money? And why promote someone if they have not demonstrated to their manager that they are capable of filling a bigger role?
Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive.
When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked.
For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities.
1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit.
2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP.
3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.
On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply.
Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post).
"Can you give an example where you did X"
"Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."
> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well.
For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.
About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away.
So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.
I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.
I’m not sure I follow - if there is no budget to hire a junior dev, or hiring a junior dev would further lose the company money, why would a company do that?
A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.
Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.
This right here: a "senior manager" explaining in clear language how large organizations of humans simply do not scale. We revert to "statistics" and treat people as numbers, ignore they are human, and create misery at scale, not organizational efficiency, but tyranny.
This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers
I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness
If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.
I fully agree. Just want to point out that all of this is because of lawsuits. When companies were more transparent they were sued, so they became less transparent.
This is random but I was recently rejected for a role from a company I find very interesting - https://www.overstory.com/ - and when I asked, the engineering manager gave me clear, detailed feedback on why (I don't have experience with satellite imagery tools like STAC, I accessed dict members with x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}), and I didn't go in to depth on my takehome assignment.).
I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.
Depending on your perception, x.get is either error recovery (good) or a silent failure (bad). One is not necessarily better than the other; it depends on what you want. In my experience, x[] is usually the better choice because failing fast makes debugging easier.
I hope no one is recommending x.get as a general practice, because that is pretty naive.
If you're a very junior sw engineer reading this, who hasn't done a lot of python, use x.get(). Almost always, so for you, always. This doesn't apply if you're a scientist or mostly writing small scripts, but if you are doing SWE, always use x.get().
Once you've understood python you can use x[] in limited cases. Never in your unit or functional tests. I code using x[], but later on I replace a lot of them with getter (around my second refactoring, when I add type hints and tests) especially in library or code that'll be shared.
For what it's worth, I only use x.get when having a missing key is a normal and expected part of the process. If I need to be able to expect a key to be in the dict then I'll use x[] so I can get a useful exception for debugging. Though really, this should only happen with validated inputs, and as Python adopts more type hinting dealing with this should get easier over time.
I've been around a while and I'm mentoring a junior dev, and one of the things that has come up is to fail as fast and as hard as possible. A silent failure is one of the worst things to have. And this is why I usually won't use .get on data that has presumably already been validated.
But I was already rejected so I haven't been able to explain my logic :-). It's still nice to get their feedback, though.
Funny enough, in Europe, you _should_ be able to get any written notes on you via GDPR.
This seems like splitting hairs. Sure, maybe x.get is better, but would that be a deal breaker? Know you are just giving quick example, but this just struck a cord. Are jobs really so hard to get that employers can be that nit-picky?
If I've learned anything it's that a lot of the hiring process is extremely arbitrary. If someone asks "why do you want to work here?" and you say "money" you might get someone admiring your honesty or you might get someone who wants you to have a personal affinity for the company. And it can be hard to know which.
Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations?
It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case.
If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clue as to the person's ability to perform in a technical role.
Learn! You aren't hiring people to learn. They must know everything they will ever need on day 1. (Forget what it says about your company - you only do things that people at other companies have been doing for years...)
I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.
Fortunately I was in a situation where I'm not too bothered about not getting the job but admittedly it would have been nice to have this chat with them.
I am _very_ familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and would, of course, adapt to house style, but where I am now we set up a nice pipeline in Dagster with a whole lot of boxes for assets, and at the risk of being non-technical I want the box with the bug to be the one that turns red. If I use x[] I get that. If I use x.get the red box could be three modules downstream because of a NoneType Exception.
It’s a take-home test. I’m saying if the particular test called for dealing with a particular type of input and you didn’t do it, you failed. It’s that simple.
If it didn’t, then it’s a pointless nitpick and shouldn’t ever be brought up as interview feedback.
It is completely nit-picky, as others have said, both methods have pluses/minuses, so how does the interviewer know the internal preference of the hiring company? Unless the question was specifically "how would you do this lookup if you have Dirty data". Then maybe missing using a default value is something. But even then, maybe you hit an invalid value, you should fail, or if you are providing defaults then there should be some follow up on, what is a good default, how will defaults be reported out, etc....
> For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates
In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.
I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.
If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?
>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.
Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.
So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?
Yes it's true for Europe. (big) companies' HR just ghost you or reject you with the same legally safe cookie cutter template messages. Maybe at very small companies if you only interacted with the hiring manager he might have the time and inclination to give you some personalized feedback but that's very rare.
No, not UK, just Austrian companies in Austria for example. Swedish companies in Sweden. Also German companies in Germany. In Eastern Europe too. Is that enough of a sample size for my opinion on European companies?
Austrian resident here, checking in. I have yet to see this heinous practice in the Austrian job market, but I guess ymmv. Every single time [*] I've asked for feedback on the interview process, I've gotten it - including details for why I was not considered for a position.
Oh, I have asked, and only got ghosted. Even by Austria's biggest telecom company in Vienna too ;)
90% of the time the feedback is "sorry, we can't move forward because we have better candidates in the pipeline" and asking for details leaves you ghosted.
You probably live in a different Austria. Or maybe because I'm a foreigner with dark skin :)
Well, I live in Vienna and have never had an issue with getting good feedback on why I didn't pass an interview - except from Qualcomm, who responded "we have no comment on the interview process, we just didn't feel it was a good fit", which actually just made me feel relieved to have not passed their criteria.
Never been ghosted, either. So I dunno, our subjective experiences differ. I'm also a foreigner, but maybe our experience levels are just different.
What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position, and that can be frustrating at times.
It could also be the cultural differences between companies that are engineering driven first, versus companies that are primary sales/management/consulting driven first and the engineering part is a distant second.
And the likes of QCOM and all these international big-tech pay so much above the low Austrian market rates, that they can afford to treat candidates as disposable commodities as they have virtually unlimited applicants, so it could be a problem of scale besides the culture and liability concerns.
>What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position
But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you? I doubt they straight up told you that. :)
>But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you?
I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.
I'm not saying Austria isn't without its glib bureaucracies and Kafka'esque recruitment nightmares - just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
>I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.
Ouch, that must hurt knowing you're just the reserve, but to be honest I wouldn't hold a grudge over this, I expect most companies in the world do this, as most candidates also do this with companies when interviewing. It's fair game and you hedge your bets.
> just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
I have no idea what it's like in the US, Asia or Oceania, but compared to most of EU, including the UK, I haven't found any extra empathy to candidates or employees in the Austrian private sector, especially that here employment is basically at-will compared to the rest of EU so you're always an easy scapegoat to find yourself unemployed for some failing of an incompetent manager (and Austrian management is really next level Kafkaesque)
It is absolutely not the same in Europe. Maybe it depends on the country. In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind. But the idea of taking a company to court for something like this in Germany is laughable.
It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it.
>In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind.
You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates?
Also, the devil is in the details as German culture and language is often designed to cleverly camouflage negative feedback as neutral or positive to avoid lawsuits, so you can definitely have generic cookie cutter rejection messages that legally qualify as "honest" like for example in your Arbeitszeugnis.
How would you legally challenge that if otherwise? Do you sue the company because you feel like their feedback wasn't brutally honest as per your expectations as it was too generic and "nice sounding" and had nothing bad to say about you?
IMHO you choose a bad example as German corporate culture is not as "brutally honest" as you portray it to be, quite the opposite, it's just very good at pretending to be honest.
From my personal experience across several countries, I've noticed the more difficult it is to fire someone and the more anti-discrimination laws exist in that country, then the less honest and more generic your feedback will be, if you get any feedback at all and it's not a generic automated rejection.
I chose the example I have experience with. I don't have experience with other EU countries, so I can't comment on those. I also don't have experience with massive large companies, so maybe this is a problem of scale rather than culture. Although it does seem like smaller American companies have the same problems.
It's not that complicated. In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway. In short, it's not worth it for them, it's that simple.
Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on speed-dial, to change that company's culture on "honest feedback" forever.
It's why we can't have nice things, there will always be someone to abuse the system and take it down with him.
> In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway.
Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.
You underestimate how lazy some companies are when it comes to non-billable hours/tasks. The question on their end is "why bother, what's in it for us?".
>Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candidate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
That's the problem, it's NOT easy to send feedback that's truthful yet at the same time is 100% iron clad against any potential expressions that might be interpreted as discriminatory. Engineers are not good at formulating such things and their bluntness is a liability.
Which is why engineers are left with the technical part, and the final candidate-feedback communication and rejection is left to the HR who's main job is eliminating employee/candidate liability for the company, so they usually take the route that makes their job easier and send the same generic message to everyone, especially that in many
companies HR is understaffed.
There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.
When I interviewed at IBM in Germany in the late 00s I was rejected and got crystal clear feedback on why - and that is a big American company in Germany.
PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name.
[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.
You what's funny? When this PIP culture hits German labour laws. Then the result is basically pointless bossing, which ultimately results in, for the employer, rather expensive severance packages. Nothing funny about bossing, but funny that employers still want to force their head through a wall, instead of just offering the package they have to pay anyway from the get go.
Large companies just stagnant hiring in one region or another to offset risk. I’ve seen companies hire like crazy in places like the US and India but the same people have been working in the UK/EU for decade(s) without any new hires.
UK/EU companies will do the same and recoup costs by laying off regions like US/India because it’s easier.
You can easily avoid these kinds of companies who are always hiring and firing. I’ve never had to deal with a threat of a PIP.
Companies hire where employees are cheaper, and where labor protections are weaker. All the time. They also are limited to hire in regions that can support their business, e.g. Poland in case of Germany. India wouldn't work for an inhouse team running order management for a German production company, but Poland might. Might because getting such an org off the ground, and running, takes considerable efforts which might not justify whatever salary savings one might have.
That being said, Amazon in Germany is more like a up-or-out place than a hire-and-fire one for white collar folks. And the blue collar personal is pretty much treated like logistics workers at other places, read not really great. Salaries tend to be higher so (accounted for region and other things).
No idea how things are on the ground in the US so, but I guess worse. Which seems to be a general thing so.
From what I understand, PIPs and documentation save money compared to going through a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, the “at will” employment principle would mean that the company would almost certainly win the suit (assuming not-illegal-discrimination), but it would be expensive to go through with the suit. Comparatively, a PIP, lots of documentation, and keeping the employee around for 6 months longer is a cheaper alternative.
TBH, if AI makes a lot of legal action cheaper, this calculus might change. There’s a business product here: an AI mediator that all parties agree to use at the start of employment. Looks at all documentation at time of firing and says: “based on this, employee would average $X out of a civil suit. Company would average $Y to defend. Cut employee a check for func($X, $Y) and by cashing it employee agrees to relinquish rights to further legal action.”
Well it seems that PIPs are not actually improvement plans.
An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals.
What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.
PIPs (at least in europe) are a way for company to prove employee was fired because they are incompetent. We tried to help employee X, see the paperwork? But they are not good enough.
Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits.
Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements
I have only heard secondhand of two cases where pip didnt result in being fired (but cant confirm it, could have been a propaganda stories passed on by gullible)
If virtually all PIPs result in firing, wouldn't it be trivial to argue that either 1) the company is misusing PIPs as a stealth way to fire people, or 2) the company is completely incompetent when it comes to providing PIPs that actually work.
With most European labour laws, neither option is very good for the company.
No, because there is actually such a thing as a bad employee. Labor laws are not a get out of jail free card for being bad at your job. Firing people is not actually illegal.
PIPs actually work if they provide evidence that someone actually cannot do the job they were hired to do.
That all the employees put on such PIPs fail would be evidence that they are doing a good job of identifying bad employees to fire, not that they don't actually know how to improve performance.
Trivial, how? A corpo lawyer will tell judge they agreed with employee on improvement plan to guide and help them prevent firing. They did all they could to help them.
How will you prove that you were fired before pip was put in place?
How will you argue the whole pip system is set to fire people?
(Similarly) It is open secret politicians steal public money, why don't we just lock them up for stealing?
But the point is, would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP? If you give an employee guardrails for success and they flounder anyways, then it seems the employee was not a good fit for the role. It says more about the employee than the process.
> would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP
90%+ of the situations I have witnessed, extreme luck or act of god would be required to achieve the requirements. In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.
I have also had the misfortune to witness one where the employee didnt realise it was all a con to fire them; they got the miracle, 10x'd their teams sales but "failed" some pointless side quest to get coffee for the boss every morning by 6am.
For the most part they looked like they worked out fine - generally it was a personal problem, people not "liking" people. The line manager gave the nudge and wink to be "extra nice" to the meglomaniac in the senior suite and after a few months cooler heads prevail, along with a documented performance.
A lot of actual real world peformance and what people actually do isnt really visible when you are a few layers up (or in a different team). Sooner or later in an organisation large enough someone is going to assume simply because they dont like someone over there, that person does nothing all day long.
If one was particularly skilled you could probably use these sorts of things to undermine upper management that is already on the ropes - but that is an advanced technique.
I would say it depends, if employee was set to be fired - there is nothing that they could do to avoid it, decision was made to downsize team, or they were assholes, had personal clashes with leaders etc.
There are probably cases where pip is used to give a good person who is slipping a kick. That was probably initiated by their manager to motivate them back on track. However, a good manager would have a serious talk with that employee, rather than use formal HR process.
So thats why (I think) pip is mostly used to get rid of people.
Even without worrying about lawsuit, it isn’t a good use of your time as interviewer to tell the candidate. It’s just like having a long conversation with someone you don’t want to go out with any more.
They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.
It's the element in quick sort that you swap around to make sure all elements before pivot are less than it and all elements after are greater than it.
It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?
If it were some random company, I'd say your scenario is plausible. But with Amazon, I happen to know that everything written in this article is 100% accurate to their real PIP process.
Even from this perspective I don't think the employee is in the wrong.
If a job gives you mental strain, especially if it is affecting your performance, IMO the right thing to do is to quit. I'm not surprised the boss was disappointed, but I do think they should've seen it coming.
I've been in situations where a job evidently isn't for me anymore, albeit in a seemingly healthier environment— my boss and I talked openly about the team no longer being a fit for me for weeks if not months prior.
I was evidently not working at my full potential too, and when I told my boss I was quitting, they told me what date I should officially submit my resignation so that I'd still get my latest bonus. It was all very amicable and objective.
> -person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them
That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.
It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.
People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.
There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually.
So really it's overhiring BS that is then getting taken out on employees. Given that, I think as has been pointed out by another commenter - the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance, generally. Seems better than year round psychological torture of being at risk of a PIP, and then if being put on one knowing the most likely outcome is being fired. So you feel dragged through the mud and then having doubly failed (put on PIP & failed the PIP).
I knew a guy who moved from Wall St to Amazon and described the performance management / compensation system to be pretty rough and had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.