At amazon, admitting to a problem will guaranteed lead to having to open a COE, correction of error, which means meetings with executives, inevitable "least effective" rating, development plan, scapegoating, PIP, and firing.
Where I was about 99.9% of the COEs where just a lesson learned and new process to prevent it. There was one that was basically used as a tool to remove a VERY good engineer, that didn't mesh well with new leadership.
A sister org, one I worked a lot with, wouldn't COE anything. If you were the lead engineer on a product or service that had a COE you were going to get a PIP by year end review. I wasn't surprised when all the talent left that group.
I assume this to mean that it is an element of an individual's PIP, a formal process to set guides for getting someone to commit to a higher level of achievement.
Patently incorrect. A PIP is management telling you that you need to seek alternative employment, now.
Joking/sarcasm aside: I’ve never seen or heard someone who is placed on a PIP successfully “exit” the PIP. They exit the company or they’re exited from the company. PIPs seem to mark the start of the “we are building formal documentation to fire you” phase of losing a job.
I guess I'm the poster child for having vision insurance as a company benefit.
A lawyer I spoke with suggested employees regularly visit their doctor about work related stress so that when they inevitably get PIP'ed they can claim medical leave and work related illness. Some places its a war zone and that's what workers have to do.
I have and at Amazon and AWS. The pattern I have seen is medical related. Someone is on some sort of medication that is screwing with their abilities and don't realize it. I've seen multiple cases: one where it was meds that caused liver problems and the person didn't know they were supposed to get regularly testing (crappy doctor) and another where they found out meds they were on caused short-term memory loss. These surfaced during the PIPs and were fixed - and the folks got out fine.
Outside of someone protected by a labor union, I’ve very rarely seen anyone recover from a PIP and not be eventually let go. Most commonly employees see them as a 30 or 60 day window to proactively find a new job before they’re terminated.
For example, a friend I have that recently left Facebook knew for a good 6 months he needed to shape up. But they hadn't put him on a PIP in that time. They eventually offered him a decent severance to quit, and he took that rather than continuing to try. If he stayed, he probably would have been put on a PIP fairly shortly. It was the best thing for everyone. He wasn't all that happy there anyways.
Lots of people bad at their jobs blame the PIP system for their failure at Amazon.
Nothing against you personally of course, but I just have to congratulate whomever it was who came up with this gem of an euphemism. It's definitely going up there next to 'career-limiting move'.
Resolving COE can be a positive even if you know how to spin it, at least that was the case when I was there. But not sure whether things had changed
They are a formal, in-depth retrospective on customer-impacting service degradations or outages. They include a thorough functional description of how the state of your service evolved into failure, a exhaustively recursive review of the operational decisions and assumptions that contributed to that failure, and a series of action items the team will take to ensure that the service will never fail again for the same reason.
Edit: This list is incomplete, and the link included in the sibling provides a better, more thorough description.
COE also doesn't lead to negative marks on anyone at AWS that I know of. It's a learning experience to know why it happened and action items so it doesn't happen again.
Writing COE is kind of admission of guilt and I have definitely seen promotions getting delayed. During perf-review, lot of times managers of other teams raise COE has a point against the person going for promotion.