Amazon Managers Say They 'Hire to Fire' to Meet Internal Turnover Goal

"Performance improvement plans," by any name, are 95% bullshit, and 5% well-meaning, but clueless people managers who don't realize that that PIPs are bullshit.

At a non-Amazon company, I once had a PIP where the target sounded feasible in theory, but dubious in practice. "Fix N bugs this week," but the manager would choose bugs like "our software crashed two weeks ago, can you make sure it won't crash again?"

A colleague was put on a PIP because a coworker was promoted over him, to a lead position, managing him, and my colleague kept debating app architecture with his new lead the same way he used to before, without realizing that this newly promoted person now had the power to steer toward firing him. My colleague has since learned not to speak up in meetings about app architecture to avoid upstaging his new boss.

I used to work at a company (not Amazon) with a similar "cut x% each year" philosophy. In spite of this on one high-performing team there was one very poorly-performing person and it was completely obvious. One day over drinks the manager told me "He's my designated fire-ee. If I don't have turnover from people leaving naturally then he's there to take the bullet when the cut comes. If someone leaves during the year then he survives until the next cycle". I even know a manager (as here) who specifically hired someone so they wouldn't need to cut any of their productive people.

Stack rank and cut produces perverse incentives.

I take it Amazon does a 360 style review and eliminates the lowest “performing” 10-20% of employees automatically each review cycle?

These types of environments breed hostile and manipulative work environments, it may get short-term results, but long-term it creates horrible company cultures.

I saw a few reports on Blind of people getting put on PIP within six months. Makes more sense now.

They could at least add it to the job description. That would do job seekers the favor of clearly communicating Amazon is nuts as an employer.

Im curious why anyone not out of school would take an amazon role. Is there tc that good? I feel like the idea that one had amazon on their resume as a plus is way overplayed.

sample size.

I’m a Principal SDE at Amazon. Amazons weakest link are its managers, especially at the L6 and L7 levels. Competent L6 SDMs are far and few. I’m now working with the nth L6 SDM as a direct ask from an L7 peer. Like the other SDMs I was asked to work with, this guy can’t write, lacks technical depth, but he’s able to wow other managers in interviews.

And the person who hired him is too proud to admit his failure and won’t do anything about it. It’s the same damn thing on repeat every damn year.

The problem with L7 managers is many of them are just sales people. Many of them are brilliant individuals, but they can’t hold themselves from trying to shadow architect what their teams are developing. Okay you wanted to be a manager. Now trust your damn people to do their job and get the hell out of the way.

For an L6 SDM, eventually this person will get encouraged to move to another org to go be incompetent somewhere else and become someone else’s problem. It’s unlikely he gets let go, unless it’s an engineer. An engineer is put on a performance improvement plan and removed.

Does it really bother me? I’m helping him write a coherent road map document. His senior engineers are getting flak for the managers poor management abilities. The engineers manage themselves and TPM themselves. Why are he and so many like him here? It makes no god damn sense.

And good, hard working, very capable engineers are thrown under the bus because of incompetent managers. They screw up peoples careers.

I’m just bitching at this point. I know. But nothing will change until it hits our bottom line.