Amazon has a quota for the number of employees it would be happy to see leave
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview.
When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision.
> Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal
How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs.
If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.
If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).
Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
1) Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. The fact that they didn't even try is telling. The cost of publishing a lie is exactly 0, and the potential benefit is going viral and making a lot of $$$ with associated advertising impressions and new subscribers.
2) There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people, who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. And again, not one BR, but since this is systemic behavior, it's the majority of BRs across all teams and locations.
Why would any HM even speak to them?
> The fact that they didn't even try is telling.
How do you even know that?
> There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people
This sounds like a gross overestimate.
This is not an organized conspiracy. Individual HM would come to the same conclusion, which is it is to their own benefit to act perversely when it comes to hiring/firing. This isn't even restricted to Amazon. Time and time again, at companies with poorly thought out policies, managers end up doing really shitty things in order to meet goals.
> who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other.
And because it's not an organized conspiracy, how would they tell on each other. It's not like they're gonna go around tell each other that they're doing corrupt things.
And even if they were, that usually ends up creating a code of omerta. You see it all the time in organizations where they do terrible things. These places end up creating a us vs them mentality. Police is one example. Another example is how China runs things. They spread out the bad actions across everyone, making everyone complicit. This makes people less likely to rat each other out because now they're the ones doing it and internally, people justify their own decisions.
> The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives.
This is the only thing I agree with. It is unlikely that a BR would collude. They have no reason to.
Which is the fundamental argument here. All this talk about how bad orgs behave this or that way is not relevant considering that they were exceptionally thoughtful about how to separate the hiring decisioning from firing decisioning.
I think we can all agree that Amazon does a lot of shitty things, but the concept of introducing a BR deserves praise.
Collusion between BRs and HMs is not the fundamental argument here. That was just speculation by someone else trying to poke holes in the argument that HMs do not hire just to fire. The fundamental argument is that the policies lead to perverse actions by HMs.
> All this talk about how bad orgs behave this or that way is not relevant considering that they were exceptionally thoughtful about how to separate the hiring decisioning from firing decisioning.
As has been discussed in many other comments, the separation of concerns here does not prevent the perverse action of hiring more people with simply so that HMs have more options of who to fire.
> so that HMs have more options of who to fire
Totally true, I don't deny that. But that's not the same as hire to fire, in the context of how it's commonly understood and criticized: that the person that was hired will also be the same person who is going to get fired. My point is that while it's unfortunate that someone will get fired, it's not necessarily the same person who was last hired.
One way to interpret that is that you are literally hiring someone just to fire them.
Another way, the way I and some others are using it, is that they're hiring people *so that* they *have* people to fire. As in, they're not necessarily firing the people they hire, but that they need to hire so that they have options when they need to fire.
I don't think the latter is any better than the former because they're still going about hiring with the explicit intention of firing people. Maybe it's not the hire specifically, but when they have that intention, it still creates the same kind of toxic environment.
The culture of Amazon does not see this as immoral, so why would they "tell on" each other? And among those who maybe do see it as immoral, the managers are incentivized and compensated for it, and the non-managers are threatened with PIPs and firing if they disagree with it.
>The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals
BRs do not have any kind of "track record" related to attrition rate. After a BR participates in a hiring loop, that's the end of the story for them. A BR has no incentive to not participate in this so called "conspiracy".
But furthermore, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the BR program works. In practice, the BR is just another interviewer that helps facilitate the debrief, and usually just defaults to echoing whatever hire decision the HM makes. If an HM wanted to hire-to-fire, the "participation" of BRs isn't required at all.
As an Amazon Bar Raiser, our community takes our unbiased position and ability to veto hires EXTREMELY seriously.
We hire for Amazon, not for the team.
The article posted here is pure speculation.
...and having worked for other large companies, I've seen similar metrics being tracked. It doesn't mean any of them are hiring just to fire people.
Frankly, I've noticed a LOT of poorly written anti-Amazon articles around, and I'm not clear if there's some effort to undermine the company. Is Amazon a political organization?
I am not disputing that the NYT revealed his full name, they absolutely did so that, against his wishes.
Citation needed.
Leaked internal memo shows that if an org doesn’t meet the target this year, they have to make it up next year.
You are in a subthread that branched off of this statement:
> I was personally told by a former manager who used to work at Amazon that he hired to fire. He hated that the company forced him to fire good people and left.
So the conversation veered away from the BI article, and we're now focusing on the relevancy of anecdotal evidence that was presented by another HN member. The fact that you needed this explained completes the picture for me with regards to all your other comments.
Sure, fire has not been found, but there is a ton of smoke on this.
They’re one of the largest corporations in the world; of course they’re a political organization.
There’s a mandate to PIP and the manager wants to protect their productive employees so they hire someone and set them up to fail.
I don’t think you’re going to get any clean documentation on this process - it’s simply a result of a system that stack ranks and mandates firing.
About 15 years ago, I was placed on a PIP for low performance at a large technical employer. I managed to climb out of my hole and shine, but it's a good lesson in humility and responding constructively to feedback.
"Oh @sokoloff quit? He was OK but let's mark him as non-regrettable so we can hit our target. Where do you want to get lunch?"
In happy cases like this, and in cases where you actually have significant performance problems, URA isn't so bad. The more degenerate situations happen in circumstances like:
* The employee wants to internal transfer. Bad Manager X immediately adds Employee Y to the development list and says "Oh ho ho, you're not able to transfer because of your performance problems." For Bad Manager X, the apparent incentive is high - either the employee stays and you keep the resource or they leave and you get URA credit. Obviously this leads to pretty awful situations, but I saw it happen multiple times. This can also happen when the manager is trying to protect the employee - e.g. add them to DL but not actually fire them. This usually backfires.
* Senior management pushes down URA targets. Hey, you've got a 15 person group? That means you need to pick one person to let go. Satisfied with all of their performance and understaffed to begin with? I don't care. Don't you want to have another great performer like employee Z? You need to make room, so tell me who is the least impressive person on your team. This leads to really sociopathic management behaviors.
All of this would be OK to me, if it was done transparently and more objectively. But Amazon has thrown out all the paper trail and messaged to employees that they aren't being stack ranked, which is complete bullshit.
Pro tip if you're working at Amazon: if you get a PCS with no additional grant and no base increase, you're on the development list. Find another job, or do something amazing.
Allegedly, the only sure-fire way of knowing if you are on Focus/Dev list is if you ask your manager point-blank about it and they have to respond with the truth.
The idea that I would put an employee onto some kind of dev/PIP/watch list and then not tell them about this fact is so fundamentally foreign to me, but I believe it happens (because no one would make up such a thing).
>Instead, Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal.
And as OP is correctly pointing out, that can't happen, because the bar raiser can veto any hire they think is unqualified. Or at least it can't happen without the bar raiser colluding - and since the bar raiser is not the hiring manager (or even from the same part of the organization as the hiring manager) and they are not being evaluated on the UAR, they have no incentive for this.
If, as you suggest, managers were hiring _qualified_ people with the intent of firing them... I guess there's no way to prove that isn't happening but FWIW, I'm also at Amazon and have been part of a bunch of interviews and I've seen no evidence of that.
For a person to get placed on a team at Amazon, the manager must be making some representation that they need another employee. Amazon isn’t going to waste headcount by giving it to managers who don’t ask for it. This means managers have control over whether hires are joining their team. Therefore a manager can execute the plan of hiring to fire. It doesn’t matter whether they have the power to approve a specific candidate.
Obviously if you are forced to cull X% you are going to try to maintain 1+X% staffing level.
Whether or not this actually happens, I don’t know. Do I think that managers (or really anyone else) can use soft skills to exert some influence some of the time? Having participated in many such panels, I think it’s pretty doable despite what many people claim because of the discussion process that happens.
The need to get vacancies filled.
Where is this data?
In most cases such people are put on a plan, ironically called "Coaching Plan" itself, and thereafter fired.
URA quota is an open secret at Amazon, and some employee appreciate the practice of hire to fire, as it saves their own employment.
That in turn ensures that objection to bad hire, who is going to be "coached" is non existent.
Rather than “lower the bar” an HM can just request 1 more headcount for SDE1 than they truly need.
1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us
2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place.
Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness.
PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.
Step one: treat any article that quotes anonymous sources with deep skepticism. The sheer number of retractions and stories that turn out to be blatantly false (especially in the realm of politics) has become absurd in the past few years.
No startup needed, just some (un)common sense.
And btw, when you call people names, be aware that this often says more about you than the person you're trying to insult. Seems like you have a particular aversion against people with startup ideas, which automatically means that you were never successful with any of your own - people who make startups work for them don't have as much of a chip on their shoulder. That's ok, startups are hard and most people don't win - I have a lot of respect for anyone who even gives it a try. But please use your experience to help other people as opposed to just being bitter about it and putting others down.
Startups are great, but their chances of success are higher when the founders know what they’re talking about.
It's unfortunate that switching the source made it less clear which author's work I was commenting on, but I think that you'll see that most HN readers who engaged with me agreed that Jason Aten's article was rather weak. Your childish name calling, on the other hand, will always be unwelcome here regardless of circumstances, and please consider changing your approach or just go back to where you were prior to recently creating this HN account.
[1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at...
There is no requisite for the person hiring to be the one firing for the person hiring to hire a sacrificial lamb.
A rational actor could easily decide 'Hey, I like my team, if I hire this guy/gal who the firing manager definitely won't like[1] He/she'll be fired before anyone on my team.' Morality aside its the same as serving up a secondary 'bad' idea to your boss to give him/her the illusion of choice, and get him/her to go with the plan you want.
[0]>So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing
[1]For personal or professional reasons.
Then others pick it up by referencing the first news report. They no longer have to be specific, instead its just "news source X reports".
Unless you follow the chain back to the source, you don't see the actual confidence level. Sometimes you don't even get an accurate picture of the original source.
Parent's comment is not fully correct, yet you are taking it at face value and not looking "too deep underneath the carpet", and in some ways are "pick[ing] up someone else's lie and expand[ing] on it without bothering the verify the fundamental thesis".
The fact of the matter is that the Amazon HMs who decide on firing often are the same people who decide on hiring. Amazon may desire for that not to be true, but in practice, it is. And GP's comment doesn't actually provide any evidence against that.
I've added more context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371455, but the gist is that Bar Raisers are supposed to be an independent hiring evaluator, but IME they often just serve as meeting facilitators that will just back up whatever decision the HM makes, which makes the HM the ultimate decider.
Saying "my statement may or may not be right, I'll let the general public decide" is lazy and shirking responsibility. If you have reason to believe that your statements are wrong, you should retract those statements or at least put a disclaimer on them. I think that's the bar you would hold Inc to, and you should hold yourself to it as well.
The Inc journalist did a lazy job of presenting facts [1], and my suspicion is that this is not by coincidence - as a journalist, you either do a stellar job of researching every last bit of a story, or you do the opposite - close an eye and report as vaguely as possible, mostly citing external sources but somehow making the story sound original so you get some credit as well. Both are safe approaches; the space in between is dangerous - you can't take someone else's shitty reporting and then check if it's true before publishing - that's how you get sued for libel. Fun fact: if you prepend "in my opinion, ..." you're 100% safe from any libel risk.
If we consider additional evidence that came to light through the BI article, I am still aligned with mabbo's view - the Amazon management seems to have taken a conscious step against the hire-to-fire scenario by separating the ownership of hiring and firing.
[1] Note: this topic originally linked to an Inc article
And so are you. As has been pointed out multiple times, the assertions made about BRs and HMs in this thread are flat out incorrect, and yet you are continuing to rely on them and even go as far as to tout them in other comments in other threads as well.
>close an eye and report as vaguely as possible, mostly citing external sources but somehow making the story sound original so you get some credit as well
This is exactly what you are doing throughout this thread by repeating the notion that Amazon "separat[es] the ownership of hiring and firing", which if you were willing to do any amount of research rather than just blindly trusting a random internet comment, you would find just isn't true.
You are holding yourself to a different bar than Inc, which is hypocritical. The point about removing Amazon emotional context here also applies to Inc, because it's clear you personally have a lot of emotional baggage related to journalists. So the question is: would you post these same disparaging comments, and still maintain the same "my statement may be incorrect but I will continue to repeat it anyway" if it was your favorite high school teacher you were disparaging, potentially ruining their career? I would certainly hope not, so I don't see any reason other than arrogance of why you would do so here.
> the assertions made about BRs and HMs in this thread are flat out incorrect
The assertions are that there is a hire to fire practice. Those assertions are based on 1) the evidence of an attrition goal, and 2) anecdotal stories of people who know people. My argument is that 1) is not the same as a hire to fire practice [1], and 2) is hard to verify - there are a lot of people with an axe to grind. What I would love to see is an analysis of people who started their job at Amazon and didn't reach their first 12 months. If that rate is any higher than at FAANG for comparable positions, then we have a smoking gun. How hard would it be to do this? Not very. The lack of this effort is telling. Also, I tend not to subscribe to every conspiracy theory, which admittedly is hard these days. But you should try it, it would calm you down a bit.
> just blindly trusting a random internet comment
Thank you for making so many assumptions about me. You're wrong. It was a slow day today, and I was really intrigued by this concept, so I dug a bit deeper and read a lot of posts on this topic. My takeaway from all this is that this is a bit like a political discussion: some people really passionately hate Amazon's recruiting practices, and some defend it. I certainly wouldn't say that everyone is aligned that BRs and HMs are colluding and that the system is not working as designed.
> You are holding yourself to a different bar than Inc, which is hypocritical
That's a ridiculous statement. Journalists have a code of ethics, whereas the general population doesn't. This is a fact, let's please not debate something as fundamentally verifiable like this. Not everyone can do everyone's job. My job is not to spend my whole day verifying facts of what some journalist published, but it's very much the journalist's job to do that for their pieces. We're not in the same position, nor should we be. Not that this fact matters at all since I stand behind what I said, but you're starting your argument right off the bat with a fundamental inaccuracy.
> you personally have a lot of emotional baggage related to journalists
That would be weird - I worked for many years for the NYT and I think they are a wonderful org. So... your instincts are wrong again. I really hope you don't rely on your instincts for a living.
> would you post these same disparaging comments
Totally nonsensical reasoning once again. My comments are not disparaging, so let's just end that discussion right there.
If anything, let's turn our attention a bit to your interesting HN career. You created an HN account called tyuqfromhere 8 hours ago, which you used exclusively to attack Amazon. And then this new account, tyuqfromthere, was created an hour ago, and... you guessed it, it's used exclusively to attack Amazon. Someone said elsewhere that there's a lot of anti-Amazon propaganda recently, and I sure as hell would love to know who you are and what your real motives are.
To be clear, Amazon can crash and burn for all that I care, but there's one thing I do like about Jeff Bezos - it's his last sentence in his blackmail response letter [2]: "I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out." I doubt we'll ever find out what kind of a creature you are and what you're trying to accomplish with your HN trolling, but it sure as hell would be interesting.
[1] I am not defending the attrition goal strategy, but its presence is not a proof of abuse. I know that if someone presented me with the requirement to let 2 of my 30 member team go within the next 12 months, and I was given 2 new team members to try out, I would definitely give everyone a fair chance. Also, every other manager I've ever worked with would do the same. I find it hard to believe that somehow that all managers at Amazon are suddenly different from anyone I've ever worked with.
[2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146...
It's not even a news piece, it's an opinion column. You're free to disagree with it. That's totally fair.
I'm not reporting on Amazon's internal hiring practices, I'm applying a lesson to what Insider reported. That's not a cop out - it serves an entirely different purpose. In this case, it's a lesson for managers. If you don't feel like I made that point, ok, but I think the core thesis of your critique is fundamentally flawed.
Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams.
Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
> How? It's not their choice.
The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them.
Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?
Orange/red badges are typically a big deal because it is very rare for people to last at Amazon past even 2-3 years, nevermind 5 years.
1. The company has grown rapidly, so many/most people seem fairly new. That doesn't mean that people that have been here a long time are leaving (although some obviously are). 2. The tool available to employees shows tenure of all employees, including fulfillment center workers, which are much less likely to be long-term.
Are some career ladder jumpers actually planning to leave anyway after 2-3 years so they can leverage compensation offers between FANG?
You contradict your own point above
> has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
These higher ups tend to have extremely well-tuned bullshit detectors and it would be extremely hard for a manager to sabotage an employee and get them categorized as underperforming.
It would reflect worse on the manager not the employee.
If you think that this effort is demonstrative of their ability to translate needs into working code and then deliver it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I don't think it would be difficult for an experienced hiring manager to identify someone who's well-rehearsed but otherwise incapable and then hire that person specifically in order to fire him later.
I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose.
Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives.
Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?
The bar raiser can say "no" even if the HM says "yes," but I never heard of it going the other way (where hypothetically the HM would say "no" and the bar raiser "overrule" the HM.)
And in hundreds of interviews there, I never experienced a situation in which it was as black and white as the above would make it seem. There were times, of course, when there was a difference of opinion, but it's on the people in the room to debate and convince each other based on logic and data - a bar raiser is not simply going to walk in and put his/her foot down and say "no" to a team that is otherwise saying "yes" without pretty detailed discussion and reasoning.
(When push comes to shove, the bar raiser could overrule, but everyone would rather it not have to get to that point...)
To be pedantic, the HM makes the hire-or-not decision, the BR can veto a hire decision. BR cannot make a hire decision.
In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM.
If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that.
This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.
It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff.
As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.
You are a manager. You need five people on your team.
You hire eight, because you are expected to lose three in the next two years.
If three of them leave, fine. If three of them are incompetent, great! (You get your URA and you have evidence your Bar Raiser is an idiot.)
If the interview loop worked perfectly, all eight are great. But you still have to boot three of them.
It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.
I have a ~10% hire rate in over 500 industry interviews conducted. These were at large tech companies so they included 5+ people spending 3+ hours each.
It’s not worth the time to fabricate head count to begin hiring, then fire a qualified person. We assume Amazon is cutthroat and grades on delivery. Imagine doing this sham while doing your normal job.
Either you haven't been part of the panel in a while or you haven't worked for Amazon. BR's responsibility is not to make the sole decision but help the panel achieve consensus. This is very clear in the interview training.
Edit: formatting
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
edit: downvoted for an opinion presented with a neutral tone?
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire.
Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy.
As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams.
Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured.
[0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.
Exactly. It's like saying you're passionate about paperwork. Everyone thinks it sucks and we should do less of it.
Lots of people have to pretend to be more passionate than they are, but please pick anything other than business process.
I still think pair programming is better than code review when feasible.
The problem is when the process gains consciousness and ego and fights for its own limitless expansion.
not ALL developers crave this. I've been through companies where process is scoffed at (some developers burn out trying to manage their own stuff, others love it) and companies where everything has a process - eg Pivotal Labs, the extreme example of agile by the book (some developers burn out with all the inflexibility, others love it).
I don't love "agile", but for what it's worth, it's a reasonable starting point to create a sustainable culture where the company can try to 1) remain agile (adjective) as it grows, and 2) keep developers reasonably in control of their work schedule. There's worse alternatives, I guess?
I agree with you, but Oh, the irony!
From the Agile Manifesto:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
This still holds true for most people that have to fire someone.
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway.
It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it.
It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political.
Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons.
A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
They’re also a junior engineer (less than two years), so I’m still not sure if I should be looking to push them out.
My biggest uncertainty is what is an objective criteria and expectation for a junior engineer.
The fault is mine.
It's also possible for and employee to get stuck in a rut at a job, and nothing can get them out of it except a change of scenery. This is because everyone's expectations of them being a low performer or troublemaker or whatever are already set, and that perception will not change. So it ends up becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, because any small improvements the employee makes don't move the needle on how people perceive them.
Keep a close eye on how their underperformance is affecting other team members. If the rest of the team has to make up for the person's underperformance or rewrite their code, they could be subtracting rather than adding value to the team. Engineers are rarely islands of productivity.
Consider your headcount. If you can only hire 5 people and 1 of them isn't really contributing, you're giving up a full 20% of your team's potential. Replacing that one person with a performer on par with the other 4 people on the team will instantly boost their performance by 25%. Withholding that kind of advantage from your team isn't good.
Earlier on in my career I would read stories from tech companies that said something like "if you don't get promoted to a certain level within 2 years then you get fired." Initially I thought that was pretty harsh. Now, I understand where it comes from. If someone hasn't shown progress in 2 years, assuming proper feedback, it's doubtful that they'll ever improve much.
On the other hand, I believe there are places for average engineers. Part of the issue with this person is that they wanted to keep trying to do more complex work even though they struggled with easier tasks and it was a constant struggle to try to balance that.
I think in retrospect, had I been the person's manager, the best option would have been to restrict their work to the easy tasks. If they didn't like it then they could always leave. I now also understand why some people are "managed out". Maybe they can stay in their role but if they don't have the ability to progress then I don't think it's a manager's duty to help them beyond a certain point.
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here, but that requirement should disappear quickly. Make the employer guarantee to pay them for a year, and allow them to stay once that year is up. That would be a humane way to do it.
It's so terrible that immigrants to this country have to live in constant fear of deportation if they don't have a job.
For very special jobs of critical need perhaps. For broader economic immigration I’d rather have a visa categories requiring initial (and in some categories periodic subsequent) payment than a job requirement, either for initial entry or conitnued residency.
Mostly, no, for immigrant economic visas I’d prefer “pay to enter”.
For non-immigrant including dual-intent economic visas (e.g., replacing things like H-1b), periodic payment makes sense.
> That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay
Visa categories gated on high-need, high-education job categories, especially when they also come with prevailing wage requirements, also only allow rich people to come or stay. Allowing payment (which can be subsidized by friends, family, or other supportive community) actually weakens the tie to personal wealth, though it does not (nor does it intend to; this is, after all, a proposed reform of economic visa categories, not family-based, refugee, etc. ones[0]) remove it entirely.
> and also using it as a shortcut to immigration.
I don’t see this as a problem.
[0] though to the extent those are capped, i support allowing otherwise-qualified immigrants to pay to skip (and not take up space in) the queue, through a bidding system where the cost per supernumerary immigrant in a category is higher the more are admitted in a year. It serves the purpose of the limit (mitigating social costs of level of immigration) by an alternate means, and reduces the adverse impact of the limit, not just for the people paying but also for the people not paying. It’s a win-win-win change. (A loss for thr source countries, in many cases, though.)
Are they restriction on green cards too? I thought once you got your GC you didn't lose status for being fired.
A child cannot sponsor their parents for immigration benefits until they reach the age of 21.
Anchor babies is a talking point to stir up controversy, and cause fear of immigrants.
The situation is improved when a green card (permanent residency) is obtained. Then employment is not required to remain in the country.
Otherwise they have to do everything in their power to stay in the good graces of their Manager, and skip level for decade(s).
Competitiveness is useless in professional engineering environments except as, at best, a cheap and temporary motivator imo. Learning to collaborate effectively is what's important.
You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
On that note, I wonder how these forces might work to fix ideal team size to align with these flawed incentives.
Most I ever had was 8. When it got larger than that I had people step up to active leadership roles. Eventually they did the same.
In a tech workplace 20 is probably a real handful.
My first true corporate experience was with big-four Deloitte. The culture there is "up or out". May sound sketchy to outsiders but it was actually a really supportive environment.
I already feel very uncomfortable if I'm "the dumbest person in the room". Equally, I don't want to be the smartest.
He decided his team was good enough so he submitted the paperwork for 15% for everyone. It worked, he never heard back and everyone got their raise. This went on for years.
Then one day I'm in a meeting with a bunch of management and some small talk comes up about the set raises. My manager notes he doesn't follow the 'guidance' and all the other managers gasp.
For years these guys just did what they thought was expected, didn't even try anything different.
The managers at that company were more drones than anyone else... needless to say eventually all innovation slowed and the company feel into process hell.
Outside of regulatory or compliance requirements, in many cases, "policies" are simply suggestions which can be ignored.
I had a great manager at my last company. Very good people person, would read on his own time to try and improve himself, etc. He had also been in our department the longest - upper management was always coming and going every 2-3 years. I asked him one time why he didn't want to go for one of those higher level positions and would rather stay at this sort of stressful one after a decade. He said he didn't want to deal with all the headaches at that level (more meetings with C-level people). He just wanted to keep his head down, take care of his team, and go home (a 1-2 hr commute each way).
Given the precarity of much existence in the US, and the ability to be fired on a whim, it's no wonder the 'drone' mentality, of not bucking the system, is pretty normal. Suck up the BS until you can retire. I guess at least these days most of us don't have to deal with hot tar.
It's not a very realistic risk for most people.
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
Now, might you take some additional risks, considering URA? Sure. But I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. You want hiring managers to sometimes hire higher risk/reward candidates, otherwise you get a whole bunch of identical low risk hires.
This article is an overblown bit of hearsay. Also, new hires aren’t even eligible to be PIP’d out of the gate, so you’d have to set it up quite a bit in advance.
Source: was an Amazon hiring manager for several years.
The hiring process for corp employees makes the practice the article is claiming very, very, very hard to do.
There's bar raiser, there are 2-3 additional interviewers, and the hiring manager. The initial voting process is blind. The HM would need to be very very good at convincing the BR+others in order to hire a candidate that they don't want (this is assuming no one wants the candidate).
Plus, there are a bunch of other incentives countering you to hire someone that you don't want - it costs money, it eats up your allocated headcount, and it's going to take a while for you to onboard the new hire, which is going to eat up your team's bandwidth.
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked into it as much as I should have to make this statement. Just going off what a friend who worked there most recently told me.
But really, having good health care shouldn't be tied to having a job. That's a peculiarity of the US that's done long-term damage over decades.
Bezos graduated from Princeton in the mid-80s, and while he did do a stint at some networking company (but for Finance), he ended up in finance directly. He was at D.E. Shaw when the web exploded, and he left to start Amazon.
Go to any of the top players in a given industry and it will be the same. That actually makes sense because competition in the marketplace is brutal. You won't succeed (or not for long) if you don't aim high and let people take it easy.
Not tolerating mediocrity does not guarantee success or even great, successful products. But tolerating mediocrity is sure to lead to even more mediocre products. Acquisitions are neither here nor there.
People like Bezos, Jobs, Musk are not easy to work with because they are driven and do not tolerate mediocrity (but that still does not guarantee success) and that's why the result stands out.
Are we to take the stories of hiring to fire, constant infighting, favoritism, bigotry, and other inefficiencies and derive from that information that these companies are wise and excellent, instead of at least a little incompetent and mediocre, perhaps not overall but at least in part and by design?
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
That's it. Fight losing self-destructive battles if you feel you have to, but never forget it.
Except if you keep that metric unknown to whoever is working on it. The main problem with measures is when they are widely communicated.
The problem with "hire to fire" as described here is that it fails those criteria (the meta-metrics, if you will). Knowing your company's attrition/turnover rate is good; communicating that metric, at least to managers, is (I would argue) also good. But using it as a target that your managers must not go under is toxic to work culture and employee morale.
Business is simply complex, you can always sacrifice an intangible like brand perception to tweak some metric. But, it’s the along term that represents the vast majority of a companies value.
At least assuming the company is likely to survive the next 2 years.
Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do.
Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.
Anyway, there is a huge difference in collecting data and using a metric as a goal. Process improvement may involve measuring what specifically was causing delays and possibly changing things. Or perhaps using a more complex classification system where anything involving company X will always take an extra N days and everyone needs to know this ahead of time etc etc. The point is you need to make complex tradeoff perhaps company X is worth the delay.
Once the employees know this is being measured, they will presume it's also a goal, because why else measure it? Then they will act in ways to reduce the time between order and operational status. Is there any reason to believe that they won't game the measure, pushing orders to "operational" in ways that are detrimental to the business?
1. In a company with middle management, i.e., managers working for managers, you have to reveal the metric / target to them. Or at least, some manager will spill the beans and then it's not a secret any more.
2. Companies imitate one another, directly, or through managers who share a common background. Therefore, it's not hard to guess the metrics of one business by reading about similar businesses.
Thanks to these two channels, it's actually possible that the rank and file workers understand the business better than their managers do, because the workers have a broad range of information at their disposal if they read the business pages or even HN, whereas managers are obligated to embrace the official line. When a new metric is installed, chances are that the workers already understand it, and how to manipulate it.
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
- give employees and managers enough context to understand the business goals and empower them to make intelligent decisions and affect positive change
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
A few months in there were lots of red flags — 1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code) 2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on.
About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do.
I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again.
I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
Given that, a policy of "we're going to hire X% more people than we need, but fire fast" could be seen as a generous, progressive, error-correcting process.
It's better than leaving those people who interview poorly always just short of the real, compensated, supervised employment situations where they could prove themselves.
The grounds for judging the practice should be based on whether it's done honestly. Is the practice, and actual attrition-rates/risk-of-short-tenure, explained up-front? Are hires paid for all hours worked? Do those fired receive clear feedback for why they're not continuing?
- Due to the URA targets managers have to keep getting rid of people. If everyone on a team gets a "A+" grade, they have to get rid of the person getting "A-". Many times the "A-" person had a difficult period in their personal lives such as a medical emergency, depression, anxiety, pandemic induced anxiety, birth of a child, death of a family member.
- This has a detrimental impact on team morale.
- The people who stay long enough realize that its every person for themselves.
- So code isn't written with maintainability or customers in mind, its written with promotion and impact metrics in mind. As long as one can hit those metrics targets, it doesn't matter what was compromised in the process. Ask anyone at amazon about the internal tooling.
- Tech debt, and bugs are the problem of the person who's on-call, they can write Correction of Error document if things go terribly wrong.
- There are metrics for the number of comments / revisions on a code review, if someone receives too many comments, or has too many revisions on their code review, then its counted against them. On the other hand senior engineers have figured out that putting out nitpick comments, and getting a junior engineer to go through multiple revisions results in the senior engineer having a better chance at being at top of the stack rank during OLR season. Too many isn't a clearly defined metric, its arbitrarily applied based on the manager's judgement.
- PMs get the same treatment on their documents; nitpicks, frivolous comments, spending hours and hours fine tuning every single word in a document.
- In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, and has to operate in fear of being put on their manager/skip-level's hit-list, people are merely working towards their ultimate goal of staying long enough to see their vesting schedule complete, or their Permanent Residency approved.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 (these mini umbrellas are nothing new, but this year they got more power, so it will only get worse and MPs decided to ignore all proposals to fix this)
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.
The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate".
Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process.
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
To quote some director's words: if you want to compete, compete with our competitors instead of your coworkers.
Or it could be that people are treated like a dogs and would be better off not being in that environment regardless of having a plan b.
This sounds like a re-hash of Jack Welch's Vitality Curve [1] where you're expected to fire the bottom 10% every year.
This is a crazy practice and of course the consequence is that managers will find a way to meet the targets they are assigned, however nonsensical these targets might be, for fear of getting the chop themselves. From that perspective "hire to fire" is actually the only logical (if crazy) option to both keep your people and meet your target.
Lovely.
I have only seen stack ranking from the sidelines. One guy who was on a high performing team didn't get the promo since others had already received theirs so they were 'out of promos'. He kinda had a nervous breakdown as he punched his office door for like 15 minutes while crying about wasting his life and being stupid. I remember him putting in a solid 3+ hours every day after work. I was contractor and got paid for my extra time, there was no promo I was after.
Decimating your workforce is some seriously messed up behavior.
It is easy to see the limits of the so called invisible hand of free market, it might be more efficient than state-driven bureaucracy but it is still far from optimal.
Is it even possible to avoid for large organizations?
When I worked for a US company in Canada, the upper management was open the fact that stack ranking was used. They said the bottom 2% should be gone every year. There would be a quarter every once a while that looks pretty "bleak". Then the office was allocated with "less" budget. At this point the managers picked a few people across different departments to fire. In a larger office, it's not a difficult task. The ones who regularly stole stationary for personal use, conduct side business during regular business hours or has outdated behaviours were picked. At the beginning of the next quarter, the job postings for those openings went up to the company's career page.
From the grapevine, over half of those people who were let go in this situation had difficulties finding comparable employment. The percentage sounds like a backdoor to get rid of the people who got hired because of some false positives. For that particular site of the company, these people would be let go even without stack ranking formally stated explicitly.
I saw it first-hand, I wasn't pip'ed myself. :D
Let's assume that 95% of hires are "good" and 5% are "bad." Let's say a manager hires 3 people a year, and currently oversees 100 people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the point of URA is to make sure managers fire the portion of that 5% who don't quit voluntarily. If the voluntary portion is 2%, then we'd expect the manager to fire 3%, or 3 people in our example year.
If 100% of those fired were of the 3 that were most recently hired, then obviously there's a problem. We'd expect each of new hires to only have a 5% chance of being "bad." The thing to do is to track what percent of the manager's hires within, say, the last year were part of that URA. If it passes some threshold, then either the manager is doing a poor job of hiring or they're trying to game the system.
Separately, I think companies in general are doing performance management all wrong anyway. We focus on individuals; not on teams and we ask the wrong questions.
https://www.viamaven.com/blog/amazon-pip-what-is-it-what-to-...
I read that as "if you hire two teams of 5 people, on average one person on one of them ends up not performing and getting PIP'd.
That seems... not crazy to me?
Imagine trying to build a team and good culture when someone on your team is put into a performance plan/fired every year.
Now add in unreasonable demands from management on delivery dates, churn from people trying to work at a company that doesn't fire one of their coworkers every year, and a lack of new hire support because if you don't bring your new hires up to speed very fast, they're more likely to get fired than you/your friends are. Also, those new hires get paid more than you do if they were brought in at the same level because they're "bar raising" and you aren't.
"About 10% of Amazonians receive a PIP.
This is fairly high; at other companies, 0.5 to 3 percent of employees receive a PIP."
Seems to be 3 - 20x the average. That's high.
And using invalid assumptions, if the probability that you will get PIP'd every year is 10%, assuming it's just a random dart shot, that means the likelihood you'll get PIP'd at some point in the first 4 years is 35%.
However, you might need to pay back part of relocation money, if you leave before two years mark.
And even if they don't, there are lots of ways to find yourself in a toxic workplace. If you're depending on that vesting schedule, your life can suck as you're trying to wait out an arbitrary deadline.
If you treat vesting as a nice optional bonus that you don't plan on, neither situation will feel bad to you.
I had the wonderful experience of being hired at Google many years ago, and pulled into an SRE role. I was in the roughly half that they do that with that don't work out. And I didn't work out for exactly the reason that I initially expressed doubts about. (I don't task switch that fast - not a problem in a SWE but a major problem for an SRE.) I was let go 5 days before my 1 year cliff.
That is one of the reasons why I, personally, discount equity compensation.
Google and Facebook don't anymore. You start vesting right away.
I personally discount equity at 40%. So you can offer me $300,000 cash or you can offer me $150,000 cash and $250,000 RSUs and I'd consider those equal offers.
> And stocks tend to go up
Only lately. Stock compensation sucked around 2001 and 2008.
Assume that there is a job market with lots of jobs. Each will hire you for your market-rate total compensation, no stock cliffs, no job-seeking costs. Spherical cow. Say also that you can tell the variance on stock compensation, but you can't guess at future performance.
One strategy might be to go to an all-cash job and make your market rate forever. That's a lower-bound on the best expected future earnings. But a better strategy is,
- Join a high-variance company,
- If/when your pay drops below the market, find another high-variance company.
With this strategy your expected earnings are higher than your market rate, even if the expected earnings at every job is the same. And the outperformance scales up with the variance.
But I live in the real world. And in the real world, you can't switch jobs instantaneously back and forth, like you can trade stocks. In the real world there may not be a job available at the market rate. In the real world it takes months to find a new job even if there is one, and then it's even harder to actually get market rate.
So in the real world it make more sense to discount stock compensation compared to cash compensation to account for all of these things and the risk you take on by accepting stock based compensation.
You shouldn't trade away a dollar's worth of shares for 60 cents more salary just because of taxes.
On the other hand Equity is startup is completely different thing and should be heavily discounted.
That's not the way Amazon vests your stock, unless things have drastically changed recently. They vest in single lump sums for the year, and they have a slowly ramping up vesting schedule.
First year, nothing (but they give you straight money bonus) Second year, barely anything, but they give you some cash to "offset". Third year, good bunch of the stock, but still less than half. Fourth year, all the rest of the stock vests.
Within each year you should get some stock offering, on the same ramping up basis so the idea is after the fourth year, you have consistent RSUs vesting, and they'll probably be split over the year based on whenever Amazon gave you the stock offering.
But it still should be modeled far above zero, and far closer to cash than pre-ipo options.
For very few companies. Most companies - even tech companies have annual vesting (so 25% every year). And Amazon has 5% vesting after the first year.
Google seems like possibly the worst place to work. They have major, thoroughly discussed issues with their review process. They were some of the initiators of ultra grueling interviews, elitist hiring practices…
Google is well known for killing products and you often hear that is a by-product of their review process.
Google offices are infantalized (just like FB) and often filthy (worse than FB).
That’s on top of their well known issues with internal political fighting, sexual harassment from execs and unethical business model.
Definitely helps open doors for people that would otherwise not have a chance at getting a job at the place.
That all being said, if this is different from what I described, ok.
Now that doesn't mean you need official targets of firing X% each year, you can implement "fast to fire" badly, but even the best possible implementation of "fast to fire" is going to be more unpleasant for employees than those in a slow-to-hire, slow-to-fire company.
If it's a measure, _shrug_, I see it as fairly inevitable in a big enterprise. Some people will leave for good, bad, and miscellaneous reasons. 6% turnover at a big enterprise seems pretty low IMHO.
If it's a target - wtf? Actively forcing out satisfactory staff to hit an arbitrary number is a bizarre way to operate.
I know the media loves to suggest Amazon has horrible work practices, but seeing as one explanation of this number is sensible enough and the other is batshit crazy, I choose to assume they're applying it in the sensible way.
Good.
And also you're not incentivized to make particularly good work there, as you'll be fired soon.
Great.
/s
And firing typically is totally unrelated to hiring. Firing decisions are for typical bottom X%, or product not doing good and actions need to be taken. It is easy to say that leaders do it to save their ass, but there is more to it and almost in every organization.
BI talked to managers who admitted to doing this.
It’s odd to me to deny it. We have the motive, means, and the opportunity. And not to mention the admission!
Amazon is large so it’s unsurprising that some people here haven’t seen it.
One thing that I find interesting is that Amazon PR denied the existence of even URA rates, but I’ve heard managers IRL admit they exist.
Amazon: we want to hire you.
Candidate: uh, put it in writing that you won't
fire me for 18 months minimum.But how else do you manage a mill system where talent is the grist? You don’t. You just hire them all and let HR sort it out.
do yall understand that things like this are directly causative of the great frustration and antagonism against "techies" nationally and particularly in every city that has been changed by this industry?
it is understood by everyone else that tech workers bear some responsibility for this culture and these behaviors, but tech workers themselves seem to deny it or not believe it.
I'm not familiar with any examples of this, does anyone have references?
There are thousands of other well-paying, respected companies that don’t treat their employees like shit.