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Comment by ragona | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know anyone at Amazon who would hire someone they were sure they’d fire. I’ve never heard of it. It’d honestly even be sort of difficult, given the hiring process and the involvement of a bar raiser (veto vote) on the hiring committee who is not on the team.

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.

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I would imagine this is more geared toward warehouse employees. Anecdotal but a friend who works for AMZN (warehouse), who during his first 6 months thought it was pretty good gig has soured on the company. They have some metric (time off task) where bathroom breaks and things like that can easily get you fired. A simple bout of diarrhea that causes you to spend some extra time in the bathroom is enough to warrant termination. He says that it is basically modern day slavery and people are worked like machines. There are two people he recognizes that are still there after a year, everyone else has left. It would be interesting to learn what the turn over rate is for AMZN (warehouse work). Probably quite high I would imagine. One interesting thing he did say is there is still a huge want to Unionize at their level and it's going to happen sooner or later.

This needs to be upvoted a bit more. The article is clickbait, and most comments in this thread reflect how effective it is at it.

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.

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