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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.

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.

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> Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.

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?

What's an orange / blue badge?

I think he's referring to tenure, blue -> 0-5 yrs FTE, orange 5-10 yrs FTE

In this context, it refers to the tenure of the Amazonian. Full time employees that are <5 years tenure have a badge with a blue border, those with 5-10 years tenure have an orangeish border, 10-15 have a red border, etc...

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.

People need to get out of these terrible orgs. In mine, I'd estimate >50% get to 5. The average tenure is a lot lower because the org has grown from ~15 to ~70 people in the past 5 years.

"Very rare" is, at best, a huge exaggeration. I can't post numbers, obviously, but from what I can tell based on employee available tools it's at least 25% of corporate employees. It seems rarer than it is for two reasons:

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.

"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. "

Are some career ladder jumpers actually planning to leave anyway after 2-3 years so they can leverage compensation offers between FANG?

You can tell it's bullshit because no one calls them orange badges unless it's their 2nd week on the job. They're yellow badges. Not to be confused with vendor badges, which are also yellow.

> It's the choice of who gets out that matters.

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.

I don’t understand how being in an interview loop would tell you whether hire-to-fire is occurring. If a manager wanted to hire someone on their team with the intent of firing them, they would hire someone who passed the ordinary interview process. They wouldn’t attach a note to the candidate’s file saying “we don’t really need to interview this one, we’re just going to fire them.” There would be a normal paper trail and nobody other than the manager would know that about the plan.

The source article actually provides no evidence of "hire-to-fire" practices. It simply states that there is a target URA of 6% and that's it.

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 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.

A guy supposedly tells another guy that some highly weird thing that makes no sense at all is common at their company. This is how we learned about Enron, so sure, let's admit the evidence. But also, this is how 99% of BS spreads across the internet, so whenever possible let's please use more than just anecdotal evidence from an anonymous account. If your friend has a story to tell, please direct them appropriately - we all know that the NYT would love to tear Amazon a new one. But please recognize just how weak your argument sounds as of right now.

Who in their right mind would go on record blasting a company worth as much as Amazon? It'll ruin their career. Unless corporations stop being as powerful, whisper networks are all we have.

The NYT has a great track record of protecting their sources.

Except when they don't. Did you miss the Scott Alexander / SlateStarCodex saga recently? It revealed that NYT's policies around revealing people's identity are pretty hit-and-miss.

Not aware of this. But as a former NYT employee, I can tell you they try harder than anyone else out there.

Scott Alexander was the subject of a story, not an anonymous journalistic source which is what the poster you replied to was referring to when they said the NYT protects their sources.

I am not disputing that the NYT revealed his full name, they absolutely did so that, against his wishes.

It’s undisputed that Amazon has a quota for attrition that managers must meet. The only question is how are they meeting it. Why is it so hard to believe that a manger who likes all of their employees would inflate their headcount request to get someone new to fire? It’s practically a mechanical result of the quota. Of course they wouldn’t go on record about this, it’s wrong and possibly illegal (the manager must have lied when filling out some paperwork). But it would be more surprising if it didn’t occur.

> It’s undisputed that Amazon has a quota for attrition that managers must meet.

Citation needed.

That's not correct. The article simply says they are tracking a metric. There's no mention of a "quota".

Metrics are quotas at Amazon. There is a literally a training during your onboarding about Amazon's "metrics culture", and how the only reason you track a metric is if you have a corresponding target for that metric, as well as someone responsible for ensuring that the metric reaches that target. Amazon doesn't just track random metrics for the hell of it. Those metrics and targets are used either for or against you during annual performance reviews, and URA/RA targets are one of the most important metrics for manager-track employees. If that isn't a 'quota', then I don't know what would be.

https://archive.is/nf8tn

Leaked internal memo shows that if an org doesn’t meet the target this year, they have to make it up next year.

Someone literally did that already, but with BI rather than NYT! That’s why we’re talking about this! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this overall thread.

Based on my experience with you elsewhere on this page, I was already wondering if you were a troll or just genuinely confused (on top of being rude and being a name caller). Let me help you out:

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.

There are a heck of a lot of anecdotes with the same hire to fire claim and I have heard them as well from former Amazon employees. Plenty of them on Blind as well, which verifies company employment.

Sure, fire has not been found, but there is a ton of smoke on this.

Indeed, it seems like a garbage, clickbait article. It should not be on HN.

> 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?

They’re one of the largest corporations in the world; of course they’re a political organization.

More anecdata but I have a friend at Amazon who confirmed the hire-to-fire mentality.

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.

Just about every large company has low performing employees, and just about every large company (at least in the U.S.) has a PIP process that attempts to help redeem employees who are identified to be at risk of flunking out. Some individuals, for better or worse, are just not fit to work in a particular role or at a particular company, and fail the PIP. This system is not unique to Amazon, and it's very common in the industry.

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.

sample size.

Given the overall industry turnover figures, a 6% URA target seems like something that's so low as to not be especially impactful.

"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?"

Yes, this happens. But the trick is that you have to have the employee on the development list before the termination is keyed in the HR system. The good news, is that the manager is usually responsible for entering the termination (voluntary or involuntary).

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.

Never tell your manager about plans to transfer, or even apply, until you've got a verbal offer in hand. Ask the manager for a "soft loop" which is basically an interview done off the books with no paper trail. Once you apply, your manager, hr, and others are notified.

> 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.

"One crazy trick..." employee<->manager interactions seem so broken to me.

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).

6% is for the incoming CEO, which is probably not representative of managers closer to the line. (If it is then I agree, why even have this policy at all.)

I think it is just the news has a negativity bias. It happens in trendy and groupthink oriented ways, though.

Nobody will ever get documents that proves as that is confidential information. If you want anecdotal evidence, you can check Blind.

The article specifically stated that Amazon managers were hiring unqualified people:

>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.

The sentence you quoted says the manager “wouldn’t, or shouldn’t” hire these candidates. In my understanding, this means they aren’t needed, not that they aren’t qualified. That’s the essence of the “hire to fire” practice - hiring someone not because you need them to do the job, but because you need to meet your firing quota.

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.

This makes sense. If I knew my team was going to lose 6% of it's members, I'd hire 6% more people to compensate for the loss. Even if the goal isn't to fire them that's what ends up happening.

6% is in the noise for software planning. Is there ever a single project where you are confident that 20 people is what you need so you can submit a headcount request for 21 so that you'll have one to drop? I've never seen planning that was able to achieve this level of precision.

But if firing is mandatory, ALL hiring is hiring to fire, so where is the story?

Obviously if you are forced to cull X% you are going to try to maintain 1+X% staffing level.

Yes, hiring to fire is an obvious consequence of a firing quota. The firing quota is the headline. The hiring to fire is a gory detail.

This is all old news, anyhow, is it not? I recall hearing about the Amazon mandatory firing process years ago.

Yet soft influence mechanisms exist. Pretending like the “bar raiser” is an infallible human being or has extra skill in detecting talent vs not is a dangerous assumption. This is especially the case when you consider that tech companies have repeatedly stated that the data shows that no one has such an ability and that’s why interview panels are needed in the first place.

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.

Candidates can also just be coached. A friend of mine interviewed for Amazon and was surprised how much he was told about what to expect.

In my experience, if you ask the company recruiter what to expect, they will generally tell you and even tell you about the interviewers (if known).

The need to get vacancies filled.

"This is especially the case when you consider that tech companies have repeatedly stated that the data shows that no one has such an ability"

Where is this data?

In internal presentations at Google (& FB too? Can’t recall). I think some of this may have published but I’m not too keen to do research at the moment. At the very least it might appear in Laszlo’s book.

But if that last person is good enough to get past the bar raiser, they wouldn’t necessarily be the one getting fired later. It would make more sense to just hire more people than you need in the first place, intending to fire the worst performer later on without necessarily knowing ahead of time who that worst performer is going to be. Which is brutal but has a certain logic to it.

Many teams has higher standard than the company bar though, the company bar is the lowest possible level anyone is allowed to be hired at not some decent average. In theory a bar raiser should ensure the candidate is better than 50% of those in similar roles, but that obviously can't be true after all these years, the bad 50% has all gotten hired via the same process.

You seem to assume totally objective performance management

No.

Managers generally overrule other's opinions by giving promise of personally "coaching" the new hire to make them meet the bar.

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.

Darwinian

You're speaking from a position of how the process is supposed to work, but not from how it actually does work. I think you seriously underestimate how much power an HM can have in the process if they have a little bit of experience.

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.

Let's say you're perfectly happy with your team of 9, but you have to fire 10% of people every year.

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.

I work for AWS and the concept of Bar Raisers sits in a weird grey area. There are plenty of decent candidates who pass the bar but we do stack ranking for the year end review. So they can hire at headcount and end up having to fire anyway. If you end up with two hires that are roughly the same the stack rank takes care of it.

Oh, please. Softer version of this practice is well-known in tech industry since 2000s: when company demands perf curve from the manager, managers hire and keep low-performers on the team to satisfy the curve demand. Everyone who worked at Microsoft, Amazon or Walmart has seen this happening. Hire-to-fire is just logical extension of this practice. It doesn’t really matter if it’s internal transfer or new hire.

Don’t see how any of it’s untrue. You just interpreted this in a way that would be untrue.

Rather than “lower the bar” an HM can just request 1 more headcount for SDE1 than they truly need.

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. In other words, Inc. is perpetrating a lie, along with all the other publishers who jumped on this bandwagon. That's fine, we all make mistakes. But here's the interesting part: Inc. has a perverse incentive not to be too diligent in their reporting, because if they look too deep underneath the carpet, they could come across the truth that the OP shared. Once you learn how things really work, you can't spread your BS anymore because you can be sued for libel. But if you just pick up someone else's lie and expand on it without bothering to verify the fundamental thesis, you're 100% covered. Inc. was careful to start their reporting with:

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.

> find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism

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.

That works great in theory. But look at all the comments here. Hundreds of people posted comments, and thousands read them within a few hours. A few months from now, SEO will ensure that this page will have been visited by a few million people googling "Amazon hire to fire." The majority of comments doesn't start with "hey guys, this is obviously all just fake BS," and instead you see a lot of hatred being pointed at Amazon. And this is just HN, which is going to have smarter people than any other place reporting on this topic. So, no, the suggestion you made is not a workable solution and we need a better one.

Step off your soap box and RTFA. The linked BI reporting mentions interviews they did with managers (btw you seem to be confusing op-eds and reporting, Mr. Fix-Journalism Startup Idea Guy). Or do your own verification- this practice is discussed frequently on Amazon’s teamblind lounge, for example. Get someone in your network to let you take a peek. Unlike HN (which you just trust intrinsically for some reason), that site requires you verify your employer before posting.

Ouch. Are you always this cranky? Someone suggests a startup idea and you instantly revert to name calling? The linked BI article is gated, and no, I am not going to spend a penny on that POS publication. While I would be generally curious in learning what your gated sources at Amazon have to say, it's ridiculous to be mad at me for not having done that research. If there are interesting patterns that can be extracted out of internal Amazon forums, then I would hope that a journalist would have a go at it and earn their living with rigorous reporting as opposed to skating on the edge of libel boundaries.

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.

Ok so you won’t read the article. Sorry to waste your time by suggesting you do that before proclaiming the reporter (whose reporting you didn’t read) isn’t doing their job.

Startups are great, but their chances of success are higher when the founders know what they’re talking about.

This article originally linked to an Inc. article which I read top to bottom [1]. I also clicked on the link to the BI article and found that it's gated [2]. By the time you arrived at the party, the mods changed the source link from Inc to BI, which I would argue only confirms that the Inc article was total BS and was not deemed a good reference - so much so, that they even chose to link to a gated article, which is obviously not ideal.

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...

I commented with a link to the archive.org for the BI article. It aligns with my first hand knowledge and what I’ve read elsewhere. I’m not interested in discussing this meta stuff or what names you’d prefer to be called, sorry. dang can ding me if I broke a rule, but that’s not your job. On HN I believe we’re supposed to discuss the merits of each other’s arguments.

I would prefer not to be called any names at all, thank you very much.

To borrow your words: your core thesis[0] is fundamentally flawed.

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.

Yeah, its basically news laundering. One paper runs an article on an anonymous source or scientific preprint. They use the proper terminology to describe the level of confidence involved, which may be low.

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.

This makes me want to create a tweet tumbling service. Send us a message and we'll send it to someone else, but no one can prove or disprove where it came from.

They'll do literal citogenesis sometimes, too, actually. It's happened in court, too. Oh, hey, look the press reported on the thing we leaked to them, that's proof that it must be reliable, judge!

It's fine to analyze Inc's reporting with a skeptical eye, but did it strike you at all that you're essentially doing the same thing you're accusing Inc of doing (taking information at face value without digging too deep), but with the parent's comment?

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.

I am glad you bring this up. If I am wrong, people can downvote me and my voice will lose visibility (quite literally - the comment will get grayed out and will drop to the bottom of the page). What happens if the reporter is wrong? Assuming they don't spread their lies knowingly, legally they will be in safe territory. And they will still cash in on all the controversy they create with their fake reporting. So my view on this specific topic may or may not be right, but my claim that the journalism landscape is out of balance should stand regardless.

Is that how you would feel 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 [upvotes on HN]"?

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.

You created this account an hour ago, so perhaps you don't have the full context here. Amazon has so much emotional baggage associated with it, that it would be hard to present an argument which is factually accurate but indirectly shows support for Amazon. Therefore, taking the argument out of the Amazon context helps with discussing the accuracy of the underlying facts.

I might have misinterpreted what you actually wanted to ask. If your question is if I stand by my comments, the answer is 100% yes.

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

>The Inc journalist did a lazy job of presenting facts

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.

Damn, you're on a roll. Ok, I'll bite.

> 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...

I think, and this is just an assumption so I might be wrong, but I think you might have missed the point of the article--which is that sometimes the things you incentivize conflict with what you say are your values. What Insider reported as happening at Amazon is an example of it.

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.

No, the OP's comment is wrong.

One question: who makes the decision of how many to hire?

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.

I mean, this assumes the BR is always acting in good faith and/or isn't in on the whole thing. Honest question, maybe I've misunderstood, but is it beyond the pale that a HM would ask the BR (or not even have to verbalize since the BR knowns how this game works) to sign off because they want to protect other people on their team (as in hiring someone they know will probably rank low and thus be the person fired)?

Sure, it's possible. But which is more likely:

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.

Thank you for the response, that clears it up a lot more. I think I was misunderstanding exactly what the relationship between the HM and BR is, I was assuming they worked together regularly and were team-specific instead of a shared resource between teams and not tied to the team that was hiring.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> Which is the fundamental argument here

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.

We're splitting hairs. I agree with what you're saying, and I think you agree with what I am saying. We're just focusing on a different argument. One thing we completely agree on is this statement:

> 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.

Right. People are not using the phrase "hire to fire" uniformly.

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.

>who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other

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.

Honest question - do you know all this for fact, or are you assuming this based on the collective evidence, etc? It just feels so anti-Amazon for a function specifically designed to ensure that certain things happen not to have a KPI that they are evaluated against.

That's why bar raisers have to be from a different organization than the team hiring.

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.

Could you share the metrics on which you as a BR are evaluated? Employee retention? Time to hire?

Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then...

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?

You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team.

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).

Thanks for sharing that context, it's helpful.

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?

In my org, we did a lot of hiring (I was in hundreds of interview debriefs) and we saw mostly the same set of ~10 bar raisers for the debriefs, with occasional fill-ins to make scheduling easier.

Is this how it works in the non-tech parts of amazon?

All this means is that they cannot hire shitty people.

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.

Wow. The hiring manager doesn't get to make the final decision?

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?

I would assume that the Bar Raiser can say 'No' when the HM says 'yes', but not vice versa. So the HM would choose their own team. But it would be true that the Bar Raiser can't be held to account, since you will rarely if ever find out that they made a bad call.

Well... I'm not sure that it's exactly like that, at least when I was there.

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.

That makes more sense. So the bar raiser is there to nudge people toward better hires, but generally isn't overruling the HM?

Right.

(When push comes to shove, the bar raiser could overrule, but everyone would rather it not have to get to that point...)

The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.

I can only speak for software engineering: Hiring is extremely difficult and time intensive.

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.

Managers generally overrule other's opinions by giving promise of personally coaching the new hire to make them meet the bar. In most cases such people are put on coaching plan, 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 is non existent.

one big caveat here is there is much less scrutiny put on hiring interns from internship to full-time, and Amazon hires a LOT of interns every year.

It's possible for the hiring manager to also be the bar-raiser, especially at senior levels like SDE3 and above. I have personally seen this happen. Having said that, I doubt that specific people are hired to be fired. I would consider it more likely that if a manager needs X people, he would try to keep the team strength at X + delta, so someone can be fired when required.

Edit: formatting

> 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.

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.

I don't think they meant hiring managers, but rather division or project managers, ones who decide that this division or project needs to hire more people (possibly with attrition goal at mind).

Primary target of PIPs are college hires, and Amazon hires them via online assessment and a phone call verification.

> the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision

To be pedantic, the HM makes the hire-or-not decision, the BR can veto a hire decision. BR cannot make a hire decision.

I'd describe it as "they both have a veto" - BR and HM must both say "yes" for the hire to happen.

Your interview process is a wreck, anyway. It optimizes for people who spend a month or two grinding leetcode and rehearsing their Leadership Principle stories.

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.

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