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.