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.
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?