Comment by mghd23145 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mghd23145 | Hacker News Reader

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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?

> 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.

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.

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