Amazon's Controversial 'Hire to Fire' Practice Reveals a Truth About Management
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This "stuffing the deck" used to happen at Microsoft too before they dropped stack ranking. It meant any fresh hire could never truly know if they passed interviews or if they were setup to fail. It is one of the many absurdities caused by stack ranking.
A good manager will collect and maintain a good team. Asking everyone to churn their teams means a healthy team of power players is just not allowed.
Beyond hiring to fire, having under performers is also a powerful tactic in stack ranking. It allows managers to reward their power members with more raises.
Frankly any aspect of stack ranking is a curse. It sounds great from the top level but currupts companies from the bottom up.
That doesn't strike me as odd at all. Companies should track attrition. It's a metric that should be watched, and if it goes up over time, that should be alarming. The problem is that managers are apparently graded on this metric:
> Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA).
... which is just completely bizarre. Basing part of a manager's performance review based on whether or not they fired enough people to match a company-wide expected attrition rate is completely bonkers. Managers should possibly be penalized if they fire (or lose) too many people (it shows that either they are really bad at hiring, or that their people hate them and leave), but being below that number shouldn't generally be cause for alarm. Certainly it could mean that a manager is keeping dead weight around, but that shouldn't be the default assumption.
Its cut-throat no doubt, but if its also well rewarded, why shouldn't there be a place for this kind of practice?
Here's an article that explains why - https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
In reality - the hiring manager doesn't have work for the person and doesn't care about their qualifications. So Amazon is misrepresenting the situation to their hires. People make big life decisions based on their employment - doing that is very unethical and disruptive.
If you want the conversation to be about legality then that is one thing. It seems like a practice that should be legal to me. But it is objectionable.
It fuels the anti-Amazon rhetoric and so everyone just runs with it, assuming every worst case scenario is true and extrapolating every rumor to the extreme to validate their disdain for the company. It's exhausting.
It may be successful in the short run, but that doesn’t make it a good long term strategy. It may be a good long term strategy but that doesn’t make it ethical.
To the thought police: notice how I engaged the parent in a thoughtful argument instead of moronically hitting the downvote button.
I guess this is a political issue for many. If you view this discussion through the prism of fundamental rights, fairness and so on then its bound to cause a down-voting orgy. If ever HN was a place one could discuss alternatives with political implications, it no longer seems to be.
Business success does not justify employee exploitation.
But playing the devil’s advocate, one could make the case that having a quick fire culture keeps employees on their toes and maybe keeps wages suppressed. Maybe that’s worth the cost of hiring poor performers?
As a selection process it sounds pretty much the worst one imaginary. However, these organizations seems to not only survive but prosper. There must be more to it than this.
It can be important to refrain from continually tracking that which you don't want to manage.
It is the correlation/causation problem, often times the metric is not causal to your success.
There is a nuance here, which is that Amazon is only targeting unregretted attrition rates. Which indicates the number of people leaving Amazon, who have been previously marked as poor performers. The system also doesn't allow simple gaming, such as marking someone as a poor performer after they tell you they are leaving. Having a high regretted attrition rate is indeed something managers will be penalized for.
Not defending the system in any way. Just wanted to clarify the above
Haven't seen this being done firsthand. But I've heard from trusted sources, that it's a common practice to mark people leaving on their own as URA.
Amazon is a company which gained a lot from their policy of exploiting the employee. Amazon loves how they can hire mostly subpar candidates and still make profit by driving them with fear. The same is reflected in their mandatory URA policies. Its not a big deal that some great people get fired too. They don't expect such people to stick around for long in the first place. Policies to manage developers and warehouse workers have come from the same person, so you can't expect much difference in philosophy of how to treat employees.
On Blind's Amazon private lounge, there's a popular saying, don't make noise until Amazon starts shooting it's own employees. Anything less is either old or unsurprising.
Not if you dont care about finding the best candidate or them succeeding
Always get large a signing bonus.
Practically it may cost them more to get the money back than just letting it go if you refuse to pay. Also, typically, if you get fired early and the bonus was for relocation, the money doesn't unspend itself so I'm not sure what they expect.
Every engineer that quits or gets fired in the first year thus saves their employer tens of thousands of dollars.
It does creates what we called a "Mafia". Amazon orgs do have untouchables and stack ranking affords them that status.
Firing people is unpleasant and emotionally draining. Everyone likes to talk about the failure mode where someone is overly quick to fire, but the truth for large orgs is that it's far more common to be overly slow to fire people. Absent other incentives, for every one person that you fired overly aggressively, you'll have 10 people sitting around drawing salaries despite being low-productivity or zero-productivity or negative-productivity and their managers are just avoiding conflict.
There are no perfect hiring practices, and no perfect ways to turn around failing employees -- as soon as your org gets to be a certain size (much, much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft), you'll have bad hires and/or employees who used to be productive who no longer are who you need to fire. And if you don't fire them, you get more of them -- they drain the morale of people around them. People say, "Why should I work hard if Bob is transparently doing nothing and still getting his paycheck?"
When you're a smallish org, maybe 100 people or fewer, you don't need processes for this, you just need the ultimate leaders of the company to demand accountability. If I'm the CEO of a 100 person company, I can tell my managers that it's really important that we have a high-performing team, that that means firing sometimes, and then do some spot checks to make sure that they're taking me seriously, and that's fine. And not having a process is preferable to having a process at this size.
But at some point in the triple-digit employee numbers, that falls apart. Once you have people 4 or more levels from the CEO, it starts getting really hard to make sure that everyone is just holistically doing what they're supposed to, and you start to need a process.
And once you've got, you know, high 4 digit numbers of employees or more, you also have to start being realistic about what value having a really high-performing team of 10 or 20 people somewhere deep down in your org chart really gets you: not that much.
Ignore gaming the system for a minute, let's just talk about first order effects. Just say, "Okay, in some kind of system that forces attrition, stack ranking or something similar, you remove the possibility of recognizing the reality of a team that has 10 members who are all high-performing."
If Amazon sacrifices the ability to have some random engineering team having 10 high performers, in return for getting a hundred teams to get off their ass and remove their low performers, that's a great deal for Amazon. Teams of 10 high performers are rare. They happen, sure. But they are rare. And at Amazon's size, they don't move the overall fortunes of the company much. In contrast, teams that accumulate deadweight are common, and because they are common, in aggregate they do move the fortunes of the company. Any smallish team of high performers that is actually in a position of high-leverage that it can affect Amazon's overall fortunes is going to be some weird exec-created team that's insulated from these kinds of performance metrics anyway.
But of course we can't ignore gaming the system, not entirely, and that's where the rubber hits the road. What's worse than 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating is 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating but also the managers are hiring to fire. But I guess the question is: is that actually a failure mode that happens relatively frequently? Are there enough cynical managers who have low enough empathy to hire someone just to fire them, but high enough empathy that they want to do that in order to protect the tenured deadweight on their team? I don't know the answer, but it seems like a bit of a snowflake situation. I'm sure someone is out there is basically a psychopath who'll hire someone just to fire them, in order to protect their buddy. But it doesn't sound like a common pathology.
There's no perfect system here, clearly. One of the real competitive advantages that smaller companies have -- a big reason why we all don't just literally have only five companies in tech -- is that people hierarchies get inherently less efficient as the org scales. But HN commenters, especially anyone here who aspires to one day run an org, whether as a founder or just a manager, should get past this whole business of, "the only failure mode we'll think about is being overly fast to fire."
It turns out in practice you can make good employees out of anyone if you are forced to. Sometimes it means taking a poor engineer and turning them into a great marketing person though.
Tesla also has had some success with productive teams, but Musk can only scale so far. If he isn't showing up regularly and drilling down into teams and firing the people who are not productive, there becomes more incentive to make friends and play politics than to be productive at the expense of pissing someone off.
I generally agree with your comment, and the above is a great way of phrasing your point. However, I do think the above behavior is extremely common. There are tons of people out there who show great loyalty to friends, but not strangers. I personally know many people who have said that they will help cover up their friends' crimes, regardless of the severity of the crime. Taken one step further, there is no shortage of people who are extremely patriotic and loyal to their fellow countrymen, but completely callous to foreigners and immigrants.
If you want to pursue the psychopath angle, there is ample avenue there as well. Everyone has a handful of work-friends who they know will have their back. They will give them glowing feedback to upper management, references, and job referrals. Cultivating this inner circle of peers, is a fantastic way to grow your career. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine."
I do agree with the overall point of your post. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss managerial pathologies or hire-to-fire practices.
It stretches imagination that all of the above align and this is a common practice at Amazon.
It's not like they are choosing whether or not to fire someone. They know they have to let someone go. They are just strategically choosing who it should be. Their headcount doesn't change as a result of this
> collude with bar raisers to hire low performing employees, and they need to fool their directors
They don't have to go this far. As a manager, you could simply allow the hiring process to play itself out as it normally does. And then hire someone with the knowledge that they will be your sacrificial lamb when needed
> doubtful executives at the organizational level will let you get away with it if found out
How exactly is anyone going to find out. As long as you don't do it repeatedly and in a blatantly obvious manner, there's no way anyone will find out
> it's bad overall for the company / organization
Racism, sexism and homophobia would have never existed in the corporate world if everyone did what's best for the company. Surprisingly, the 20th century wasn't a great time to be a gay minority woman.
Seriously questionable conclusion. It is exactly those types of teams that will create the next generation of outside-the-box product/service that will lead the next generation of profit for the company. E.g., it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon's data management team was such, and now AWS basically is the golden goose while their core biz is marginally profitable and has many problems (counterfeiting, stuffing, fraud-rife review system...).
That said, the value of such teams is often squandered by higher management that too often sees the new product line as cannibalizing their existing cash cow products. Fixing that problem is more key than fixing the problem of deadweight, or at least as important.
I'm no Apple-head but my impression was that Jobs' leadership focused not at all on deadweight, but on being the first to cannibalize their own products with new innovations.
- If your "productivity" is measured and rewarded based on lines of code, you know what'll happen.
- If a QA engineer is incentivised based on number of detected bugs, you know what'll happen - a lot of trivial bugs gets reported.
- If a dev is incentivised based on number of bugs per line of code, fewer bugs will get reported.
... and that's just w.r.t. software metrics. At the country level, we have the GDP to thank for if a govt targets its policies towards influencing the GDP number upwards to the detriment of what the people and economy really need in their context.
At least it’s honest.
Which is really what this is all about: ensuring people who you want to keep stick around. The pay you give someone is in part a reflection on how willing you are to leave. If my boss reduced my wage to minimum wage I wouldn't quit today, but you can be sure my top priority would be finding a new job. I know it is possible for me to feed my family on minimum wage, but I wouldn't like the lifestyle that means and I wouldn't like the snub.
Performance is messaured in five points. Sales, adoption, support, dependency and need.
Sales, how much money am I making.
Adoption, how many users are joining.
Support, how many people current actively use the product.
Dependency, how dependent are it's users on the product.
Need, how much we really want this product to be successful. Some products purely exist on a need basis.
Honestly, I think the real problem is blindly following "metrics" of any form: metrics are input to a decision making process, but can almost never be directly optimized without causing some kind of serious mistake (which is sad, as humans are often biased; the real solution is thereby to not build large companies, lol).
And yet profit sharing is so rare.
I wonder if there are management studies on introducing stack ranking to a unit inside of a company?
In regular society, it's more profitable to be a criminal/mugger/what have you, viewed entirely in a practical sense. It only becomes unprofitable when (a) there's law to prevent you and (b) there's a general idea that preventing you from doing that is correct in some way.
If anybody's experimented with this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon had as it seems like they'd try anything to see if it worked, I would guess that at scale stack ranking produces slightly more efficiency and productivity than it costs in harm to the well-being of workers. Since Amazon doesn't care at all about the well-being of workers OR employers… they're like a sort of pyre to the cause of scale and profitability… then stack ranking would stay.
If it didn't return some arbitrarily small (or large, as far as we know) benefit to the company at the cost of the well-being of the workers, it would be gone. Somebody's got to have measured this by now, and all these tech unicorns are smart enough to ditch it if it was actually impinging on their productivity. It's not, it's impinging on worker conditions, so win/win as far as the tech giants are concerned.
A new CEO changed many things so it's hard to say whether stack-ranking was more a cause or symptom of Ballmer's bad management but from the outside it certainly seems like a healthier company now that it's gone.
That's also important to think about from the other perspective: stack-ranking seems like a frictional cost — Microsoft would have been profitable no matter what since anything short of discontinuing Windows/Office would have left a massive cash flow, but it's harder to see where pushing people out cost you until after the fact. Amazon has enjoyed a massive first mover advantage from the cloud and they're certainly executing well now but I would not be surprised if, say, strong competition lead to a point in a few years where they might wish that they hadn't lost staff due to their checkered reputation for being an enjoyable place to work.
After all, you can't believe in perverse incentives without first believing in incentives!
People in business largely believe in sales people getting bonuses for closing big sales, CEOs getting bonuses for raising the stock price, and workers getting bonuses for delivering projects on time and under budget.
At the end of the day they couldn’t give a shit about Goodhart’s law and all the book they were made to read in order to keep playing the game.
Especially if he thinks stack ranking is the shit.
So you can either use a simple measure that doesn't work, or a complex measure that does work, but at potentially great cost (evaluating all the terms, bureaucratic inertia by the controllers, etc.)
Some metrics seem to provide more of a free lunch - be more robust - than others. It's not obvious which are robust, however.
Quoting from memory. It’s true that almost every time I see a really strange group behavior, it’s the natural result of poorly conceived incentives.
This is a problem that is likely to be with us forever.
However, the restrictions were so unrealistic, that in practice, the non profits had to end up cherry picking people that they'd let into their case management profiles and offer housing. At the time it was realistic that someone may find permanent housing after around a year (and even that was on the shorter side) but the city for some reason was giving the non profits something like 90 days. It was really just a data/numbers game and when the city set the numbers to play the game the non profits had to set their clients. This led to people who faced the most barriers and arguably needed help the most to not get help. For example a white mother with a child may look better on paper when the case managers were calling around and trying to find a fit than a non white male. As an aside, that's what really bothered me about Amazon's "contribution" to homelesness in Seattle - they chose to help the least objectionable class of homeless people, moms with kids, who already have loads of non profits fighting over them and doors open to them that pretty much anyone else in that situation doesn't have. We need more low-barrier resources.
Anyway, just another example that goes to show you, kind of a game theory thing, if you start out with some kind of fixed rules of the game, even with the best intentions, people are going to game the system to match it and often come to a totally different outcome than you were intending.
reminds me a bit of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdote of an occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3][4] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[5]
I definately dont think a whole bunch of dangerous cobras are being creared.
Still not ideal in that breeders are getting rewarded, but at least there isn't a bunch of cobras being released.
There is a parallel to this closer to home. There used to be a bounty on fox tongues because foxes were constantly worrying farm animals. Not sure about the outcome for the poor foxes but this no doubt sprang from similar thinking.
I can see the point that maybe that employee would have taken another role instead of the Amazon one, but I highly doubt anyone who was "hired to be fired" who then showed they were a great fit/good employee was then fired to fulfil the policy.
If instead of being called "Hire to Fire" the policy was called "Rock or drop" (as in show you rock or you'll get dropped), would this even be worthy of an article? Why is the very idea that someone be given a chance that also comes with the reality that you might not make it so hard for some to accept?
The fact that "hire to fire" wasn't even an official policy but rather an off the books stunt pulled by managers should tell you everything about it.
C.f. http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/240-goodharts-law-and-w...
This "fact" can be sourced back to an article from Business Insider which is pretty much blog spam at this point.
Hiring and staffing is always horse-trading even when it’s not being actively manipulated in the way this article suggests.
“Send me your req so I can land these two top tier candidates and I’ll be sure to work your projects first”. “Everybody rate your employees for bonuses, then submit the ratings to the CIO so we can decide who gets the two ‘above and beyond’ bonuses we got this year.”
I’m not saying it is happening at Amazon as I have no direct knowledge. But it is pretty easy to see how stack ranking can introduce bad incentives: ICs doing the interview recommend candidates worse than them to pad their positions, managers do the same so their chaff gets approved.
Plus, the entire argument that “there’s a bar raiser involved” is irrelevant to the point. Hire-and-fire doesn’t mean that HMs are trying to sneak unqualified candidates through the process. What it means is that HMs will take even qualified candidates, which pass the BR with no problem, and set them up for failure and firing.
False.
Source: Am bar raiser. 9 year Amazonian, >500 interviews. Am a manager. I do performance reviews. Yes, there are unregretted attrition rates. But "hire to fire" is absolutely not a thing.
> HMs will take even qualified candidates, which pass the BR with no problem, and set them up for failure and firing.
That is so ridiculous people are laughing at this concept internally.
Hiring good people is HARD. Interviewing takes a lot of time.
Amazon sets very ambitious goals internally, and managers are behind on them from the day they got their head count, even it takes months to fill out.
If you have a viable quality candidate available, you TAKE THEM. Holy shit do you take them.
Hiring managers are DESPERATE For people. And they will beg barter and steal for hires, and try to convince bar raisers to lower the bar to get people in.
The idea that some teams have such low-pressure goals and their managers are so loyal to their team members that they would hire a candidate just to fire them is absolutely insanely false.
If managers don't meet their goals THEY eventually become "Unregretted attrition". So if a manager has head count to fill it's for a goal, and they are way more loyal to meeting those goals as a team than to protect a good team from unregretted attrition targts.
Which by the way is also not mandatory for every team. It needs to average out across Amazon, and directors/VPs will aggegate numbers and roll them up, but ultimately if you have a team full of rockstars, none of them will be marked for URA.
I don't care what is written on Blind. Those people are fucking liars. I don't believe a single one about hire to fire.
This article and the one yesterday is just pure libel.
> Hiring managers are DESPERATE For people
You already admit to this. Now add to this the pressure on hiring managers to fire a certain number from his team. The only course of action he can take is to convince the bar raiser to accept the new hire even if the candidate is subpar.
It's strange that even after 500 interviews you have not this. I've been involved in less than a fifth of that interview number, and already seen this.
Even if you have not seen such cases you don't have any basis to claim that it doesn't happen. Logic and majority of evidence indicates that this takes place.
I suppose it is much easier to convince the bar raiser if the manager promises/explains that that hire isn't going to be here for long as for the bar raiser there is no point to object in such situation.
No. That could not happen. Bar raisers are hiring to raise the bar for Amazon. Period.
You just described something that comes very close to "hire to fire".
I've been in Amazon for long enough to see the hiring bar float up and down a lot, with big differences based on the team and the country.
Once you put together URA and the staggering attrition rate that exists in many high-pressure teams the managers are left with only two options:
A) Hire very skilled and productive engineers and then find ways to push them out of the company later on B) Let the bar slip sometimes and keep the good engineers for a bit longer
By all means, "A" happens far more frequently than "B" and, in many ways, it's even worse.
Not at all. "Hire to fire" means that the person gets zero coaching because they are a sacrificial lamb. They have no chance to succeed even if they turn out to be skilled. "Holy shit I need to hire people" means that the bar is less consistent but every hire is intended to stick around. The latter puts people in a challenging position. The former is planned sabotage. Completely different things.
Not even. It's not the manager's job to determine the bar. It's the bar raiser's. And they are not under the same pressures.
We can and do veto hires below the bar.
As your answer depends on the people in this adversarial hiring system standing their ground rather than finding common ground. Even in companies far less bruising than Amazon, there is reason to cheat.
And add that to the desperation for bodies and you have a massive reason to find some way to hack the system.
> Hiring good people is HARD.
Yes. You know what else is hard? Onboarding someone and training them to the same level as your tenured employees. When given two hard options:
1) hire someone qualified, invest lots of time to train them to the level of your current tenured team members, and then fire one of your tenured team members
2) hire someone mediocre that’s just good enough to pass the loop, don’t spend any time onboarding them, fire them, and keep your tenured team members
Which one do you think is easier? The answer should be clear. That’s what we’re talking about here.
Have you personally followed up with every single candidate you looped to see if they were fired soon after? Have you personally seen the data on every other BR in the company?
Most BRs aren’t you. Most BRs are wet noodles and will just go along with whatever the HM wants to do. And if you find one that isn’t a wet noodle, it’s trivially easy to find a different, more amiable BR to do your successive loops.
I applaud you, because you’re apparently good enough of a manager that you haven’t even considered hire-to-fire as an option you’re interested in doing. But just because you aren’t in this situation, that does not mean other managers in the company’s real so noble. Hire to fire absolutely does happen. I’ve seen it happen across multiple teams during my tenure. The fact that you’re plugging your ears and pretending it isn’t happening is just another example of the toxic culture that is dragging Amazon down. You need to accept that Amazon isn’t perfect, and that you aren’t fully in the know about how the company operates. Once you do that, maybe we can finally make some progress actually improving things at the company rather than just pretending that our own farts don’t stink.
Citation needed.
> 2) hire someone mediocre that’s just good enough to pass the loop, don’t spend any time onboarding them, fire them, and keep your tenured team members
You are clearly not a manager at Amazon and have no clue.
We throw people in the deep end. That, if anything, is our flaw.
Once again, if you are hiring its because you have head count. If you have head count it's for a goal. If you don't meet your goals, it's you who winds up as URA.
The best thing you can do for your team is ship your shit and get your top people promoted.
The way to do that is not waste a viable engineer on your team with a revolving door of mercy kills while you waste literally hours every week recruiting and interviewing folks you don't intend to keep.
The whole premise is so ridiculous, I can only shake my head.
Amazon has plenty of problems.
This isn't one of them.
Having been part of debriefs, this is not correct. Bar Raiser is there to help the panel make a decision, not be the sole decision maker.
Source: Am bar raiser.
While bar raisers can't make hiring managers take a candidate they don't want, they can absolutely "veto to hire" for Amazon.
It just means that Recruiting needs to find another team, which the candidate is not guaranteed to be interested in. And that team's manager will also want to interview the candidate, so an offer is not guaranteed again.
What I think is more likely is that managers are ready to take 90% candidates with hope of grooming them because they have a fallback if it was a wrong decision. Which is a positive thing in my 2c opinion.
There may not be evidence of fire yet, but the smoke is very thick. BI did not pull this out of a hat. This claim has been around for a while.
1. Amazon has attrition metrics.
2. Hiring managers at Amazon are deliberately hiring weak people that they intend to later fire so they can protect the rest of their team.
The argument is that because managers can't actually unilaterally hire weak people that this strategy isn't really feasible.
There are still bad parts of #1, but that isn't the most controversial part of the story.
You might ask “why would an HM fire someone who is qualified to do the job?” The answer is that Amazon requires that someone must be fired. If you were an HM, who would you rather fire: an existing qualified tenured team member who already knows the ins-and-outs of your team and system, or a new qualified person who would require extensive training and time to get up to the level of the tenured employee? You’re going to pick the new person, even if they are qualified.
They could all be stage artists who flail when learning the news and proclaim that they should have followed the company mantra and listened to their managers more carefully.
That would be hilarious.
But the truth is, if you're monitoring "URA", or other peripheral metrics, it means you're unable to actually measure performance. If you could, then URA wouldn't matter, because who cares if performance of a team was achieved by an old, stable team of company veterans or by an always evolving pack that has high attrition?
The other problem is cargo cult. Amazon is obviously a highly successful company, and so, because of this, everything they do will be regarded as a genius move that should be emulated everywhere else. But it's hard to know what contributes to success and to whar extent. For your business, maybe you don't need to use a door for a desk, or ask employees to piss in a bottle.
I expect we'll see some business best sellers promoting them as well.
Without this, managers are incentivized to just "hire the best", instead of hiring and developing under-valued talent. Amazon know to hire undervalued engineers and helps them punch above their weight. Compared to Google, who boast about paying top dollar for incrementally better engineers, Amazon's feat seems more valuable to me.
This also avoids homogenous teams. I would prefer to work in a team with a spread of skills over a crack-team of A+ players. This way, I get to develop people who want to improve, instead of being in a band of elite jocks.
Permatemps are another.
Hiring to fire just sounds bottom-rung skum level.
In light of this, let's assume for the sake of argument that in any technical hiring practice, 20% of the candidates that get through are going to underperform. Given this, it is a sensible approach to inflate headcounts by 25%, and couple this with a mandate to cull underperforming employees, allowing the org to converge on the result you'd get with a hiring process that perfectly predicts future job performance.
One group that benefits from this strategy is developers as a whole, particularly those who don't interview well. It gives more developers a spot at the company and opportunity to prove themselves.
Not to diminish the many comments about Goodhart's law. There's a lot of ways this scheme can cause more harm than good. Having per-team/per-manager quotas is also problematic, and shows an ignorance of basic statistics. Even if you know that 20% of your employees are underperforming, you shouldn't expect them to be evenly dispersed across many "two pizza" teams.
Either, your company makes sure that almost everybody contributes above their salary, or you need to fire often without hurting your "culture".
1. Would having a big company name (FAANG) on a CV be a good thing for finding future jobs?
2. Would the income from FAANG encourage fast-forwarding other life goals, such as starting a family?
3. What about foreigners who need the job in order to keep a visa? If losing the job means leaving the country, that new family might be separated.
Refusing to hire migrants at all isn't an acceptable solution either. There are many talented people who are doing everything possible just to have a chance to live in the country, who are systematically excluded by recruiters and HR. The labour market is not a capitalist free market.
I’d imagine for the less senior folks it also might be hard to initially get a read of the room when everything’s new and potentially remote.
On a side note, I recently spoke with several non-dev friends (sales, finance, etc.) about the idea of URAs and they made it sound the norm in their worlds. Honest question: Could it be just especially shocking for those of us potentially accustomed to “cushy” tech jobs.
Enterprising people started to breed Cobras for a little extra income. Thus a program designed to get rid of "bad actors" actually bred bad actors.
Various versions of this story have been told. Another famous one is about rat tails having a reward, thus breeding rats became popular.
Write up of the above and some more examples are on Wikipedia.
I am reading a draft of "development metrics" for my company and "frequency of code commits" is right at the top for quantifying developer productivity.
The only reason this document exists is that generating quarterly goals is also a metric, which is why I am not afraid of lazy productivity metrics being implemented.
Yes, it's just a line from a trite song you saw through even when you were in high school. But the awful truth is that it captures the reality of the corporate mindset very, very succinctly. Give people enough money and security... and whatever bullshit you ask them to sign onto, no matter how abusive and destructive it is to other people... they will happily come on board. And push the sleep button ever so firmly whatever parts of their brains might have (in a younger self) screamed out in protest.
"Hire people just to fire them, Mr Bezos? It's not exactly what you're asking us to do of course, but if one reads between the lines in these mandatory attrition guidelines... okay, sure, we get it. And sure, it will inevitably lead to ruined careers, mental breakdowns, more than a few divorces, maybe a suicide or two... but hey, as long as the music's playing, we gotta dance, right?"
It's just the way things work, and have always worked in hierarchical social structures.
I wonder whether the employee knew of this alleged URA metric target:
> One of the key pieces of Amazon's review process is a metric called "unregretted attrition rate (URA)," which represents the percentage of employees managers aren't sad to see leave the company — whether they part ways voluntarily or otherwise. [...] Even the most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track URA, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, has a "6% goal" for URA, which means he's expected to replace 6% of his team through "unregretted" departures on what appears to be an annual basis. [...] Several sources said some leaders may have a URA goal that was even higher than the 6% followed by Jassy.
(quoting article linked from TFA: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at... )
Incentives still matter, and are very much driven top down. If you are incentivized to let go of 10% of your team, then that's what you will do.
If a team has thirty members, hires three, and fires those same three by the end of the year, that's suspicious, but obviously they could just have had a bad run. If it happens three years in a row, or happens on five out of eleven teams in a group of 300, then that's a real problem. But Amazon would have to be blind not to notice.
Suppose you are the manager and are happy with your team. But you have to meet the URA quota. What's the best solution you can think of?
And how much effort are you going to put in for the solution?
maybe this is my ticket in...
PS my SO works at AWS and has never heard of this "practice". I wonder how common it really is. Maybe this is all click-bait. From what I’ve seen AWS hiring processes are stellar.
looking at our (we're naturally not FAANG, not even close) dept recent big promotions around - a principal 6 year out of undergrad. No need for insane workloads, just great soft skills around high management people, and the lack of experience and knowledge just helps to always be in enthusiastic agreement with instead of questioning that high management's not smart, to say the least, decisions .
I actually was a principal at one mid-size a decade ago. I went there as an IC and was very clear about that, and they gave me the high level just to bring me in. Nevertheless the principal related crap - powerpointing/etc. - was creeping in, and after the first yearly vest i left, despite all the raises in the counter to keep me, for a normal senior engineer position at another place. 2 years later they tried to bring me back as a chief architect to build a new platform, and i almost went there as the project sounded great, just in the last moment right before accepting the offer i really remembered why i left - the technical work will be overwhelmed by the "organizational" work.
I've a suspicion that I rubbed the group lead the wrong as I asked him a couple of times, non confrontationally and from a place of genuine interest, what he did to set the direction of the group and he didn't really have any answer, still not sure what he actually does.
If so, then they are incompetent at setting goals. The goal should be for teams to be at or below a specified attrition rate, not exactly at it.
Good management should be taking human nature into account.
Personally, I hate systems like this. I can’t think of a quicker way to kill any loyalty or good will I might have to an employer.
Apart from this I think it encourages bad hiring, since hey - we can always just fire em. But on the other hand, a ‘firing people is impossible’ culture has its own problems.