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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

There was a comment in yesterday's post about this, which applies here as well – there is zero evidence in the article that "hire to fire" is actually a thing at Amazon. Managers simply cannot hire people just to fire them because they do not have the final say in who gets hired and who doesn't. They can offer an opinion, the same as all the other 4-5 interviewers in the round, and then the bar raiser makes the final decision. The manager might not even be part of the interview round at all, and if they are they certainly cannot overrule anyone else's opinion.

This "fact" can be sourced back to an article from Business Insider which is pretty much blog spam at this point.

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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.

I've done +200 interviews at Amazon and I have never seen this happen. I only remember one single case where a HM was pushing to hire a clearly unqualified candidate. The Bar Raiser pushed back and didn't let it get through.

I've started observing this recently. I too didn't see such push earlier. Maybe because of recent supply crunch, hiring managers have become more desperate to save the head of the existing people in their team.

Bar Raiser?

As also pointed out in the thread yesterday, that comment about Bar Raisers was nonsense. The fact is that HMs do have the final say in most cases. It is very easy to “game the system” and get candidates past the hiring loop, BR or not.

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.

> It is very easy to “game the system” and get candidates past the hiring loop, BR or not.

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.

No one has said that Amazon itself has made Hire to fire a system. It doesn't make sense for a business to implement such a loss making strategy.

> 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.

>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.

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.

Jesus Christ the amount of unprofessional projection in this thread is insane.

No. That could not happen. Bar raisers are hiring to raise the bar for Amazon. Period.

> 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.

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.

> You just described something that comes very close to "hire to fire".

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.

> "Holy shit I need to hire people" means that the bar is less consistent

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.

Are you sure that all bar raisers are as stringent as you are? Are they all as steeped in the Amazon culture as you are? Is a favour from these managers not worth anything? Sympathy for a guy given "unreasonable" goals he can't complete without more team members, questionable as they may be?

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.

Then explain to me how I was rated LE six months into the job when half the time I was without a manager and without ever causing a Sev2 let alone a Sev1?

Get your head out of the sand. Amazon is a big place, and just because you are ignorant to it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

> 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.

> Most BRs aren’t you. Most BRs are wet noodles and will just go along with whatever the HM wants to do.

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.

There is definitive evidence. Many many threads of Amazon manager's specifying on Blind they're doing this exact hire-to-fire to save their team.

This story is extremely common, whether it be on Hacker News, Blind (which verifies employee emails), Reddit, or just anecdotes from former Amazon employees.

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.

> Managers simply cannot hire people just to fire them because they do not have the final say in who gets hired and who doesn't. They can offer an opinion, the same as all the other 4-5 interviewers in the round, and then the bar raiser makes the final decision.

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.

Bar Raiser may not make the final decision, but he/she can block a clearly bad hire.

Yes, perhaps I should have clarified. BR can only use the veto to make a HIRE to NO_HIRE decision. He doesn't have the veto to make a NO_HIRE to HIRE decision.

Not quite.

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.

In other words, you can recommend recruiter to see if any other team wants to hire the candidate. Which makes sense from perspective of all. But you can't "veto" to hire which makes no sense.

Yes, agreed. I meant BR can't veto to hire for that team without HM being inclined.

i.e. without a collusion in people across teams "Hire to Fire" will not work. and for the problem to be systemic, collusion should be happening between thousands of people.

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 is zero evidence in the article that "hire to fire" is actually a thing at Amazon. In fact it cannot be a thing since managers do not have the final say in who gets hired and who doesn't.

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.

I don’t understand how this follows? This just means you are hiring eminently qualified candidates that are then later fired, regardless of how well they are actually doing.

There are two parts of this story.

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.

2. is not accurate. Managers don't have to hire weak people to satisfy the quota. People are rarely ever put into PIP due to performance. Most of the times it is political.

But that's the whole point of the "Hire to Fire" story. The claims being made here are not that managers are firing people to meet quotas, but that they are deliberately sabotaging some of their hires so they have a sacrificial lamb to fire.

Deliberately sabotaging people does not require that the sabotaged person be under-performing or low quality. That’s the point. If a BR prevents you from hiring an unqualified person to be a sacrificial lamb, then you just hire a qualified person that can get past the BR to be a sacrificial lamb. The existence of BRs is absolutely not a foolproof check on this.

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.

Plus the existing tenured knows how to survive and navigate the politics. If they didn't, they would've never reached tenure. This is why the average tenure is so low.

The important part is if managers have discretion over who to fire.

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