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Comment by kablow | Hacker News Reader

I'm in non-AWS and things aren't any better here. It is very much dependent on the manager and team, and I've been optimistic (~3 years now), but it gets harder as time goes on.

> I'm just not 100% sure about the whole PIP scene. Our service was extremely critical and we were extremely understaffed. So I don't think it applied to anyone in our org but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP.

Our team is over-worked and has a large ticket queue, constant sev-2 pages, understaffed, etc. - and yet they still PIP'd (and then fired) someone last year who didn't deserve it IMO.

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Amazon has a lot of money to waste. It is cheaper to hire someone so they can fire them in a few months to keep the rest of the staff scared enough to overwork themselves so they can understaff.

They play a good game.

> Amazon has a lot of money to waste. It is cheaper to hire someone so they can fire them [...]

So... Amazon has a lot of money therefore they have to resort to money-saving practices? Or is the causality the other way around? How do these two sentences fit together?

Amazon has a lot money. These practices make them additional money. If they didn't have a lot of money they couldn't afford to hire to fire.

How can they do both? - They waste money when they hire to fire and constantly onboard. - They make money by not staffing enough resources but by using fear of being fired to force overtime.

Maybe the hire to fire costs are justified because the savings they get by understaffing outweights the cost.

It’s a “virtuous cycle.”

I don’t think they do, but it’s a way to smear and make all Amazon engineers unemployable by proxy. I already have difficulties finding interviews at good companies because the Amazon name implies IBM level talent instead of Google level talent.

Wow that’s a huge wtf. You don’t have enough manpower, and then you take somebody who’s contributing and fire them? Seems totally insane.

Same. My team was down to 4 people and they put the L6 external hire in Focus (the informal coaching plan precursor to PIP) and he left. And we own critical services.

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