Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.
I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.
And the higher the position, the worse it is [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/seni...
The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment.
Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.
Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer.
> The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others
Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.
Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
Although I do think that Amazon probably pays much more, it just doesn't seem worth it. It is hard to work with people in an eternal dick measuring contest. It just isn't fun.
If by 'logistics' you mean the people who pack/ship etc, warehouse work sucks, but Amazon has better salary and conditions than most others (pee bottle jokes aside).
If you mean the warehouse supervisors, analysts, etc, they get paid fairly well.
[0] www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-osha-injury-rate/
[1] https://www.adpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/19220244/Th...
Where do you get these "better conditions" from?
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...
Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...
As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.
Do you have evidence they aren’t? I was under the impression Amazon warehouse logistics employees had extremely high turnover (averaging less than 1 year).
I suspect I agree with you that logistics workers realize they are on a lower rung of the ladder and are willing to work for less compensation. I suspect much of janitorial and security staff in Amazon HQ probably have no access to stock options either.
It's likely that security and janitorial are 3rd party contractors and have no access to anything available from Amazon whatsoever.
Amazon has very high security staffing requirements compared to most other Seattle companies. Absolutely bonkers IMO
Wait, does “logistics” include warehouse, where the article mentions they had reached 150% annual turnover prepandemic? Sounds a lot like “leaving in droves”.
But Amazon is now worried that they've worn out much of the US workforce available for "industrial athlete"positions. (Their term.) The droves of arrivals may slow down to dribbles.
150% turnover is unconditionally bad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/amazon-hourly-workers-lose-m...
Hell, Amazon doesn't even give its employees free Prime accounts.
Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic.
Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy.
Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.
Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon.
I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce.
Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them.
All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%.
Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with.
It represents your lived experience.
(I'd also say that with only three different company cultures that you have personally expirenced, your perspective is skewed).
What you are missing is that you do not see similar news reports about (say) Google, Netflix, etc. Sure there will always be individual stories in any organisation but the fact that there are *continual* stories about Amazon in all areas (blue collar, white collar) indicates that this is a systemic, widespread problem that they are either unaware of (unlikely) or do not care about.
Whether it is not caring (probably) or unawareness you have to be worried if an organisation like Amazon is this complacent.
[ note: I work at AWS, and I've experienced all this bullshit from the inside. When people I know ask me for a referral in, I tell them to run away. I'm looking to leave shortly ]
https://www.vox.com/2021/1/26/22241053/antitrust-google-face...
-sensible guy who also wants the cruel monopoly broken apart.
Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.
And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.
Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.
If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)
I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.
What is the point of hiring the "best" employees except as an optimization of the stock price?
It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.
Depression, despair etc are illogical narrowing our frames of minds and not being able to see any out. Kind of like getting stuck with a coding problem until you walk away and take a break, except you can't think of a way of walking away. (Or your "way" may manifest itself as psychosis or self harm.)
Fantastic analogy. The same fundamentalist narrow-mindedness only about "growth at all costs"; no regard to content of that growth. Just make the stock go up.
Kind of like King Midas wanting to make everything gold. No regard to the interiority of the objects, nor their real use. Just make them gold on the outside.
Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.
For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.
yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.
Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.
Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.
Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not the companies’ failed promises. Obviously not keeping people is painful for growth too, but it’s still a very one sided power dynamic.
Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.
This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job.
I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.
Hope this makes you feel slightly better: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
It is impossible to measure someones productivity using metrics like commit counts and SLOC. There are times where I don't commit for weeks and provide actual business value by solving direct client issues without even a ticket being present.
At one time at my second IT job, I had a manager reprimand me (yelling over the phone) that I was away from my desk. I was remotely supporting a bank fixing consortium credit contracts (substantial amounts) after a migration. I was told to stop doing that. So, I told the support tech that my 1-up blocked this. He told the people at the bank; this went up the chain at the bank to the main accountants which resulted in a nasty call from the client to the skip manager of my manager. He called me back and asked me to resume what I did almost crying on the phone. Later that year I was selected employee of the year mostly because of that client constantly sending positive feedback on my help.
In essence, the guy was a micromanager with trust issues. They later replaced him, with someone that was actually worse.
At least it had a happy ending… oh wait.
My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work.
I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.
Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.
It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.
I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA..
What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering, though, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect us grunts to pull it off..
Best idea is not to go somewhere without having friends on the inside who you trust and can tell you what it's like.
Zune music player?
If I had to guess it would be the Kin devices that evolved from the purchase of Danger, those things clearly fit the OP’s description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review.
He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself.
Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty managers there.
If you hit up TopCoder or Leetcode or one of those other corny interview programming sites and grind away at it for a few months, you can get to a point where you have a really solid chance of getting past any coding interview.
Google is a little sneaky, since they take "Can solve a leetcode question" as a starting point, then crank the difficulty up on the questions even more so you have to be able to solve the base question in ~10 minutes and then expand on it. It's like "OK, you solved the locked room mystery. But now can you talk me through a locked room mystery solution.. WHILE PLAYING DARK SOULS?"
There's a ton of luck involved too. I've run into a lot of interviewers who ask questions they themselves don't actually understand very well. Then I'm in the unenviable position of wondering "Do I tell the interviewer he's wrong? Is it a trick, or is he just an idiot? Is he going to get mad if I tell him?" Another problem is that coding interviewers will ask a question, not try to code up the answer themselves, and just assume it's way easier than it really is.
If you want to get hired by the GAFMAN, just grind out those coding questions (and write working code answers in your IDE of choice or on the command line with vim/gcc). Brush up on your CS when you come across a concept you don't understand. Then get some referrals to get past the HR filter, and roll the dice.
BTW, when you get an offer, don't sell yourself short. Check levels (dot) fyi and/or talk to your peers to make sure you're getting the market rate for your skills.
Programmers at Google make no decisions. The only people 'making decisions' are the product owners and project managers.
> Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard.
A hard coding interview is not a valid metric on how good a place is to work.
> Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life"
I've known people who feel like this as well. Some of them are still at Google and it's the best thing they ever did for their career.
On the other hand, I know people who felt this way, got a job at Google and it completely destroyed any passion for programming/computers that they had, to the point where they never worked in tech again.
Personally I feel it's dangerous to attach "you made it in life" to getting a job at Company X.
1. Genetically (i.e. your brain just works that way)
2. Luck into it
3. Iterate towards it (continuously)
The whole concept of "get job X and now I'm done" doesn't really fit well into any of those. A job could be a good iteration or you could get lucky and have it turn out to be a wonderful team/position/whatever, but the likelihood of your plan being "I need to do x" and then you do x and are then happy seems immensely unlikely. Like Samuel Johnson said, "Life is a progression from want to want, not enjoyment to enjoyment."
Of course, like any very large companies, it's going to be fragmented. Some groups at Google are really that awesome. Some are awful.
It's no longer "the place to be" for the top engineers though who will frequently pick other places, though it does look good on your resume.
For the interview being harder, they give you a flier that tells you almost exactly what they're going to ask, and they expect you to prep specifically for those things, so it's a lot more of a test of will than a test of skill. If you "really want to get a job there", you just cram your head with whatever the PDF says you should know and repeat it during the interview and you should be in. It's of course not that simple for people with personal situations that prevent them from just cramming reading material, and they're somewhat famous in some circles for discrimination (especially gender based, from anecdotal evidence).
I don't understand why it matters what people wear as long as it's not offensive...
It is, however, still a useful signal. It should never be how the final decision is made, but in orgs where managers have way too many reports (which is a separate problems), it can accelerate things a bit.
Eg: look at the team's or orgs LoC/Commits over a long period of time in similar roles (long enough to smooth out outliers). Then if someone is DRASTICALLY underperforming (like, 1/10th of the output), you don't jump to conclusion. You starts looking at the code itself and ask questions about the projects, get opinions from the rest of the team, etc. Stuff you should be doing ANYWAY, but with a little more focus.
Based on -those- data points, then you can start making a judgement call. But yeah, any manager who stops at the SLOC or number of commits to make perf decisions is awful.
I actually worked with a manager who used number of commits exclusively. He also did not know about squash + merge workflows. So people who squashed would get in trouble and those who didn't would get raises until someone in the team finally figured out which metrics he was actually using. That was so sad...
It should also surprise no-one that design documents are not considered deliverables, only code. There's no motivation to fix a crap design. You generally have to do the absolute minimum documentation your management chain will accept, then push out some code, let it fail, then redesign it in your spare time and start pushing out incremental changes as part of your bug fixing work.
I never saw anyone intentionally build crap designs / code so they could then get props for fixing the bugs they introduced, but there were several times people didn't have time to think through the problem and built crap code that led to sev 1 / sev 2 problems. People weren't trying to build crap code, it's just a side effect of being judged on how well you implement code, not on how well you design systems.
Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The simplest reason is – it's much more expensive to let go someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not so attention grabbing or interesting.
Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that.
But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News, Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every person at Amazon basically hates their job.
And the other thing is the people who do respond with positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often get down ranked and personally attacked.
Lastly – No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally better. There are no brownie points for more code or more complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage frugality and invent and simplify.
EVERY manager I've interacted with at Amazon looks at CRUX statistics -- it is the actual reason that they exist.
My current manage (5 year badge employee btw) is counting my code. We are both L6s and he has shared with me the various target CR each level is expect to do (per week).
For L6 it is 4 (in the AWS org) per week.
The leadership principals also say "hire and develop the best", which ought to mean that they would be doing the damnedest to keep people.
But they don't. I've seen three people Pivoted in the last 6 months -- two of them had been with Amazon (AWS) for over 4 years.
These people did not "suddenly" become bad, or shit at their job, or etc. What happened is that they were stacked ranked, and they were at the bottom. The job was, and remains, exactly the same.
Which is why stack ranking is stupid. Same job. Same person. One year you are meeting the bar. The next you are the worst at it.
The institutional mechanism behind this insane thing is the URA target, just like many other insane things posted in this thread.
It seems unlikely this is universal, but at least in my management chain, focus on code was definitely a thing.
I swapped teams hoping that a new manager for an old colleague's team would be better and things didn't really improve. I stayed for a year before quitting due to my mental health. I think it can be hard to find the right team at a big tech company and even if you do, there's no guarantee of how long it will stay that way.
Also, the best C++ coder I know got dinged 'cause he was refactoring huge amounts of redundant code checked in by a different developer. I think he was eventually able to convince his management chain that DRY is a good thing and got back on the promotion track, but not before the other developer (who introduced a metric crap-ton of crap code) got promoted. After taking a metaphoric crap on our project, he then left for a different team. It took two years to fix the codebase.
On your second example, this is where having senior technical people in the calibration room is really important. The key there is ensuring that said technical people know about the work before they are in the room. It is really difficult to change outcomes after the fact. You can't expect them to defend something they don't know about.
Being a successful middle manager in a large corp entails smiling when you're expected to smile, feigning frustration when you're expected to feign frustration, showing up to the meetings you're expected to show up to, and writing the documents you're expected to write. Your problem is that you think of them as people. They may be people outside of work, but at work they're a neural net that simulates the averaged behavior of other middle managers in the corp, and then tweaks it to locally optimize their own comp. That has fuck all to do with your programming ability.
It's of course possible that you suck. In fact, it's likely, because most people suck-- excellence is the exception, not the norm. But judging your own programming ability by a column in some HR database that your NPC manager filled in? That's bonkers, man. That feedback is at best a very weak signal for it. More likely you can disregard it altogether, but that's somewhat dependent on the situation. (It is, however, a very strong signal that you're low on the corporate totem pole and can be dispensed with with little risk to the manager in question)
The proper response to a new manager assessing your performance (regardless of whether the assessment is positive or negative) is "umm, and who are you?" Don't say that out loud, but that's roughly what you ought to be thinking.
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine but because he had to rank someone the lowest, it was my turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had actually been doing a bad job it wouldn't have felt as bad because at least then I would have had some control over the situation.
I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a list of other developers on the other teams that I was helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt super shitty and I left the company right after.
That happened to be right at the same time they did away with the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of the company.)
Sure as shit, for three years, it didn't matter how awesome or shitty a job I did, I got the same middle of the road review. One year, I got a paltry bonus and no salary increase. The next was neither and the final year I got a pittance of both. By the second year, I knew what was happening and just completely checked out. I went full "Office Space" and did the exact minimum in order to get my work done and not get put on a pip. Would come in around 11, get my stuff done in a few hours and tell my team I was going to be "WFH" the rest of the day.
Finally left that team and two years since leaving that team, I've had several large bonuses and salary increases.
Stack ranking is some toxic bullshit and managers use it to make themselves look better to their own skip managers. Fucking corporate politics man, it ruins everything.
I would imagine that nearly every change in performance review structure at nearly every company is unpopular:
People who were let go (or who left voluntarily of low bonuses/raises/refreshes) aren't there to complain!
Everyone who is left, who knew how to game the system (or was so good they didn't need to) now has to optimize to a completely new metric.
It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.
Heck, I even saw directors and VP refer to "regretted attrition" and "unregretted attrition" in all hands meetings.
(although I worked at a place that never fired anybody and I'm not sure I recommend that either)
This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch’s book. He was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.
* - as I understand it; never worked there.
Are we really suggesting that's the norm at Amazon? Maybe, but wow.
It says that managers who don't perform well will be out. And that was the reason given for why this practice doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff. Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It is setup to be toxic.
You don't seem to understand. Amazon grows by 15-30% every single year.
We're constantly hiring, even if there is no attrition. We also have a high bar. The ~ ratio is 20 phone screens to 4 onsites to 1 hire. That's a lot of work to get a butt in a seat.
> Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff.
Only if you presume that every single team has to identify that X% of people for the URA target. They don't. Period. Full Stop. It's a lie.
> Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk
The #1 thing that gets asked about individuals during yearly operational reviews is "what did they deliver"? We try to identify individual contributions but individuals can't ship. Teams ship.
That makes it way easier to meet an URA target.
Do you imply that standing stack ranking is a quality needed to work at big tech ?
I've never been at a company who uses it where the teams improved at all. Most of the time those regressed since people were actively working in silo's and shitting on other people's work to make their own work appear better.
You could stack rank how nice you thought people were, making two layers -- like "really nice" and "mostly nice" (of course, there were no labels in the tool). Or you could use it to highlight two particular team-mates who really stood out by making a layer for them, and then a layer for everyone else.
It could also be used to stack-rank the entire management chain, which was fun.
1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing.
2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.
In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.
I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.
Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.
True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.
If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.
I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is).
A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies.
So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.
Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?
If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.
I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong.
The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.
So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.
No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?
If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.
Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.
*Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.
386.1b dollars / 798k workers = $483,834.58 / worker
That's impressive, but... Alibaba: $717.3b / 251k workers = $2.8m / worker FlipKart: $436.2b / 30k workers = $14.5m / worker Texas Instruments: $14.38b / 30k workers = $468k / worker G.E.: $75b / 174k workers = $431k / worker
I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to fire them later.
And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.
Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."
Its the equivalent of the corporation being a person smoking cigarettes. It imparts some benefits and doesn't kill right away but given enough time it still causes disease. They'll start to miss opportunities. They'll run slower.
The metaphor vanishes in a lot of ways though because the corporation can pivot and simply say "we were wrong". Microsoft is a perfect example. It regularly threw away people and this caused damage and various big failures but not enough to scuttle them. They are still successful. Still growing.
Students of history know that Microsoft's story of success hides a lot of messy details including behavior where plenty of law had to get involved. Amazon will go down a similar path. Or has likely already begun.
Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.
Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.
So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.
It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system goes for the former.
But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up new markets.
It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it.
Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants.
Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh
Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you?
About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting.
About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved.
Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company.
It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.
Unless it's in writing, you should never, ever, ever take a statement like this at face value.
"You are coming in at level X, but this role is actually scoped at level X+1."
In reality, it means nothing and you can get promoted in lots of different ways. It is just a trick that unethical recruiters and managers play.
PIP is scary to foreign workers who are on temporary worker visa. Losing a job means that you may have to leave the country, which is a life changing event.
It is so scary that, in immigrant communities I am familiar with, it becomes a common sense to not to even dream about getting out of PIP. If your manager put you on PIP, start looking for a new job immediately because you don't want to risk losing your immigration status.
Don't try too hard on the PIP project, don't try to please your manager, only put reasonable amount of effort into the project so they don't have a reason to fire you immediately, and try to get the f** out as fast as you can.
This is always a HUGE RED FLAG. Never agree to this. Ever. For any reason. Even if you can get it in writing, you can be laid off, fired, etc.
Get the title when you walk in or don't walk in.
The problem is that titles generally have salary bands. You'd much rather be at the low end of a better title because the high end of the band is higher.
The flip side is that you better know that you can actually do the job. If you come in as a Principal, you're going to be expected to work as a Principal and not a Senior. If you're work is only up to Senior, you're going to get fired.
I, sadly, had to fire a guy who got into this position somehow. He was a nice guy. He could do Senior work. But he was at HR Principal level. We were a startup struggling to survive and I didn't have the time to teach him. So, I had to fire him to free up my slot so I could get an actual Principal that I desperately needed.
He took my advice to land somewhere else as a Senior, and I gave him a nice recommendation. He got pretty close to the same salary and killed it for them at that level.
Diabolical thing. I remember laughing (other place, other times) as my manager friend told me about a manager in the org practicing it. It was an exception though, and I see how it may be a regular practice at AMZN.
You interviewed for a PE role but instead was offered and somehow accepted a SDE2 position?
That's a 2 level downgrade and would mean a very different role for you with significantly lower compensation.
https://www.kake.com/story/32508747/court-oks-barring-high-i...
I don't agree with this personally, but what they are doing is not equivalent to them exclaiming that "We don't hire the best". It would only be equivalent if they were explicitly filtering-out qualities they believe contribute to being the best, such as discipline, strength, and the like.
[1] Due to boredom, etc.
As for hiring "the worst", I guess there's those companies founded to give ex-convicts honest work.
I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer.
Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.
I work now in a situation where every single case that comes across my desk is actually unique. I still have a toolbox, but I need a really big variety of tools and picking the wrong tool is very easy. Suddenly instead of a golden way I'm actually focusing on testing designs quickly and in isolation to make sure we're picking the right tools for some given design.
> The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show
I assumed it was much higher.
What I have seen is PIPs lead to so much stress and anxiety that people are unrecoverable.
I unfortunately worked with one person where a PIP led to hospitalization for thoughts of self-harm, because it was clear there wasn't going to be success in the current role, but there was no way to exit effectively (and there were confounding personal-life stress/factors). The whole thing was a horrific mess, starting with a nepotism hire, and finishing with unacceptably incompetent HR.
A lot of managers and companies I know have moved away from the "PIP" terminology because the acronym has become too toxic to be productive. Instead, they'll have different names for their version of the program.
With few exceptions, managers don't enjoy firing people. We don't enjoy PIPing people, either. A good PIP (or whatever a company calls it) is usually structured as a mentorship program that lays out clear expectations for what is expected from an employee, pairs them up with mentors who can help get them there, and involves more frequent check-ins than normal to help get them on track.
As a manager, I have seen many PIPs succeed, if executed properly. I've also seen many fail. One of the common failure modes is when the employee assumes the worst and doesn't bother trying to improve. That's one of the main reasons smart companies don't use the "PIP" terminology any more.
I'm not following.
Is this sarcasm/humor? Why would your boss put you on a PIP to pressure you to work LESS?
I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity, and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just focused on filling this one specific role, but the process spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had already committed to another job, but figured I would see the process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you are interested I can dig it up.
But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but its much more recent that those stories started coming out from the engineering side of things.
I remember reading a blog about working at Amazon that was mostly about how they hated the dog friendly culture and couldn't get any accommodation for being allergic to dogs.
The reputation of Amazon as somewhere you go out of college and then quit after 2 years has been around a while, maybe about as long as the one about Google having impossible interviews.
Current Amazon engineer here. People have been complaining working at Amazon for a long while.
At least in my organization, leadership pays close attention to whether folks are happy or unhappy in their roles. I posted this earlier, but we have a massive workforce of engineers at Amazon, across many countries. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5-10% of those unhappy folks are willing to say something about it online, you're going to see plenty of news sites picking up those articles and representing Amazon in a negative light.
There's plenty of bad publicity around Amazon, and I think that's due to the insane growth of this company. Regardless of your view, Amazon has been insanely successful. With that success comes suspicion, and you can quickly go from being very trusted to everyone questioning every practice – from quality of AWS documentation to Prime shipment speed to hiring/promotion practices, etc. Alot of people have skin in this game because they're competing directly with Amazon.
I'm not saying Amazon can't do better. We absolutely need to. But alot of the things being represented as systemic issues at Amazon are simply not so, but they certainly push a specific narrative. shrug
What a fucking scam. You should quit peddling conspiracy theories and actually talk to people with a lot of experience in the industry. I just hope that you figure out how reality works the easy way (by listening to anyone in this thread).
After Amazon stabbed me in the back, I swore that I'd never again put work first over my own interests/family/health, and I haven't regretted that decision once in the 6+ years since then.
>I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.
I've never met anyone who was happy with their previous employer after getting let go. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but I'm entitled to my perspective. Your personal attacks towards me are just that – personal attacks.
I hope you found an employer where you're happier. :)
It's stood out for me because it subverts my expectations - that those with the most vituperative comments would use throw-away accounts to avoid burning bridges.
Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations.
On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way.
I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!
What I submit to you that this level demoralization already happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that is merely a 7 letter word with little to no meaning.
I guess what I am saying it is not a new trend. Just a stepping stone in corporate America. The only difference is now, we don't get Mr. Burns choosing this, this and this one ( keep the egghead ); this time is a blackbox algorithm that won't ever touch the real decision makers ( cuz someone with enough forethought will add an exclusion list :P ).
What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain about retention and skills shortages and a host of other problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so temporary visas for acquiring talent.
Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a dark pattern.
It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses.
Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses.
We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention.
Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.
However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.
Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE
HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY
So to clarify, if previous years bottom of band was 100K, and this years bottom is 110K, your base bump + your projected stock value (current year + 15% increase planned YoY) will be 110K.
Source: Former Amazon Manager.
1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.
The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs.
The 6% in the article is incredibely underestimated.
Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?
I've seen people quote 5%, 6%, 15% and even 30%. The 30% number was in the Amazon India post that was high-ranking here yesterday.
For starters Amazon's policy is similar to GE's in the 90's, where every year they would let go the bottom 10% of the workforce.
Either way, we need to decide whether the part of the workforce that is let go are bad workers or a mismatch with the company.
I want to believe that there are very few bad workers, and that the majority of cases are a question of mismatch.
If that's the case, parting way is the best outcome for both the company and the workers; so that they can both move on and seek metter match.
Maybe we need to embrace more this practice, and - AT THE SAME TIME - fix the hiring process that is broken beyond belief.
Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that people - except himself of course - are lazy so they need to be terrorized into being productive by firing a certain percentage of the employees.
Ultimately, it damages not just Amazon's brand as a employer, it reflects poorly on Amazon employees and managers for going along with this charade.
They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce.
This is despicable.
These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.
Also Amazon is not dodging state income taxes because Washington doesn't have a state income tax.