Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

I guess if workers are considered expendable than that's a positive. Corporations need to be more accountable to their workers welfare and not solely stockholder's welfare.

But taken as a whole I cannot help but conclude that the program is meant to instil a culture of fear (and by extension toxicity). Considering the following:

* A manager may or may not have made vague statements to indicate you are on this list. Since the manager is explicitly instructed not to talk about the list itself, it is up to the employee to triangulate from a manager's statements their standing relative to performance. This means that employees can never really be sure about their status with respect to this list and so must constantly be on their toes (especially regarding statements from their managers).

* If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the logic in preventing them from switching teams internally? Perhaps a culture change or a product change would tip the scales for them to increase performance. Maybe there is a culture clash with the org or with the direct manager. I don't see any downside in maintaining the FOCUS status but allowing the employee to explore options to improve their productivity internally.

* If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the rationale behind blacklisting them from ever becoming rehired at the company? This the most egregious offence to me regarding the entire program - that Amazon is hanging a sword of damocles over all their employees heads, implicitly threatening them with blacklisting them as one of the largest tech employers in the industry. This list, again, being entirely secretive and Amazon explicitly instructing managers not to talk about with employees.

From my understanding, you can work at Amazon several years, be on a FOCUS/devlist for a huge amount of that time - and never even know. When you leave, you are automatically marked as URA and ineligible to rejoin the company.

This all adds up to me as a program specifically designed to be vaguely threatening and fear inducing.

If we assume an ideal world where managers are all great communicators and can handle performance management with skill and would never misuse the program for any reason - I can maybe squint and suspend my disbelief enough to see how this program can effectively work.

But you would have to be breathlessly naive to assume that's how the program would practically work in the real world with actual managers (and the state of middle/upper management in tech companies at large).

Any management/leadership team who is OK with rolling such a program out at scale given the above is not a team I would want to work with in any capacity, and IMO it just speaks to the dehumanizing nature of the culture they are aiming to create. It is inconceivable that upper management at Amazon doesn't realize these effects of the program.

Like you say, they have probably thought about it deeply, and just don't care. The metrics are working for them, so it continues. I personally am not going to lose sleep over it, I will simply refuse to work there. I hope employees who do work there know that there are other technology companies who actually consider these negative effects on their own employees and actually have empathy towards creating a place where people genuinely want to work - because for other companies, the equation regarding optimizing business metrics lands a bit differently when it comes to their own employees. If you can pass the bar at Amazon you can pass the bar at other places. Don't sell yourself short thinking this is normal or OK.

If management thinks you're doing a bad job, it's not needed to make it known to the entire team - but you should know.

How did that lack of performance oversight work out for Nedry anyway? Oh...

Performance management is a necessity in any company, but whether you’re in “Focus” or not is besides the point.

There’s no company policy that managers cannot or should not discuss performance or providing coaching until an employee enters focus. This is absolutely false, and if someone’s doing this, they’re a bad manager failing at their job.

Performance feedback and discussing career growth is exactly what manager 1:1s are for. You’ll know way in advance if there are performance problems. If you don’t know or somehow it was never communicated with you, that sounds like a manager who is failing their team. And among the size of Amazons workforce, the probability of no manager ever dropping the ball or failing at their job is 0. Managers can be ineffective, just as the people who report to them.

But to repeat, company policy is NOT to hide performance feedback from employees. The article is editorialized. One example the article provides is a person who was put on Focus who is a person of color. Actually, I’m a person of color too. You could try to argue my perspective reeks of survivorship bias. On the other hand, a significant chunk of the workforce in engineering and tech related roles are people of color. Amazon is significantly more diverse than other industries I previously worked in. Again, I 100% don’t believe your skin color, race, religion, gender, or any other type of discrimination is a factor in performance. That’s simply not the company I know.

And my question stands - yes, there are employees who under perform. And when they’re let go, they’re going to be upset with the company. Most people, no matter how brilliant they are or are not, are not great at receiving feedback, particularly negative feedback. But the issue I see here is it’s implied that these are all solid performers who were put into performance management for no reason at all or they were blind sided. I don’t believe that’s a systemic issue.

In my opinion, the hiring interviews do their best to establish a high bar for candidates, but we do make hires who are great on paper, can white board problems, but they fail to deliver at their work. These people are given plenty of feedback PRIOR to Focus or any performance management plan kicks in.

This article makes it sound like Amazon hires and fires at will. From my personal experience, this is not true where I work in the engineering organizations. Given the interview bar, it’s difficult and costly to find and hire candidates. Once someone joins your team, your team puts in an investment in ramping that person up. If that person isn’t so effective at the tasks they’ve been assigned, the first step is to identify their strengths and place them in projects or tasks where they can flex those muscles and grow in whatever areas there are gaps.

Now did some team somewhere have a manager who dropped the ball or senior engineers who didn’t come together to help the new hire? Yeah - probably. But that’s not a cultural or systemic problem. That’s a problem with that specific team. And if that’s how that team is run, it’s going to be obvious when they fail to deliver. But yeah, this unfortunate case is what drives outrage and readership (for this paper), and so that’s what you’ll see in the news media.

If your manager gives you that feedback, they’ll then tell you specifics and come up with a plan. I don’t think this is “corporate speak” as you put it.

We can formally give this process any name, but it doesn’t change anything.

I found out about 'focus' or my 'performance issues' when I resigned from Amazon.

I fundamentally don’t believe that Amazon is letting go of talented engineers. Can some individual manager be terrible at their job and screw up? Yeah absolutely. But as a company, it’s extremely hard to find talented individuals. And then once you bring them in you have to invest in them and ramp them up.

Having said that I worked on really hard problems at Amazon. Not everyone can or wants to solve those kinds of problems. I was successful because I enjoyed it. That’s where my priorities were. And there were other times where I struggled. Sometimes trying to solve a particular kind of problem or sometimes not having enough clarity, or realizing that we haven’t broken down a problem.

But then there are individuals who just don’t have the ownership. If you have a not my problem kind of attitude, I don’t think you’ll last at Amazon very long. Eventually you’ll be let go and then you will be bitter about it.

As an aside, you won’t ever hear about all the engineers at Amazon who enjoy doing their work, who enjoy the teams that they’re on, who have a really good relationship with their leadership teams. But you’ll hear the most loudest and vocal feedback from the people who are the wrong hires or they had a bad manager who messed them up. In the latter case I don’t think it’s a systemic issue. And to be honest, the positive stories don’t get the Readership or drive the outrage

> “If the employee directly asks, ‘Am I in Focus?’ you should answer honestly,” the response continues. “However, remind the employee that the use of a specific product should not be their take-away from the conversation, as there are important performance gaps they must address.”

That doesn't sound like mandated secrecy. That sounds like they think the employee shouldn't care what the specific product is called.

Signing bonus is not unique to Amazon. You can get a signing bonus anywhere in the industry, along with a sane vesting schedule of 25% each year or a front loaded schedule to prevent 4 year cliffs.

> Vesting is inherently lumpy, and makes managing cash flow a bit more tricky.

It doesn't have to be lumpy. Google stocks vest monthly here in US. Also, how is it tricky to manage?

A union? At Amazon?

It is quite sad how many in our industry are either sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally in the case I mentioned).

If anything you only benefit from being in Washington and not paying half of that 500k in income tax:

So many employees find out by either attempting an internal transfer, or getting PIP papers served.

Still, impressive turnaround.

You're assuming various PIPs are being used in good faith by the employer. In a lot of big companies there's a nebulous and hand-wave-y criteria for putting someone on a PIP and then there's no clear path for the employee off the PIP. Too often PIPs are like "mean girl" shit lists. You can get on one without knowing it and have little to no agency in getting off one.

For companies that do stack ranking, you can end up on a PIP just for happening to be at the bottom of the stack for no real fault of your own. The employer is then happy to dick you with compensation for as long as they can justify keeping you on a PIP.

It's more demoralizing to end up black balled and screwed over on compensation than just being told outright you're on a PIP and there's some particular goals to hit to get off. Not everyone can just jump ship after they get stiffed on compensation after a review. The goal is to demoralize people so they quit so they don't have to fire them and potentially end up with some wrongful termination lawsuit.

You could have a bunch of OOPs-fanatics who will hate the functional programmer who does things differently. Toxic culture (lack of self-awareness means that 99% of people don't know they are participating/creating/perpetuating the toxicity) means this functional programmer is demoralizing the team.

That's how objective IT is. Its culture wars of this sort - misplaced fanatic sincerity and close-mindedness, or worse mean-ness. And its demoralizing to the majority. Hence the PIP. Its like a dystopian landscape.

You want demoralizing? How about being an excellent employee, but being told that you can only get a COLA raise because your manager has been told only 2 out of a team of 15 can "exceed standards?" And these standards are as vague as HR can possibly make them.

So unless you're sociopathic, you try to "improve" which generally means kissing up to your boss. Doing a better job revolves around keeping your boss happy, regardless of whether that means your real work is being done at an "exceeds" level. Find out what metrics he considers important, and focus almost exclusively on them.

If you're sociopathic, you do this, while sabotaging your coworkers. It's pretty easy to do; keep important information away from them, point out any flaws/mistakes they make, etc.

Any large organization will end up like this if they follow traditional HR guidelines for performance evals. It's part of a competitive environment.

The only place I've seen it work better/differently was when the entire team was evaluated. That helped prevent the Machiavellian sabotage, but did allow lower performers to benefit from the work of the higher performers. But that would happen anyway; you can't fire everyone. And the motivation of the coworkers shifts from competitive to cooperative. Helping others learn new things, overcome issues, etc. When management gets behind this, it's amazing, but most managers and executives are discouraged from trying new things.

I've had my fair share of good and bad gigs-- I am willing to trade a considerable amount of Amazon's upside in exchange for employment I can predict.

There's always a reason some people don't perform well and its very very rare that the reason for this is something inherent in them.

When people talk about glass ceiling - well, now i know what glass bottom feels like :) If any requirements you don't directly match you can try to make a case in say cover letter to substitute - education vs. experience, etc., there is no way though how one can "decrease" the number of the years.

Edit: Clarified that I meant within Amazon.

>I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II level already, or applying for that role with that amount of experience.

it is absolutely reasonable to ask and reject if unsatisfied with the answer. I think it is discriminatory to bar from applying (or reject automatically) based on such years based cap.

>Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of experience but are applying for internships.

again, i think such automatic rejection is discriminatory.

I was severely jaded by my experience there. When I started, I immediately initiated conversations with my manager about what I could do to make sure I succeeded. I asked the more senior engineers on my team if we could whiteboard about the services we owned and who interacted with them as well as what upstream teams we depended on. The SDE3 told me "I don't know." To this day, I'm still pissed off that an SDE3 who had been on the team for 4+ years "didn't know" who used their services or how the services interacted. And it wasn't that he didn't know - he just didn't give a shit about onboarding newbies.

That same engineer, when I asked him for help in debugging an alert that I had put into a system, threw out some bogus answer and took one step back. I told him I had tried his suggestion. He then gave another bogus answer and took another step back. He literally backed away slowly and after three or four steps, just sat down at his desk and ignored me.

I recognize I'm an N=1, and I have friends that more or less enjoyed their time there, but I saw far too many bullshit patterns from engineers and managers for me to think of Amazon's approach as anything but intentionally malicious.

The fact is the PIP hasn't put their job in jeopardy, it was their not meeting expectations that put their job in jeopardy. The reality is once you're there, it's (a) probably obvious due to your manager's consistent displeasure and (b) almost impossible to get out of either way because even if the manager is wrong the employer will side with the manager. The PIP itself is, as you say, just procedural backside-covering to paper up a decision that was already made.

> Lack of discussion is concealment.

With that in mind, is it really better to torture an employee with a set of steps you know they won't execute to your satisfaction anyways and dole out false hope? It seems far more humane to let them know it isn't working out and to put their stuff in a box.

I bet my lunch money that an employee is far more likely to shape up and deliver in line with expectations when they aren't afraid each day they walk into the office may be their last. I think this gives employees more chance to succeed, not less. More transparency isn't always beneficial.

Or it's too good at being a PIP ;)

Many PIPs (in my experience: most PIPs) are not good faith attempts to allow a poorly-performing employee to improve. The decision to fire them was made before the PIP was issued, the PIP is just documentation to protect the company in the case of a lawsuit.

Amazon's approach here - if correctly reported - seems like it takes the step of embracing a PIP for what it actually is, by making it purely a documentation/justification task and eschewing the (often make-believe) step of letting employees fulfill the requirements of the PIP.

Overall I'm very much against non-transparent PIPs. Short of gross behavior, employees deserve to know if they are going to be let go for performance and prepare an exit plan. Not to mention PIPs are often arbitrary and capricious - not every employee on a PIP is actually poorly-performing. At the very least it gives people time to jump ship.

> tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations

Then the rest of the article is all quotes about employees who are not sure if they are meeting expectations or not. Are managers just not following this guidance, or is there some other rule that says the opposite of this quote?