“Standing Up for Us Plebs.” Amazon Leaders Reject Policy to Push Employees Out | Hacker News Reader

“Standing Up for Us Plebs.” Amazon Leaders Reject Policy to Push Employees Out

bigtechnology.substack.com

53 pointskantrowitz27 comments

Interesting that Amazon still stack ranks. About ten years ago, I think everyone made fun of Microsoft’s stack ranking and here we are.

It's an inhumane management approach that treats employees as a consumable resource, so it's a perfect fit for Amazon.

Note that there's a classic case of picking a simple, easy, and wrong metric - number of employees made to leave - rather than the more nebulous "is our staff management policy producing good results", because the latter is hard to quantify.

> Interesting that Amazon still stack ranks. About ten years ago, I think everyone made fun of Microsoft’s stack ranking and here we are.

I've never been pro-union, nor anti-union for that matter: I'm just indifferent as I find them to have many pros and cons that ultimately cancel each other out.

My limited time with those who were unionized made me see the perils and entitlement that come with certain trades (electricians specifically) and their reluctance to cross train non-union, or their outward antipathy towards anyone who hasn't paid dues to their union has put a damper on my outlook.

But given Amazon's influence in the Labor market post-covid, and their lobbying efforts and their ever growing market share in addition to their inhumane actions towards labor, I think it's imperative that Amazon be unionized in the US and AWS be broken up into many companies. Amazon has just too large for it not get away with this behaviour. Anti-trust laws are on the books for a reason, and Microsoft had to reigned in on as well.

Just look at this:

> To reach it [Unregretted attrition], they’d have to put 111 employees on notice in a performance plan called Focus. The ensuing misery could make many leave on their own...

I have no problem with the 6% number for URA. The problem I have is that the 6% never seems to include managers. So when your manager bad hire bungles the OP1, constantly randomizes the team, and then jets to another team in 18 months the manager keeps their stock grant and the poor pleb dev that worked under those conditions gets the axe for their 'poor performance'.

This is exactly the issue with quotas like that.

For any action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

What often happens as a result of such policies is that the weaker or newer managers simply become an unwitting separation/firing mill, or the people who have to be managed out are simply those that are inconvenient in some way for the org, or are too new for the team (the infamous hire-to-fire phenomenon).

Also, as in this leak, what happens is that in order to reach a 6% URA target, they may have to put 15% of people through performance improvement, and some of these people simply leave Amazon to successfully work for Google and Facebook, defeating the notion that they had unrecoverable performance issues to begin with.

At the end of the day, if success in improving performance, is a fail in the metric, isn't that itself a fail? (This in turn provides an incentive for the managers to finish up anyone they put for performance improvement, making the whole process a sham, since it's virtually impossible to get out of.)

I have never seen a major company so vehemently despised from the inside like Amazon. It’s internal ratings compared to 99% of other software companies are abysmal.

I have a few successful colleagues (former) and friends at amazon.

I don't think anyone I know who works there or has worked there liked the culture at all. For most, it's just an aspirational resume building step - it looks great to be a former Amazon employee but I don't think many really see it as a great place to go and stay.

Criticisms of Amazon need to overcome a fundamental problem:

Amazon has been one the most innovative companies of all time. As a result it has grown explosively and is beloved by customers. All with this policy in place.

In other words, this policy appears to work. Or at the very least, it doesn’t hurt. If you don’t like it, don’t work there.

This is ridiculous because there can be many, many reasons for Amazon being successful while still making a lot of mistakes. You are conflating cause and effect here, how can we know if Amazon couldn't be even more innovative if they didn't do this?

> Or at the very least, it doesn’t hurt.

I think you missed this part of my comment. I don't conflate cause and effect. No do I conflate correlation and causation, which is what I think you meant to write.

> be even more innovative

So your premise is that the most innovative, productive company in the world could be more innovative?

Are you insinuating that there's some sort of cap on innovation?

Yes. For instance, natural resources, financial & human resources, time, and physical reality come to mind.

So if we consider every single (known) possible permutation of "ways to do something" do you really think that amazon is anywhere near the possible cap? I have my doubts, and this is even thinking we won't figure out some new way to bend physics to our will

The two things could be completely unrelated. We have zero evidence that this policy has any impact, positive or negative. Seems odd to frame the two as related.

Counterpoint - MSFT had stack ranking for years and stagnated until they ended the policy in 2013, followed by Nadella becoming CEO in 2014 and it’s hard to argue that MSFT hasn’t seen an incredible revival. One could draw a series of similar comparisons, from stack ranking had zero impact on the company performance, to stack ranking being the barrier to MSFT success, all the way to the removal of stack ranking actually CAUSED Nadella to be appointed CEO. We have just as much evidence for any of those possibilities.

What has Microsoft innovated? As far as I can tell, they turned into a cloud provider after AWS paved the way and wrung out some extra revenue by turning Office into a subscription.

So the whole innovation amounts to simply being a cloud provider?

I think a lot of people overestimate the importance of AWS. It's both funny and sad to see people think they need AWS for the most basic compute tasks that are easier and cheaper to accomplish without AWS.

There's actually many blogs and distributed services that use zero AWS, and have higher availability than AWS, and which don't have to provide a status update telling their customers that "even Netflix is down", passing the buck. When Netflix is down, my site's up, so that's a really bad excuse however you look at it.

I am using the dictionary definition of innovate.

>To begin or introduce (something new) for the first time.

>To begin or introduce something new.

>To introduce novelties or changes; -- sometimes with in or on.

I believe that qualifies AWS as an innovation, the context being comparing Amazon's innovative-ness to Microsoft's innovative-ness since they ended stack ranking.

> The two things could be completely unrelated

Yes. Could be unrelated, could be related. We can't run a clinical quality controlled experiment to make that determination.

My initial point was that Amazon has produced stunning innovation while maintaining this HR policy. So at the very least, it doesn't appear to have held the company back in a meaningful way.

Much of the framing of stack ranking in these comments is that it is deeply inhumane. Over time, this type of framing undermines our conception of what actually inhumanity looks like. For reference, China's treatment of the Uyghurs is inhumane. Malaysia's treatment of the Rohingya is inhumane.

This claim is a laughable, being made by wealthy, coddled people who are complaining about a company's approach to accountability. But here's the thing, if someone can get a job at Amazon, they can get a job at just about any company. Particularly in tech, which has seen an imbalance of labor supply and demand for going on 30 years. So I say again, if you don't like stack ranking, don't work at Amazon.

This is just whataboutism.

Yes, for any sort of maltreatment, you can identify somebody else engaging in worse. Precisely because of this fact, identifying somebody else worse tells you exactly nothing.

I mean surely questioning current ways of working is how you stay innovative and respond to a changing world? it feels odd to imply they have reached peak innovation and should just stay the same.

So your premise is that everything “the most innovative, productive company in the world” does is absolutely perfect and can’t have a single shortcoming?

Criticisms of Amazon do need to overcome a fundamental problem.

Unfortunately, it's not this problem..or at least, that's not the biggest problem.

Criticizing Amazon because of the policies held in Team X is like saying 'The U.S. talks way too fast' after visiting New York (caveat, long time New Yorker here). Each state is different in the US. In the same way, each team is different in Amazon: the Whispersync team is much different than the Amazon FedCloud team, and both are much different than the fulfillment team.

Perhaps because it has grown so fast, and been so innovative, the company is not homogenous. So when you criticize policies..please criticize specific policies, and specific teams.

I do not work for Amazon, am not a shareholder, but I do have several friends that work there, on different teams.

Edited to add some thoughts on stack ranking...

I have been at a company that did formal stack ranking. I was never in the lower tiers..but I hated it, because I saw all the stress and drama caused by it. It pit team members against each other and disincentivized team mates helping each other. Stack ranking is also the reason I didn't sign on with one particular company (not Amazon).

I've also been at other companies that did what amounts to unofficial stack ranking: manager has a pool of $Xk to divide amongst pay raises on the team and must justify it by some kind of metrics.

Neither are good for teams, for the people at your company. What isn't good for the people at your company is not good for your company. People are what any company is made on. Innovation, hard-charging business, can cover this to some extent for a while (perhaps a long while), but it always takes a toll in the end.

Perhaps the best compensation structure I've seen (on paper) is at Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), in an article that's now 20 years old:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/30/fog-creek-compensa...

I'm curious to see if Glitch uses that, how it worked in practice, and what the thoughts are about it now - 20 years later.

The 6% URA goal is actually a company-wide directive from the S-team.

In this example, we actually see an individual org within the company trying to push against the company-wide policy.

Without AWS and the pandemic, is there an Amazon as we know today (regardless of its internal policies and culture)?

Hard to say. The problem with time series' is that you only get one realization ;)

But I think reducing Amazon to an Ecomm/AWS duality goes too far. That said, I would bet that, yes, Amazon would still have been extremely innovative.

It's pretty easy lol -

IBM was also once an innovative giant.

What worked then might not work now, the culture then might not be the same as the culture now, and the world then was different from the world now. The riches they have now are the results of the innovating they did 5-10 years ago. The next 5 years is a different question.

economy is not just there for itself, it serves the community. Innovation and growth is also not a goal for itself. If a company fails at a fundamental task, like providing fair working conditions, then discussions about consequences in a democracy are needed. Then one can formulate policies, elect leaders and change the game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com