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Comment by rk06 | Hacker News Reader

> churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.

It was a matter of time for that to happen. Amazon is infamous for having a firing quota, and infamous for Hiring managers to hire people, to fulfill said quota.

As long as these practices remain, the situation will only worsen for Amazon

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Top performers leave the company voluntarily, most often to get a promotion and pay rise elsewhere. This is commonplace in tech. The problem is (particularly during the last few months) the intake of talent has struggled to keep up.

There is no firing quota.

According to multiple sources, Amazon has a policy to have 6% UnRegrettedAtiration. which in normal speak is 6% of employees to be fired per year. and managers are expected to fullfil this quota, and backfil it if they failed to meet it previously.

Here is a recent news mentioning it: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...

Nuance, but you can have someone leave you don’t regret without firing someone.

Sure, but let's say that the quota is not met organically and only 3% leave voluntarily. Then to achieve the target 6% unregretted attrition for an org, you'd necessarily need to pick a different 3% to fire/push out.

> There is no firing quota.

It's called planned attrition.

to make this clear: as a SDM at Amazon who is probably not really authorized to speak about this - there are goals but there is no quota that says "you must fire your bottom 6%". At least, no one has said to me you must fire someone. That's just nuts. At any organization there tends to be some under performers so if you are doing your job the problem sorts it self out.

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