Hacker News Reader

Comment by i_love_limes | Hacker News Reader

I have a question for other former/current employees of Amazon.

I worked there for 4 years on the AIV / Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn't hear my colleagues talk about it either, "under-performing" laid off employees were rare (and unsurprising). Was I ignorant of what was going on around me?

From my perspective, the 'bar raising' in Amazon worked through the hiring process, of which I did many interviews. You only hired someone if you thought they were better than average either technically or on leadership principals.

Did this PIP quota thing always go on? Does this go on now to the same effect as people are talking about, or is this an echo chamber magnification of something that happened within a subset of one org?

View on HN

I was at Amazon for almost 10 years and my experiences echo yours. The few people that I saw PIPed were people who were under-performing. I never saw people who were performing their job be forced into a PIP category.

It's definitely possible that you were, as you put it, "ignorant of what was going on around you". I think you were at Prime Video at a time when it was really taking off, 2012-2016 was definitely a strong time for Prime Video, especially with the Twitch acquisition.

However, I was part of the Retail org between 2018-2020. I strongly back the PIP horror stories here. I don't want to share more details, because I'm still not brave enough to publicly bash an employer on the net. But I want to emphasize what I think others have also mentioned here, which is that, due to Amazon's size, there was definitely no one "Amazon culture" to speak of. The variance between orgs (and sometimes, between teams in the same org) was bafflingly huge.

Ex SDM (worked at AWS for 5 years, I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, had a pretty great time), I had a small team and there was no pip (pivot) quota mandated. But I can see how this can be come a pressure on larger teams, e.g. orgs below an L8 / orgs larger than 50 people. Not a pressure on pip (called pivot), but there is an expectation of some % of people as LEs (least effective / improvement needed), and LEs usually lead to focus / pivot.

It's pretty much standard practice: https://www.teamblind.com/search/amazon%20pip

This unfortunately didn't answer any of my questions.

Senior managers at AMZN have shared privately that there was a time after the NYT story where this was removed or not as strictly enforced.

That time is now gone, and goals are tied to your percentage. A team failing to meet its yearly goal can be expected to be asked to let go 15% vs. the standard 10% say.

It’s real and as messy as people are sharing. Some teams are better off than others.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com