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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

> As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.

Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear...

Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.

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Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member.

Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.

Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political.

Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.

So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.

Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.

Agree, 100% McNamara fallacy level thinking. The easily measured things don't make up the full picture, and may even be completely wrong, but they are easily measured so they become the full picture.

I worked somewhere that did weird personality tests as part of the recruiting process.

I talked to my manager later and he basically explained it as - yeah, it predicts nothing. No one ever gets denied because of it.. but its something for HR to wave at you if a hire doesn't work out and say "see it was right here in the personality test".

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Internal culture, process and behavior is what decides if a job is stressful.. while at Amazon I worked fewer hours outside work hours but was a lot more stressed as every one around you is busy proving their worth than looking at what needs to get done collectively.

You might be able to quantify internal culture, process and behavior, by applying some of the qualifiers from the human development index and happiness index to your company.

Just a thought.

“ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.”

This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!

Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.

My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.

But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”

Completely agreed. The credible threat of termination drives employees to perform even if they also misbehave in other ways (e.g. CYA and office politics). Consider the Lesson of the Concubines by Sun Tzu:

"Sun Tzu then set the women a simple drill and made sure they understood what to do. However, when he started ordering them to perform the drill, the women burst out in laughter. He tried again with the same result. Sun Tzu claimed that this failure of the troops to obey was the fault of the commanders. So, despite the warlord’s pleas, he ordered the two concubines beheaded as an example for the rest of the company. Thereafter, the women did not utter a single sound and performed the drill exactly as commanded."

This is a depiction of Amazon. However, a "simple drill" is not high speed software engineering.

>Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.

End result being snakes, backstabbers, and sociopaths rise to the top of the chains. Engineering is a collaborative effort so it speaks to the culture of AMZN how they incentivize this nonsense.

I was thinking along similar lines yesterday, although it was about patents: how things I value like science and software have benefited much more from collaboration than competition. And yet we have been convinced of the power of greed. Where are the works of these powerful people now? Turned to dust. All this chit chat about impact. Impact is about helping others. If your workplace doesn't encourage you to help your coworkers the best case is that you are building nothing.

I have noticed things move much faster when it’s competition vs collaboration. Compare Apache to Nginx as an example

> > As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer. > Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this.

I agree. I’d hate to work at any org that does this as a rule.

To play devils advocate however, I’m sure many of us have been in a situation where a co-worker was coasting, or doing the minimal amount of work, while spending energy to look busy.

I’m thinking this cynical outlook could have contributed to this practice being implemented in large organizations.

It turns work into a war of all against all.

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