My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit
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Amazon managers often have target URAs (unregretted attrition) to hit, around 6% per year in an organization. They are incentivized to fire people who don't perform, regardless of the reason. If they don't do it, someone else on their team might have to go. If they cannot hit URA targets, those managers could become targets to let go as URA.
This is a well-known tradeoff within most tech circles on the risk of working for Amazon. Unlike Netflix, who are clear about a similar policy (though without targets) Amazon does not advertise that they have internal URA targets externally.
I'll also add that from the outside, this setup has worked surprisingly well for Amazon for well over a decade - based on business results and how they became one of the most valuable companies in the world. However, as this policy is more known and stories like the author's surface, it's starting to hurt their brand in ways that hurts their hiring and is forcing them to have to pay more to hire ("would you take job A or job B that pay the same, knowing that 6% of people per year are fired at job A being Amazon?")
Quite a few better ones left on their own. The company definitely lost overall. The next CEO guy came targeted especially this - something along the lines of "we let leavers/retirees go and just don't hire for now". It worked wonders, people were more focused on actual work and job hunting.
[0] imagine getting an offer with a million dollar signing bonus listed, only to see in the fine print that this bonus is paid in $10k increments over the next centry.
Then fire someone else. Somebody who is not going through a family health crisis will have an easier time finding a new job. Yes, Amazon's policies are shitty, but the manager still deserves to be blamed.
Of course, the whole situation sounds completely ridiculous when you live in a country where it's simply illegal to fire workers without cause, especially on such a mass scale as Amazon is doing it.
It is illegal to let people go for some reasons but in most cases letting people go for no reason at all is just fine.
Amazon managers lacked humanity. We had a crazy high bar for engineering talent, but engineering managers and technical program managers seemed to have no bar. Many of them were hired directly by the senior manager or director, brought from their former company as part of an empire building exercise.
These people would squirm and flail at Amazon. They couldn’t keep up. They didn’t understand the technology.
So, what happens is they project their insecurities, get behind on communications, fail to set expectations on projects… and when they panic, one outcome is some poor engineer is going to get thrown under the bus.
You can be rated top tier at amazon, which is the highest rating in the company’s annual review process. Even then, you’re going to receive feedback about your weaknesses, why you’re not good enough, how you could do even better.
The corporate propaganda machine has coined a term around this, “Growth Areas”. Your peers are encouraged to provide feedback on your growth areas, and in the feedback they should write specific anecdotes and stories on how you failed or why what you did was not good enough.
At the end of the day, it’s a place were no matter what you do, how hard you work, how many hours you put in, how much impact you have, You will go home feeling bad about yourself. That you’re not good enough.
The pace and the hours are grueling. People make decisions to build their own empire within Amazon and get their coveted Sr Manager and Director promotions. You’re just a means to an end.
If you take in everything you experienced in those five years into consideration: Was it worth it?
Japanese managers have remarked on this problem in the US when hiring. You cannot easily invest in employees in the US. Investing in training reduce the amount of salary you are able to pay, so people leave as soon as they have training for a better paid job which doesn’t offer training.
Of course Japan is perhaps a bit extreme in this area but as a Scandinavia I have observed the same problem with fellow Scandinavians working in the US. Many remake on the natural loyalty you have been raised with slowly evaporating under US work conditions.
Currently working in Japan, and being from Scandinavia I can barely see the resemblance. I've only worked at startups & briefly in a public research Institute here, So sure maybe at big corporations there might be resemblance with the trainee-programs vs new-grad shukatsu system of Japan, but that's about it and afaik that's same in US.
Friends from Uni in Scandinavia didn't really show any "employee loyalty"; it correlated with the size of the company, and inverse correlation with age.
Her manager became pretty aggressive when she was one minute late for work only once. Only then she started noticing people were gone from the building within 30 seconds of the end of their shift. The job purely became a money thing. Nobody cared for each other. Just be on on time for your shift and get the hell out when your shift ended so you couldn't get forced into unpaid overtime by some manager. Zero happiness for eight hours a day.
Yay for the money i guess?
As for why a company would employ an incompetent PM like that? Because he was a shark, one of those useful manipulative figures who can easily tell lies to customers or push people into resigning without thinking twice. One day, some time after quitting, I paid visit to that company to see old friends and have lunch with them. Just guess who was the first person to call my name loudly, approach me with a huge fake smile and hug me. Yup, it was him. They're more common than we could think; if you have one nearby, be very careful.
I admit that this could have nothing to do with public listing, maybe it's really just large corporations, and the overlap there is significant.
It's not Amazon, the whole modern society works like this.
Humans are social by nature, but since childhood we are forced to avoid deep and meaningful relationships because everybody is a competitor, the "enemy" you should leave behind.
Instead of living, we are trained to perform and win over the competition.
Instead of making friends, we push people away and divide people into groups of winners and losers.
Instead of feel like humans, we are forced to ignore the feelings to keep going, keep performing, just like we were all machines.
And at the end, if you cannot keep up, you are discarded like trash, because you are no longer contributing to your employer's revenues goals.
Don't let Amazon off the hook like this.
What I'm trying to say is that it's Amazon and everybody else.
These days people tend to focus on tech companies, but they forget about gas, oil, telecom, pharma, food, and many other sectors with the same behavior.
For example, 10 years ago I had a contractor doing a job at Monsanto. He needed to bring his own water because Monsanto's employees were forbidden to give water to contractors.
I would encourage the author to name his manager. Maybe the manager can provide his side of the story. I suspect that Amazon leadership principles won't help him in anyway.
Mentioning the manager could inhibit him from further employment elsewhere, because once the HR Depts of other companies' start to gather background information on him, they'll think he's a whiner fingerpointer. You cannot exclude a person from employment just for that, but they'll find another reason to not hire him.
It doesn't drive change at Amazon, but it saves him unnecessary risk.
Well, except if you have the emotional detachment ability of an Amazon employee, that is.
There's a story about a Valve employee who got a paid extended leave when he got an illness:
> In 2004, Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Expecting his condition to require a departure from the company, he spoke with managing director Gabe Newell, who surprised him by offering an extended leave with pay. "Your job is to get better," Newell said. "That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Wolpaw#Personal_life
That's exactly what my employer did when my daughter was dying from leukemia. It's also what I would do for an employee in the same situation, even if I had to trim my own salary.
Beyond that, my manager also continuously offered or arranged for things that made our life easier, in part because it kept me productive but in larger part because she cared about us as a person, something that continued not only after their death, but after I left the company, and after SHE left that company.
Hell, my manager was the only person who sent us flowers during my partner's brief last stay in the hospital before dying. (Everyone else either was able to be there in person or didn't have time to make arrangements.) My manager pulled strings with hospital staff that I didn't know she had to have flowers in my partner's room within hours. When we were making last-days preparations, we even floated making her our emergency estate executor if I was somehow incapacitated, until someone physically closer to us volunteered.
So, yeah. Put him on paid leave as a brand-new, expensive employee. Even if there's no guarantee he'll stay. Even if he'll leave the company anyway. Since I'm not sure whether empathy is a factor for you, at least because everyone else on the team is watching how a manager responds to this.
A company that cares about its employees accepts that there can be personal reasons why someone might not be at their peak efficiency.
It doesn't sound balanced, if you're a valuable resource they should want you to stay and be at your best, even if that means giving you time.
Else Amazon is yet another meat grinder, even for high performing people, where you as a person have no value to the company, except what you output. Because if something bad happens to you - which is a matter of time, because life throws curve balls constantly - you're done.
Amazon's behavior doesn't even make sense from a hard-headed business perspective. There's a good chance that this person could have continued working effectively if they'd just let him take a months' paid leave without piling the pressure on.
Instead, Amazon faffed around for months with their sadistic extended firing process, which probably ended up costing way more than it would have cost to just give this person the time they needed to recuperate from their family crises.
The person was making $300k a year and you don’t make that kind of scratch without really high performance expectations and stress being placed on you. He took the job after his wife was sick, he was given opportunity to take leave to handle his personal business and mental health and chose not to do it. He could have used STD and LTD if he opted and appears he didn’t. At every stage this person appears to have made the “maximize money” decision instead of alternatives which could result in less job stress, but maximizing the focus on his family’s and his health.
Was he given a shitty personal row to hoe, absolutely. Did he make it worse for himself…I think that’s a yes too.
Shout-out to EMC corp, when I was assigned overseas, they paid the bill for ICU costs of my son's birth while on overseas assignment when the insurance company would not. Not all companies are douche bags.
P.s. I no longer work at EMC nor do I recruit for them LOL.
I bet Amazon would be profitable enough with a 5-day, 6-hour work week and much better benefits and vacation time, but since that makes them not as profitable as they can be by using slave labor...
Because they're sociopaths or worse.
That's why now I'm a strong promoter of bootstrapping, unless you have envisioned for yourself an exit too.
Then, and only then, yes, bring external investment as incentives are aligned with your peers. Maybe seed fund yourself and then bring Series A externally.