Leaked documents reveal Amazon’s process to review employees’ worth to Amazon
fortune.com
fortune.com
Former Amazon SDM here. The actual rating process didn't strike me as something all that controversial. I had to do extensive write ups for all of my reports--this was standard stuff: what went well ("superpowers"), what didn't ("growth areas"), and some actionable ideas for improvement.
Then I had to pick numerical scores for "impact" and "potential" that were fed into a black box that resulted in an "overall value" score--this score is meant to be mysterious to the employees but it's the worst kept secret in Amazon at this point. OV ranged from LE (least effort/effective) at the low end, through HV 1,2,3 (high value) which is essentially "meets", and then TT ("top tier") at the high end.
~10-15% of a director org is supposed to be LE, up to 20% TT, and the rest of people distributed through the HV levels. I proposed these ratings to the bigger org that were then agreed to or adjusted by HR and higher management in a formal manager meeting.
The infamous URA quota of ~6% unregretted attrition (PIP) is meant to be met through managing out LE employees. The process starts with a PIP-lite called "Focus" and goes to the real PIP at the next stage, called "Pivot".
Many people got out of Focus, very few get out of Pivot. The part of the process I had trouble with, which contributed to me leaving, is the curve fitting of ratings for people. I had to do things like trade a HV3 down to an HV2 in order to keep an unpopular but otherwise fine performing engineer from getting an LE.
The stories people tell about hire to fire and unfair Pivot are overblown in my experience but not false. From what I've seen, the company will find pliant people and lean on them hard for more and more and more and then manage them out when then start to falter.
Lot of nuance to this--I have no love for Amazon and I'm happy to have moved on. It is definitely a meat grinder. That said articles like this are pretty low effort on my view.
I’ve seen new engineers that tried to rush senior eng behaviours and they didn’t do well in performance reviews until they corrected their behavior. You need to prove you can be a baseline contributor before you start dreaming big.
Your manager has a huge amount of impact on your career. If you're working for an asshole/moron who won't reciprocate in this way, find a different one.
[1] Not the same thing as work that's valuable for the firm.
Figure out who the internal competitors are.
Learn what gets rewarded in an organisation. This often has little correlation to actual value.
Optimise for political capital, not whats right.
Don't make a scene. Don't cause drama. Don't be stupid enough to lead anti-company movements, e.g. discussing pay inequality, or unionisation.
Be cordial and respectful to everyone, even if they don't deserve it.
Companies with > 1000 employees will operate completely like this. Where there will always be 3 “priorities” for every manager: what they were told by the C-level, what they know to be important to their manager and what _they_ want to get out of their position.
The amount of times I have been caught totally off guard because I couldn’t fathom why a certain team or individual would be actively doing something to the detriment of the business… only to later understand it was to the benefit of their unit/selves.
> Optimise for political capital not what’s right.
Yes and no. Often what’s politically valuable is short term and misaligned with what the company’s values are.
Pushing back diplomatically might be the smarter thing in the mid to long term. be mindful of where the request comes from and from whom.
At some point what's "good for the company" will not align with what certain (powerful) individuals want or need.
Ideally you'll have coworkers that want to succeed and want you to succeed so that you are all open to learning from each other.
Sometimes you have a coworker who has gaps in their knowledge and is insecure (or sometimes that person is you). To avoid politics there, just help that person feel secure -- find things to learn from them or find ways they can help you.
Maybe a coworker is burnt out and doesn't have the energy to work as hard as you can. Learn what you can from them too, help them feel important.
Maybe your manager is overloaded with work. Figure out what their responsibilities are so you can prioritize what you work on in a way that makes their life easier.
Basically: politics is inevitable but you should just be new, make friends, have empathy, and let things fall into place.
This is the type of behavior that causes mid-life crises.
At a small, young, growing company, that's what the company needs - if your goals aren't aligned with the company's, you are going to be spending scarce resources on the wrong things.
If there's a way, in a larger company, to prevent "necessary alignment" from turning into "political gamesmanship," I've never seen it. If the people in control of your fate have goals that aren't perfectly aligned with "overall health of company" then now it's games and bullshit and it gets real hard on the individuals. And that can happen very easily: Director X wants to be promoted to VP, needs to show results in their domain, maybe doesn't care if this has knock-on effects on other orgs; the company is 99% likely to be fine anyway, and it'll help them move up... do you get on board, or do you push back because it's a bad overall strategy? Good luck... :|
Implying management doesn't do the same...
Once you’re among the senior leadership flattery won’t work and honestly they’ll see right through it. If you play your cards right you’re free to prove your technical prowess and get placed into top performing teams with the best managers. As long as the senior leadership knows your name, and you don’t overextend like a noob, you’ll get what you want pretty quick.
Or you can quit in two years and get another job.
That being said a company as big as Amazon will always have edge cases.
This manager obviously doesn't want to hurt this awesome team or lose any members, but Amazon wants them to churn out the bad engineers (which this team may not have).
So instead of finding faults where they don't exist, our manager hires 2 engineers with little to no chance of working out in the team long term, give them some busy work, puts them on a PIP, then eventually fires them, only to soon replace them with two new victims.
It sucks to be a victim, and it sucks to knowingly do that as the manager, but it does work out great for the team and the manager - so I think it could happen (maybe not super common, but it isn't unrealistic in my mind).
1. Amazon isn't so special that even they can control the distribution curve to only have rockstars,
2. This is too big for a single team in the first place, let alone 10 rockstars,
3. You don't want any rockstars, let alone only rockstars on your teams,
4. Managing low performers is a magnitude more work than solid performers; no manager would do this to themselves on purpose. It would be easier to cut their 2 least rockin' stars.
And other people say rockstars and mean ‘assholes that churn out new features really fast with incomprehensible code and then leave others to maintain their monstrosity as they move on to the next thing”.
I assume Amazon is large enough to have a team somewhere with 6-10 of the ‘good’ version, and also a team somewhere with 6-10 of the assholes.
Then what do you do a year (and a half for Amazon) later for the next cycle?
One of the many problems with stack rank cull N% of your employees every year is that "every year" part. At whatever level it's mindlessly applied, if the company wants to keep it at the same head count you by definition have a steady churn of hires, which I'll grant you won't always be good, and fires.
You can critique Amazon for basically saying "don't worry about it" so managers may invent plans like hire-to-fire to game the system and overall someone's gonna get screwed on that team, but it's a tough problem to solve - otherwise, what's to stop managers from all simply claiming "no, my team's a special case"? Introduce special cases and it'll just be gamed through that mechanism.
I'm a firm believer that if you want to avoid things like that you have to avoid large organizations. A large organization is highly incentivized to be bureaucratic so to minimize the effects of unexpected losses and to keep the money machine running.
You lost me. Why should we want to stop managers from saying that?
Your unspoken assumption here is that recruiters, HR and managers have perfectly aligned incentives. It is trivial to find instances when this is not the case - e.g. a high-performance team being forced to fire their "least effective" member[s]- this relies on the theory that talent is uniformly distributed across Amazon.
Hire-to-fire is neither a conspiracy nor a conscious tactic. It's the natural consequence of what we managers are put into.
If HR wants you to URA someone out, who would you rather lose? The experienced SDE who is productive and is responsible for projects you don't want delays in; or the new hire who's still trying to learn company tools.
That's why hire-to-fire is a thing.
I never saw any written documentation about the URA goal, HR probably wants to avoid creating a leakable paper trail. It always came down verbally from my L8. I heard rumors that Amazon's HR boss Galetti is the big advocate of the URA goal, but I was nowhere high enough to be part of those conversations.
Source: former L7 manager, now happily out.
I can absolutely understand how this feels news worthy to those outside of tech.
It should be more controversial and the fact that people are saying "hey this is just how it works" is part of the problem.
LE and URA targets do change by organization and current HC goals. People need to go to Focus but in my experience it was the right thing to do. HR will absolutely help you to improve the performance and retain the individual if you think it's fixable.
From my experience, and I'm not saying this is case for all, people in Focus had undeniable performance problems that needed addressing. Stack ranking and quotas suck, and you feel like shit having to abide by them, but I've also seen managers being overprotective about underperforming employees. At some point, you have to do something about them because they'll bring the whole team down.
> trade a HV3 down to an HV2 in order to keep an unpopular but otherwise fine performing engineer from getting an LE.
Like this where the company's goal is never to improve "unpopular but otherwise fine performing engineer" but rather to keep the boundary of the boxes. And this despite mounting evidence against such systems, and the known abuse with methods like hire to fire. To me this is always a sign of rotten leadership.
I and some friends worked for Capital One, which does stack ranking (but not the intense PIP that Amazon does).
Overall the stack ranking isn't a huge issue, but you get screwed because those boxes are subjective, which I always felt was the big issue with any system like this.
I worked easily 9-6 most days and got an average rating, while I buddy of mine in a different org would work maybe 4 hours a day and get the same rating. My org had intense work and my manager saw that as the norm.
Again not terrible, but I would be incredibly mad if say this same system conspired to putting me on PIP. Working more and longer hours but not meeting the definition of average for your specific manager and team.
Then those managers are bad at their jobs and should be PIP-ed even more ruthlessly.
It's always interesting to me how managers get a complete and utterly unexamined pass in these conversations. The bar is so, so low for them. Managerial incompetence can be breezily cited as the reason for a horrible policy, like managing out a fixed percentage of every team, and everyone considers it a fait accompli. After all, what would be the alternative? Managers actually being held accountable for doing the most important part of their jobs?
ICs must be held nose to the grindstone every minute of every day... but ya can't do anything about bad management!
Not so for the poor manager, somehow. The poor manager who, in most cases, bent over backwards to get that promotion.
Big Orgs have big re-orgs all the time and the entire management structure can change swiftly. Leaf node workers left untouched.
If the reorgs actually got rid of bad management, it wouldn't be necessary to shrug and cite bad management as the excuse for mandatory stack ranking and attrition quotas.
"We can't help it! Our managers can't be trusted to tell us if someone is effective!"
Middle managers, other than maybe first-level ones, are the lowest of the low, and very rarely get managed out. In fact, they are the cause of nearly all corporate problems, IMHO.
Cannon fodder for hire :)
But holy fuck I have no desire to work in such an adversarial low trust environment.
And you did this because why, exactly? It doesn't matter if someone is performing fine if they're an insufferable ass to everyone around them and breeding resentment, etc.
Further I would not rate anyone being an insufferable ass as "fine performing".
What about if someone leaves and they were never officially put into Focus or Pivot? I've heard of someone leaving where their manager never put them through any part of PIP, and then after they left they found out they weren't allowed to rejoin Amazon for a year. IIRC Amazon lets employees rejoin up to 6 months after leaving, maybe longer, usually.
It’s distinctly 1984 newspeak.
Amazonspeak is wild.
I couldn’t imagine a worse company to work for in any capacity. I don’t even want to shop there when I read this shit.
Sounds like they need a union. Why are there so few software unions?
For like 20 companies out of thousands. This is in no way standard.
Leaked documents aren't necessary to know that Amazon — among other FAANG companies — stack rank. But I will say that when Forte (the system used for performance reviews) first rolled out about 4-5 years ago, it was initially intended as a way to solicit feedback from your peers: and it was used that way.
At first.
But of course, within a few years, the system evolved and was eventually tied to your compensation.
Your forte, when you discuss it with your manager, should give you some growth areas that you should improve. If in your next talent review, you haven't made much progress, that will contribute to your ranking naturally but that's about it
> Factors that can boost an employee’s score include being reactive to customer needs, acting as a mentor, providing new ideas in discussions, and exhibiting a strong and adaptable work ethic.
Never mind, this is outrageous. Somebody should put a stop to these monsters.
The reason why this concerns people is because Amazon’s approach to worker metrics is notorious for all sorts of bad effects, from warehouse staff pissing into bottles to PIP culture among its engineering staff.
Is there any sign that these KPIs will be used in a less stringent way?
Managers made whatever decisions they wanted.
The previous system, "Evolution" had many issues, no doubt, but it made peer feedback a major input into the evaluations.
From reading the article that's exactly what Amazon is doing. How does your manager feel about you, how do your coworkers feel about you, what do you think about yourself. Just with more ceremony, so it doesn't look like a bunch of dice rolls.
IMHO the best way to work in tech is as a partially committed, outside contractor. Your counterparty has little leverage over you because you don't have all your eggs in one basket
I've been on both sides (IC + manager), though not at Amazon. As a manager, it's always crystal clear that not every team member contributes equally, often by a wide margin. When it comes time to give out monetary rewards and title increases, how would you propose people be evaluated?
Is this the “everyone gets a trophy” generation shocked by how the world really works?
I’m not aware of any very high performing organization that doesn’t have some form of cycling out low performers. And places that don’t do this, or promote based on silly metrics like years of service, consistently are places plagued with poor standards and performance overall.
High performing individuals also loathe the underperformers and want them gone. They drag down standards, create more work for others, impact morale. I’ve seen too many orgs that don’t chase out poorly performing people. What happens? The good performers flee.
Amazon's attrition goal is an open secret everybody knows. Once everybody knows that someone else's success is your failure, people start backstabbing eachother. They stop helping eachother.
The problem is that the attrition target is a quota that all of us had to fill.
Does this sound like a healthy environment? It creates perverse incentives where folks become more concerned about outperforming the next person than actually working toward the primary goal of shipping a product.
If your goal is to whittle a group of people down to one, then stacked ranking is the right tool. However most, if not all, organizations are created to achieve larger tasks. And this requires the cohesion of a team. If you think of only individuals, then you'll miss the forest for the trees.
2. Does your system actually correctly identify the lowest performers? If you believe that, you have more faith in metrics than I do.
3. Does every team have lowest performers that should be fired? I think that is the real toxic component here. I'm sure that all of us have occasionally met an underperformer that the company would have been better off without. But an automatism that every year, a blood tribute of N% shall be paid leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
No one I know raised on "everyone gets an award" has done anything but mock it.
Every peer review calls out someone’s “superpower” and the Leadership Principle they excel at. (It also has some suggestions for improvement.)
There’s really very little to complain about in Amazon’s process except for the curve fitting.
If you're the worst of the best, you might be paid the same as the best of the worst in a different team, even if you're way better then them.
I think a lot of people would prefer an absolute measure, like did you deliver what people expected you to do deliver for the role and position you were hired for, aka, are you doing the job they need.
If it was an absolute scale, then ideally someone that's the worst of the best would still be paid more than someone that's the best of the worst.
But, like with interviews, I think it's just a hard problem. Evaluating performance is not something anyone has found a good way to do it. Wanting to do it seems reasonable, but being accurate at it isn't easily achievable, there'll always be injustice due to the innacuracies of the process.
In my experience, it was the boomers who did this sort of shit to us millenials. I remember the 2nd grade softball games that we just wanted to have fun, and the younger boomers (our parents) then got all of us participation trophies for.. reasons. I know at least 3 in my team that intentionally left the worthless trophies underneath the benches. They were nothing to us.
We 2nd graders just wanted to play ball. Sure, do points (we weren't "allowed to"), and play quick, mix up teams. But no, it must be structured. My generation was also the start of that crap too.
And speaking of participation trophies, schools tried to do that crap too with "gold stickers" on perfect homework. I mean, who cares? I just wanted it done. Fellow students did similar with rolling eyes, like whatever.
Tbh, I'm a millennial, but always thought "everyone gets a trophy" was a crock, as did many of my peers.
What's also a crock though is the world we've been left with, but that's also become just a cheap low hanging generational quib that is counterproductive. Then again, it does actually provide some sense of foresight
These "news" sites never link their sources.
The author comments about these documents, but how would one proceed to form their own opinion?
I'm not sure if anybody should just "believe" on such articles.
> employee’s potential—ranked on a scale from one to four
Article doesn't explain how "potential score" works.
Considering it is 1 of 2 metrics that factor into total score, it sounds important.
Why is this controversial?
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon...
That's the controversial part, which for some reason this article doesn't really go into.
Everyone with some sense should hate that, though.
Why don't we write a sensational article about that instead?