What levels of SDE usually have hire for fire at Amazon? SDE I? II?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
At some point what's "good for the company" will not align with what certain (powerful) individuals want or need.
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.