I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.

Since when did being "humane" contribute to profit?

>Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance

The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance. The company doesn't care what ex-employees think.

Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.

Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/work and the technology shifted. My disability isn't suited to the new working style/process (or lack of). However, I do excellent work outside of my regular day to day responsibilities, like my secondary role as an ASC. My manager even said that I'd I could just speed up my regular work I would easily get the highest rating and a promotion. Hearing him say that really sucks because I unable to just speed up with my disability in the given work environment. The company/managers have made no effort in helping me find a role that works better with my skills or is impacted less by my disability. It seems there may not be any of the traditional roles/teams left. So now I fill midlevel roles and move team to team trying to find somewhere that I fit in. If I can find a place I fit in like before, then I would easily excel.

Another example was a dev on another team that I worked with a few years ago was sloppy, slow, and just all around seemed like a poor performer - and even our tech lead and manager talked poorly about him. He was even considerably slower than me. About 3 years after that he's now the head of data and analytics for our international operations.

With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.

I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.

Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).

To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.

Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?

> underperformers lying about to cull

is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.

Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?

The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.

FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to:

  Underperforming:  ~12%
  Meeting or Exceeding: ~80%
  Better than exceeding: ~8%

All that said, every company and even org within a company have their own goals, targets, processes, and flows, and my experience was pre-COVID, so I'm also sure that any needle movement has been in the direction of harsher evaluations.

No interview process is perfect. Companies, no matter how 'high the entry barrier' make mistakes when hiring. This is how they've decided to correct it.

It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.

Interview process doesn’t test for everyday laziness. A lot of very smart people who easily solve leetcode are just coasting at their jobs.

You mean ... Leetcode?

I would categorize it as an artificial high barrier to entry that is based on how much you study and a bit of luck. If anything, it is designed to make employees believe they are top-tier.

Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff.

Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.

I've worked on many high-performing teams where you couldn't find 6%, or 1-in-18 of people who shouldn't be there.

However, I've never worked for an entire fast growing company where I couldn't readily pick out 1-in-18 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone knew it.

Hiring is far from perfect and these companies are growing quickly. Combined with turnover, you're bringing in a large number of new developers every year. Some people are really good at Leetcode and interviewing, but don't actually like to do work at jobs, for example.

IMO, the problem comes when these arbitrary thresholds are applied at low levels like individual teams. If you take a group of 18 people and declare that 1 of them must be fired every year no matter what, it's terrible. On the other hand, if you were to look at a large department of 1000 people and went through everyone's performance closely, I don't think it would be hard to identify 60 people who weren't working out.

The other problem is that some people have become really good at gaming this system. Every time I've worked at a company that does arbitrary culling of employees, there was always a contingent of old timers who had mastered the system years ago and never found themselves up for consideration to PIP. Either they were friends with management, had some arcane knowledge that they refused to let anyone else access, or they were really good at buttering up their manager come performance review time. I can think of one guy who was always fighting with everyone and refusing to do work, but would become the sweetest, most helpful hero a couple times a year when some high profile issue came up. He'd work 16 hour days for a couple weeks, emergent triumphantly with some solution, then disappear again for another 6 months. Untouchable, yet clearly the lowest net performer on the team.

There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.

I completed them. All of them.

My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).

I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...

What really ground my gears?

"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."

I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."

And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.

I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.

Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

About this point he turned his camera off.

Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.

He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.

HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest of the call.

A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).

There's no contradiction. No interview process can avoid low performers. There will always be unmotivated people, people who are difficult to work with and so on...

But yes, this isn't cool, but at least, people working there have very high compensation and know it's a competitive environment.

1. Carefully review and test 500 models.

2. Buy what seems to be the best 55.

3. Rank what you have, and return the worst 10 out of 55.

4. Repeat careful reviewing of other possible models.

5. Buy another 10 microwave ovens.

6. GOTO step three.

I thought that constantly hiring and firing was common practice. It also puts e.oyees under stress. Maybe it started at GE?

I do not like it, but I can see the sociopathic boss' point of view.

While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

Psychological torture is there by design and not as a side effect.

I've been working closely with Amazon sellers for more than a decade, when I first heard how they stressed out employees I thought it fit the image that we had from our end, as sellers, perfectly.

I've come to suspect that Amazon has behavioral scientists and psycologists working on how to build the most threatening way possible to communicate, to stress sellers out as much as they can, to have them broken at their feet.

They will send emails like "Action required: your listings have been deactivated", for simple stuff that require a couple of clicks to fix, and the problem is that it's not like the story of the kid who cried wolf, sellers are terrified when they receive those emails. Sometimes 20-30 families depend on that business and an email like that could mean everyone is out of a job.

That is just an example, this strategy is applied in such a consistent manner through their communications that it puts it beyond doubt that it's done on purpose.

And please, don't be heartless to say, that's what you get when you your company depends on a big corp. I've seen that thrown around here when so many can get their lives turned upside down by Google or Apple too.

My livelihood is based on my ability to get a job, keeping my skills current and keeping my network strong. I would never base my livelihood on the whims of one company.

A job is merely transactional. I exchange labor for money. When the company decides my labor is not worth the money they are paying me or I decide that the pay/bullshit ratio is going in the wrong direction, I change jobs and find another company that will give me money for my labor.

I’ve done so 9 times in my career and 6 since 2008.

In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short stick for so long that they don't even know what fair working conditions look like anymore.

Also, as an employee, those two weeks are easy-street. Leaving early and long lunches are the norm.

Oh and I was able to put all of code through the open source process and post it to the AWS Samples public GitHub repo and reuse it.

I worked on ProServe.

Martial problems, family problems, health problems, depression, addiction, and what not.

Not saying that two months is enough to resolve those problems, but if for whatever reason such engineers are able to finally block those stressors, and bring their A-game to "beat" the PIP, then that should absolutely be a good reason to keep them aboard.

A PIP should not be a delayed 2-month firing process. It should be a legitimate chance for someone to improve.

It simply doesn't make any sense. You can have a team of only high performers and your manager will tell you to fire someone, and if you don't do it it will be you.

Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.

Of course, this kind of staff turnover is terrible for the company, but they reap what they sow.

For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".

But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide).

As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing.

You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?

Here's an alternative view that popped up in my feed yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IVdaysrIS74

And then, because the code base is so awful, the only productive people are the ones who have been around long enough to avoid the culling, but they’re also dealing with how bad it is, so even their productivity comes to a near-grinding-halt.

and management wonders why nothing is getting done. It must be because they need more engineers… and the cycle continues.

edit: can we just say the company names, this site is anonymous lmao

I work at Amazon and I can tell that it depends on the organization and politics.

Of course nobody is untouchable when it comes to the layoffs, but quite many people have made their spot pretty much resistant to firing. They are crucial for business to continue. (Again, maybe my organization)

Also, it is very common at Amazon; Nobody is doing the job they are hired for. As a developer, you are responsible for anything and everything. Management only deals with PIP and crunching out weekly/monthly/quarterly documents where their management doesn't give a damn about except the summary part.

Decent salary.

A big name on a resume that can be leveraged into a better, well paying job.

Remember, people who are content don’t leave reviews. I worked with Amazon a lot over the years. There are people there who have been there for a decade+. It wouldn’t happen if they were treated abysmally.

One thing I liked was that Amazon puts up less of an act that everyone is one big family. I knew they saw me as a "human resource", and could behave accordingly. It was only when the stress started to follow me home that I got out, only sticking around longer than that to take advantage of the great health insurance for a big procedure.

I have the impression that if you can survive for 4 years, you get some very lucrative wealth building stock options. But I also believe that most people don't actually make it all the way to the end. Kind of like a winning lotto card you get for standing in a boiling shower for an hour

The general gist of it was: while one got treated better at Google, you got more done -- and had more freedom to choose how to do it -- at Amazon. So depending on the team, potentially higher job satisfaction.

I don't know if that's still the case. Personally if I'm going to sell my soul and work on stuff which isn't my personal passion, it's going to go to the highest and best bidder... but I will admit after 10 years at Google, the slow pace and boredom got to me enough that I quit. Maybe I would not have done that if I'd felt more emotional attachment and productivity in my work, and maybe a place like Amazon could have provided that. But I've heard too many dark tales. (I sure miss that level of money.)

I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".

> And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.

I largely think that is a good thing. Employers have a disproportionate power over the employees, and having to go through the hurdles to fire a few troublesome employees is well worth the protections afforded to everyone else.

When they can hide behind "molar company", yeah, they will never change that practice. Instead, if you said the name, at least we'd know what to keep an eye out for.

At my current company we had a massive, make-it-or-break-it deliverable for the spring. It was literally all departments coming together for a whole year and trying to get this thing done on time.

All, but HR. All HR cared about was to make sure managers would pester their report to put their 3 annual goals in [random HR system] before [random day in March]. HR like to see people as interchangeable cogs but that's because that's what they are themselves.

If someone in HR can save a company hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars by removing underperforming workers, and replacing them with better workers, shouldn't that warrant some bonus?

In the same way that if some engineer discovers a bug that is costing the company a lot of money, and fixing it, should also get a bonus?

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:...

Seems to work exactly for the purpose it was created, to force out employees one way or another.

(Redundant Acronym Syndrome)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.

If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?

>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.

Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.

So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?

1. Large numbers

In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.

This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.

2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes

Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.

Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.

Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".

I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.

In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.

I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.

Or a lack of union protection.

They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.

People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.

If a job gives you mental strain, especially if it is affecting your performance, IMO the right thing to do is to quit. I'm not surprised the boss was disappointed, but I do think they should've seen it coming.

I've been in situations where a job evidently isn't for me anymore, albeit in a seemingly healthier environment— my boss and I talked openly about the team no longer being a fit for me for weeks if not months prior.

I was evidently not working at my full potential too, and when I told my boss I was quitting, they told me what date I should officially submit my resignation so that I'd still get my latest bonus. It was all very amicable and objective.

That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.

It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.