While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.
> ...
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.
It's a machine.
I don't think you get it. The way this stuff is done is just as described - totally blindsiding, and potentially flat-out gaslighting. There's no actual metrics or data until they fabricate a paper trail and force you out.
You don't win these things. Rather, you take your money and go elsewhere. Then turn down the subsequent job offers you get from them, using them only as leverage to juice your pay elsewhere with a competing offer ;-)
Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?
Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.
Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.
Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.
Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.
So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).
I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.
The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.
The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".
To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.
> In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest
which if so it singularly failed at.
I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.
Personal protective equipment?
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.
We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.
This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.
As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?
Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.
If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.
To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.
And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.
Reality is, you wanted to find a conference room or the bathroom for that.
Let's not forget that in order to use said documentation legally later, you would potentially run the risk of violating company policy on confidential information disclosure.
"You or your employer said you were fired.
We decided:
You were fired, but there was no misconduct. You gave your best effort, but you were unable to do your job as expected.
When you are fired but there is no misconduct, you are eligible for benefits."
He had a disagreement with his manager (let's leave it at that, heh), and over the next week, his arrangement to work from a different office (the rest of his team were based in this office too, just his department's office was technically somewhere else) was removed, his flex was removed, he was taken off all projects, and told that using his computer for non-work purposes was a disciplinary offence.
He had a 90 minute each way commute, was required to be clocked in between 9:30 and 4:30 every day (not 9:31, 9:30), required to work 37.5 hours, requests for using TOIL due to commute or other issues were immediately denied, no work to do, and not being allowed to use the computer in his office. The resolution was he found someone in a different department in the city we lived in that had the exact same thing happen to them, and they negotiated a swap with each other and things got better again.
==
Point being, these processes are a combination of ass-covering, parallel construction, and outright abuse. Nobody deserves to be treated like he was (or like people are being treated in these PIP programs), it would be more humane for everyone if we did something different.
Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done.
PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager and maybe the employee. (Depends on whether they are actually even aware they're a bad fit or not, and whether they're well-intentioned or not.)
Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Suddenly (as described in the parent article) they're being hit with complaints they've never heard before. Maybe there's substance, maybe not. It's a major blow to self-esteem and it's a dragged out process. They're not even given the satisfaction of a quick firing where they can be angry and done. It's a long suffering.
And to make the managers do this stuff - it's awful. Having to lay somebody off when a company RIFs people sucks. Having to fire people usually sucks unless they've really earned it. But telling a manager they have to PIP a percentage of their team arbitrarily and participate in this gaslighting process is simply evil.
Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.
I could have quit anytime during the process and had other opportunities waiting for me. I was offered another job before my 10 days of paid time off elapsed let alone my 3+ months severance and I survived through a vesting event.
At almost 50 years old and Amazon being my 8th job out of now nine, why would I wrap my esteem on my job? It was just my 8th time to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.
Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.
Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).
And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.
So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.
> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.
An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.
This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.
A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.
6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.
Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.
You ignored what I wrote
The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.
A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.
And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.
If it wasn’t about the equity, why would they be so mad? The point of the PIP is generally to remove the employee.
In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.
The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.
And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.
It's 100% about culture of fear and control.
And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.
But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.
I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.
So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.
Y1: 165K salary, 15K stock (15 RSU), $120K bonus.
Y2: 165K salary, 45K stock (45000/(1001.15) RSU), 90K bonus.
Y3: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(1151.15) RSU)
Y4: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(132.25*1.15) RSU)
So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.
After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.