How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
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.
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.