The German Works Council has blocked Amazon's performance reviews | Hacker News Reader

The German Works Council has blocked Amazon's performance reviews

30 pointsjerrryyy11 comments

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Managers are no longer allowed to rate their direct reports based in Germany, and it appears this is a permanent decision. Let’s see if Seattle weighs in.

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Wow, finally someone had the balls to say that stack ranking and PIPing people like a meat grinder is inhuman.

And Amazon will move those jobs to India. Mission accomplished. I'd argue that was the very original goal of all this. Worker Councils lineally shot themselves in the foot.

So when do we start putting tariffs on imported code? If it's all just a shell game to move to the lowest paid and most abusive environment available, then working conditions will never really improve.

If those jobs could be moved to India, they would already be there. But you cannot run a fulfilment center one continent over. Or a competitive (EU data protection legislation compliant) datacenter.

You obviously can take it too far both ways. I guess Amazon took it too far in one direction.

But is taking it to the opposite extreme (no reviews, no ratings, no measurement) - a good longterm solution?

What does that mean really? That everybody are equally good at their job, nobody deserves to be fired or promoted?

I don't know that. But I do know, for example, that german cars are not a pinnacle of engineering or reliability anymore (for many years now).

Mad respect to the Germans for taking a stand on this.

The entire idea of measuring worker performance is not only dehumanizing but is particularly flawed when it comes to knowledge work.

It's like trying to determine the faster car by racing through rush hour traffic. Or ignoring the fact that each car is on a different incline.

Knowing the right people and being in the right place at the right time can often make or break one's career.

Yet we are to incorporate these factors that are for the most part not in our control as a measurement of our own "performance". The unlucky get insult added to injury. The lucky get a dose of ego or fear (depending on their level of self-awareness).

It seems like corporate gaslighting to me.

Counterpoint: some people are just better at their jobs than others

Counterpoint: some people are simply faking their results, selling them better than they are, or scarify necessary parts which will bite the company months or years later.

This makes it hard to impossible to get reliable, or even fair results. Especially when the review is subjective and is lacking an objective metric as a base.

How do other large companies in Germany handle performance reviews/raises/bonuses?

Just fine. Worker's Councils have a voice in what is measured and how it is measured and they usually find a reasonable formula with management. Without knowing the details, I am going to assume Amazon was being invasive, draconian and exploitative in their approach.

I worked as a manager at a local German company in Germany with a strong Worker's Council team. Performance Management was run through them, they had comments, the process was adapted and managers were onboarded. This is not to say that performance management doesn't suck in general (because once you start having metrics, people start gaming them and you're almost superimposing it on people's way of working), but the Worker's Council didn't block it, because at the end of the day it was neither invasive nor exploitative.

EDIT: typos.

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