awthroura

Deliberately sabotaging people does not require that the sabotaged person be under-performing or low quality. That’s the point. If a BR prevents you from hiring an unqualified person to be a sacrificial lamb, then you just hire a qualified person that can get past the BR to be a sacrificial lamb. The existence of BRs is absolutely not a foolproof check on this.

You might ask “why would an HM fire someone who is qualified to do the job?” The answer is that Amazon requires that someone must be fired. If you were an HM, who would you rather fire: an existing qualified tenured team member who already knows the ins-and-outs of your team and system, or a new qualified person who would require extensive training and time to get up to the level of the tenured employee? You’re going to pick the new person, even if they are qualified.

Get your head out of the sand. Amazon is a big place, and just because you are ignorant to it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

> Hiring good people is HARD.

Yes. You know what else is hard? Onboarding someone and training them to the same level as your tenured employees. When given two hard options:

1) hire someone qualified, invest lots of time to train them to the level of your current tenured team members, and then fire one of your tenured team members

2) hire someone mediocre that’s just good enough to pass the loop, don’t spend any time onboarding them, fire them, and keep your tenured team members

Which one do you think is easier? The answer should be clear. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Have you personally followed up with every single candidate you looped to see if they were fired soon after? Have you personally seen the data on every other BR in the company?

Most BRs aren’t you. Most BRs are wet noodles and will just go along with whatever the HM wants to do. And if you find one that isn’t a wet noodle, it’s trivially easy to find a different, more amiable BR to do your successive loops.

I applaud you, because you’re apparently good enough of a manager that you haven’t even considered hire-to-fire as an option you’re interested in doing. But just because you aren’t in this situation, that does not mean other managers in the company’s real so noble. Hire to fire absolutely does happen. I’ve seen it happen across multiple teams during my tenure. The fact that you’re plugging your ears and pretending it isn’t happening is just another example of the toxic culture that is dragging Amazon down. You need to accept that Amazon isn’t perfect, and that you aren’t fully in the know about how the company operates. Once you do that, maybe we can finally make some progress actually improving things at the company rather than just pretending that our own farts don’t stink.

The comment you are referring to was nonsense. Bar raisers are not some magical fairy dust that prevents hire-to-fire, and in practice they are not usually the one who ultimately makes the decision, the HM is.

As also pointed out in the thread yesterday, that comment about Bar Raisers was nonsense. The fact is that HMs do have the final say in most cases. It is very easy to “game the system” and get candidates past the hiring loop, BR or not.

Plus, the entire argument that “there’s a bar raiser involved” is irrelevant to the point. Hire-and-fire doesn’t mean that HMs are trying to sneak unqualified candidates through the process. What it means is that HMs will take even qualified candidates, which pass the BR with no problem, and set them up for failure and firing.