I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.
In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview.
When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision.
> Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal
How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs.
If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.
> Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.
Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams.
Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
> How? It's not their choice.
The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them.
Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?
I don’t understand how being in an interview loop would tell you whether hire-to-fire is occurring. If a manager wanted to hire someone on their team with the intent of firing them, they would hire someone who passed the ordinary interview process. They wouldn’t attach a note to the candidate’s file saying “we don’t really need to interview this one, we’re just going to fire them.” There would be a normal paper trail and nobody other than the manager would know that about the plan.
You're speaking from a position of how the process is supposed to work, but not from how it actually does work. I think you seriously underestimate how much power an HM can have in the process if they have a little bit of experience.
In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM.
If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that.
This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.
Let's say you're perfectly happy with your team of 9, but you have to fire 10% of people every year.
It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff.
As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.
I work for AWS and the concept of Bar Raisers sits in a weird grey area. There are plenty of decent candidates who pass the bar but we do stack ranking for the year end review. So they can hire at headcount and end up having to fire anyway. If you end up with two hires that are roughly the same the stack rank takes care of it.
Oh, please. Softer version of this practice is well-known in tech industry since 2000s: when company demands perf curve from the manager, managers hire and keep low-performers on the team to satisfy the curve demand. Everyone who worked at Microsoft, Amazon or Walmart has seen this happening. Hire-to-fire is just logical extension of this practice. It doesn’t really matter if it’s internal transfer or new hire.
So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing. In other words, Inc. is perpetrating a lie, along with all the other publishers who jumped on this bandwagon.
That's fine, we all make mistakes. But here's the interesting part: Inc. has a perverse incentive not to be too diligent in their reporting, because if they look too deep underneath the carpet, they could come across the truth that the OP shared. Once you learn how things really work, you can't spread your BS anymore because you can be sued for libel. But if you just pick up someone else's lie and expand on it without bothering to verify the fundamental thesis, you're 100% covered. Inc. was careful to start their reporting with:
1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us
2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place.
Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness.
PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.
I mean, this assumes the BR is always acting in good faith and/or isn't in on the whole thing. Honest question, maybe I've misunderstood, but is it beyond the pale that a HM would ask the BR (or not even have to verbalize since the BR knowns how this game works) to sign off because they want to protect other people on their team (as in hiring someone they know will probably rank low and thus be the person fired)?
Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then...
If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
All this means is that they cannot hire shitty people.
It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.
Wow. The hiring manager doesn't get to make the final decision?
I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose.
Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives.
Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?
I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and coach them up - and sometimes, over time, they improve enough that it works out!
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even.
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
Management is a difficult topic to discuss online because the average commenter is statistically far more likely to be an IC than a manager.
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
The profession of "management" has a problem similar to one a lot of tech companies have: if you reward the generation of new ideas, you get a huge proliferation of them that aren't necessarily better and make everything more complicated.
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
And as a secondary effect, it lowers team morale when a low performer is consistently draining other team members of their time. And lowered morale leads to lower performance and other issues.
Stack ranking is basically the "up or out"[0] with the added idiocy that there's not enough space "up".
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
Sorry, people who make mistakes are not low performers dragging the team down. Learning from mistakes in an open and non-judge mental way is a marker of a healthy team culture.
Amazon has many tech workers on visas, and it can be extremely anxiety inducing around performance review time. Once a manager puts a target on your back, it's a major uphill climb to remove that target. And for someone on a visa you don't just lose your job, you get repatriated back to your home country unless you can quickly get rehired somewhere else. Edit: And not just you, your wife and kids too, even if your kids were born here and it's all they ever knew.
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
Seems like a classic case of "show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome".
You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
I didn't read any evidence that this actually happens, and I read the incentives differently. If I was a manager I would feel that this lowers the risk for me to hire a person - if they perform well and it really works out, then great. And if not, then I know they'll just be part of the "unregretted attrition" number that I have to hit. Basically I can just hire a bunch of people and see how they work out, keeping the ones that nail it and allowing the others to go find jobs they are better suited to.
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
I don’t know anyone at Amazon who would hire someone they were sure they’d fire. I’ve never heard of it. It’d honestly even be sort of difficult, given the hiring process and the involvement of a bar raiser (veto vote) on the hiring committee who is not on the team.
Now, might you take some additional risks, considering URA? Sure. But I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. You want hiring managers to sometimes hire higher risk/reward candidates, otherwise you get a whole bunch of identical low risk hires.
This article is an overblown bit of hearsay. Also, new hires aren’t even eligible to be PIP’d out of the gate, so you’d have to set it up quite a bit in advance.
Source: was an Amazon hiring manager for several years.
This article is pretty light on what evidence this is actually happening, or how often.
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
Yeah this article is garbage. I never saw any of this when I worked at Amazon (up to around a year ago). Post-interview panel meetings always focused on the candidate's strengths and weaknesses and their ability to raise the bar. It would have been absurd in those meetings for a manager to advocate hiring a "throwaway" candidate. I can't see it happening at all at Amazon, particularly with the requirement of having a bar raiser on each panel.
Idk if it’s Bezo’s roots in finance, but Amazon seems a brutal workplace for all levels of employment (I don’t know anything about the lives of senior managers). The company outright abuses its blue collar employees, and routinely mistreats its engineering staff. Stories of its toxic practices have been spread for at least a decade now. What’s especially baffling to me, and I admit this is merely rumor, is that they’ll actually adjust your raise schedule to take into account the price of the stock, so it’s hard to imagine it being highly lucrative. Of all the big tech companies, I think Amazon is most likely to unionize.
Goodhart's Law as generalized by Marilyn Strathern: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
For many reasons, I typically do better with qualitative performance reviews, and I'm usually more critical of myself than my manager. I have first-hand experience with exactly the kind of point I believe you might be trying to make, because I've been lucky enough to be managed by people who are genuinely passionate about managing people (and have therefore used qualitative reviews).
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
I do agree with both of these, but then the question becomes “so then what DO we do?”
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
I was surprised by how quickly the author seemed to confuse measurement and goal
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
This sadly isn't surprising since it's been happening in one form or another at least since Jack Welsh, and probably earlier. He was probably just the first one to give it a name.
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
As a people manager, I have encountered this issue of managing "to the curve". Regardless of the composition of the team and the fact that they could be all high performers, I have had to make decisions that fit to a curve which senior mgmt is imposing.
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
I was at the receiving end of this. Not at Amazon but at another similar Silicon Valley tech company. When I was hired I thought it was a great opportunity and moved my family to SV. First day I go in, I realized that just about couple of months before my hire date about half the team was laid off.
A few months in there were lots of red flags —
1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code)
2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on.
About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do.
I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again.
I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.
You'd hope that the people being hired to be later fired are at least given a chance to prove themselves. There's a world of difference between "We're not sure about this person, so let's hire them and we can always fire them if they're bad" vs "This person is definitely terrible at their job (or obnoxious) and I'm only hiring them so I don't feel bad about definitely firing them later".
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
Here are some unintentional consequence of this policy,
- Due to the URA targets managers have to keep getting rid of people. If everyone on a team gets a "A+" grade, they have to get rid of the person getting "A-". Many times the "A-" person had a difficult period in their personal lives such as a medical emergency, depression, anxiety, pandemic induced anxiety, birth of a child, death of a family member.
- This has a detrimental impact on team morale.
- The people who stay long enough realize that its every person for themselves.
- So code isn't written with maintainability or customers in mind, its written with promotion and impact metrics in mind. As long as one can hit those metrics targets, it doesn't matter what was compromised in the process. Ask anyone at amazon about the internal tooling.
- Tech debt, and bugs are the problem of the person who's on-call, they can write Correction of Error document if things go terribly wrong.
- There are metrics for the number of comments / revisions on a code review, if someone receives too many comments, or has too many revisions on their code review, then its counted against them. On the other hand senior engineers have figured out that putting out nitpick comments, and getting a junior engineer to go through multiple revisions results in the senior engineer having a better chance at being at top of the stack rank during OLR season. Too many isn't a clearly defined metric, its arbitrarily applied based on the manager's judgement.
- PMs get the same treatment on their documents; nitpicks, frivolous comments, spending hours and hours fine tuning every single word in a document.
- In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, and has to operate in fear of being put on their manager/skip-level's hit-list, people are merely working towards their ultimate goal of staying long enough to see their vesting schedule complete, or their Permanent Residency approved.
The UK made it very easy this year. They created a concept of "deemed employee". Basically a worker is an employee for all intents and purposes except that they don't have any worker's rights.
It's currently being adopted mainly in the IT sector that requires flexible work force.
The main problem is that the worker needs an intermediary to be hired through - currently it must be a worker's own company and then a fee payer that collects tax on the worker's behalf. This all can be automated though and probably it will take a year to be implemented and streamlined.
Currently this system is being exploited by the so called mini umbrellas - instead of worker having its own company, they are hired by someone else's company set up specifically for the engagement, except that they likely pay wrong tax and pocket the worker's money through various fees.
It's crazy, but it looks like this is some sort of an incentive for big companies to come here after Brexit.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 (these mini umbrellas are nothing new, but this year they got more power, so it will only get worse and MPs decided to ignore all proposals to fix this)
[Managers at Amazon are] expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year. Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA). Basically, it's the number of people you wouldn't be sad to see leave the company.
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate".
Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process.
So, when they say Amazon, what do they mean? Its not just a web development company any more, and these turnover rates should be wildly different in their call centers, distribution chain, last mile delivery, server farms, ops, management, marketing, legal, design, executive suite, retail, robotics R&D, main web developers, blah blah.
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
> something seems off about hiring someone just so you can fire them later. It just seems wrong.
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
But they know that the clickbait they wrote will generate clicks, views, and discussions, so they've done their job, that's all they care about. There's not even any facts in the article, they're just supposedly summarizing what someone else wrote in another article, which I can't view because of a paywall. The text I do have access to, the linked article, doesn't contain a single verifiable fact.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview.
When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision.
> Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal
How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs.
If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.
[+] [-] mghd23145|4 years ago|reply
Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams.
Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
> How? It's not their choice.
The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them.
Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?
[+] [-] fshbbdssbbgdd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyuqfromhere|4 years ago|reply
In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM.
If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that.
This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.
[+] [-] grumple|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff.
As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.
[+] [-] vikiomega9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bestcoder69|4 years ago|reply
Rather than “lower the bar” an HM can just request 1 more headcount for SDE1 than they truly need.
[+] [-] aerosmile|4 years ago|reply
1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us
2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place.
Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness.
PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.
[+] [-] mcguire|4 years ago|reply
You are a manager. You need five people on your team.
You hire eight, because you are expected to lose three in the next two years.
If three of them leave, fine. If three of them are incompetent, great! (You get your URA and you have evidence your Bar Raiser is an idiot.)
If the interview loop worked perfectly, all eight are great. But you still have to boot three of them.
[+] [-] joshstrange|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamadatix|4 years ago|reply
If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
[+] [-] rattray|4 years ago|reply
Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
[+] [-] treesrule|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thereare5lights|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.
[+] [-] trunnell|4 years ago|reply
I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose.
Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives.
Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
[+] [-] not_jd_salinger|4 years ago|reply
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
[+] [-] asdfman123|4 years ago|reply
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
[+] [-] cratermoon|4 years ago|reply
https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer
[+] [-] sinsterizme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|4 years ago|reply
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA
[+] [-] op00to|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stadium|4 years ago|reply
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
[+] [-] mdavis6890|4 years ago|reply
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
[+] [-] ragona|4 years ago|reply
Now, might you take some additional risks, considering URA? Sure. But I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. You want hiring managers to sometimes hire higher risk/reward candidates, otherwise you get a whole bunch of identical low risk hires.
This article is an overblown bit of hearsay. Also, new hires aren’t even eligible to be PIP’d out of the gate, so you’d have to set it up quite a bit in advance.
Source: was an Amazon hiring manager for several years.
[+] [-] tqi|4 years ago|reply
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
[+] [-] mypalmike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orange_joe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|4 years ago|reply
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
[+] [-] zamalek|4 years ago|reply
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
[+] [-] asdfman123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Uehreka|4 years ago|reply
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
[+] [-] nebulous1|4 years ago|reply
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
Except if you keep that metric unknown to whoever is working on it. The main problem with measures is when they are widely communicated.
[+] [-] nineplay|4 years ago|reply
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
[+] [-] twiddling|4 years ago|reply
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
[+] [-] throw345hn|4 years ago|reply
A few months in there were lots of red flags — 1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code) 2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on.
About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do.
I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again.
I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.
[+] [-] leoedin|4 years ago|reply
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
[+] [-] mataug|4 years ago|reply
- Due to the URA targets managers have to keep getting rid of people. If everyone on a team gets a "A+" grade, they have to get rid of the person getting "A-". Many times the "A-" person had a difficult period in their personal lives such as a medical emergency, depression, anxiety, pandemic induced anxiety, birth of a child, death of a family member.
- This has a detrimental impact on team morale.
- The people who stay long enough realize that its every person for themselves.
- So code isn't written with maintainability or customers in mind, its written with promotion and impact metrics in mind. As long as one can hit those metrics targets, it doesn't matter what was compromised in the process. Ask anyone at amazon about the internal tooling.
- Tech debt, and bugs are the problem of the person who's on-call, they can write Correction of Error document if things go terribly wrong.
- There are metrics for the number of comments / revisions on a code review, if someone receives too many comments, or has too many revisions on their code review, then its counted against them. On the other hand senior engineers have figured out that putting out nitpick comments, and getting a junior engineer to go through multiple revisions results in the senior engineer having a better chance at being at top of the stack rank during OLR season. Too many isn't a clearly defined metric, its arbitrarily applied based on the manager's judgement.
- PMs get the same treatment on their documents; nitpicks, frivolous comments, spending hours and hours fine tuning every single word in a document.
- In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, and has to operate in fear of being put on their manager/skip-level's hit-list, people are merely working towards their ultimate goal of staying long enough to see their vesting schedule complete, or their Permanent Residency approved.
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 (these mini umbrellas are nothing new, but this year they got more power, so it will only get worse and MPs decided to ignore all proposals to fix this)
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
[+] [-] dexen|4 years ago|reply
The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate".
Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|4 years ago|reply
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|4 years ago|reply
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grim-444|4 years ago|reply