> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.
So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant.
Here's how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly.
How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design.
But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument's sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating.
Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door.
In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same.
This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.
It's funny, this was the pull quote for me too. Or at least this part:
> the cruelty is the point.
However, my reaction is quite different. It became hard to take this article seriously at all after they drew that conclusion. It is flagrantly false. To wit, they don't produce any documentation (whereas elsewhere the article is awash) to support this claim. No email threads where a sinister VP says, "Back to drawing board gang, this proposal isn't cruel enough."
Very clearly, the point is performance.
The author's fantastical conclusion ("cruelty is the point") reeks to high heaven of the sort of leaps in logic and interpretation that seems to be undermining the credibility of some of the West's most hallowed institutions.
I've only run into this issue in 'corporate America' once in my career.
I worked for a company who acquired another company. Acquired company was bonkers dysfunctional. First day I met them one of the managers bragged about how hard he worked his people and how many would leave.
I just didn't get it. What good does that do?
He didn't get more out of his people, quite the opposite, his team didn't perform well.
He was unpleasant to just be around, almost anytime, his employees clearly hated him. I'm not super social but I at least like to work with people that ... I want to be around to some extent.
Let alone my question of "Why would you want to be like that to other people?"
It was weird because it was one of the only times I encountered this issue.
"up or out" seems like such a strange concept - I understand the idea of trimming fat, but I've seen a firing of 5-10% annually, and it's demoralizing and terrifying as a worker.
You're basically put in a position where you don't want to do too poorly, as you're guaranteed to get fired, but you also don't want to do too well, because then you may hit your ceiling too early, end up being "overpaid", then underperform and be set up for the cull.
I've seen both, and the yearly ritual of managers coming in and tapping people on the shoulder, them walking out to never be seen again ... I hated that.
Yes. I've worked at a place where the CEO up and said "we're OK with losing <X>% of employees per quarter" which was just insane to me to release that publicly to everyone, at a time when all our friends were leaving or given the boot. Really killed morale.
If HR says "You can't have all high performers on a team", they are telling a manager that you aren't allowed to excel in your own job as a coach.
They are literally telling you not to spend your time helping employees because some HR chart wizard is going to make you rank them anyways and you will have wasted your time.
The way this should be done is to recognize who are motivated high performers and make sure they get help on their path "upward". This isn't saying to ignore others but recognize that people are at different stages of careers and will have different needs.
I've worked for up or out companies most of my career. I get it can be uncomfortable but there is a good reason there is forced ranking. Most managers hate giving bad reviews to people that aren't doing well. If someone on the team is doing some work but not doing much its easier to say they meet standards and be nice to them. My current job is like this, there are a bunch in the team that do very little but manager is too nice and I think the firm suffers.
I just don't get this part. On an intellectual level the point they just got done making is that cruelty is not the point. It's a byproduct of the system. The "point" of the whole thing is having a motivated and efficient workforce, at almost any cost. This is arguably evil and immoral, but it's not the case that the ultimate aim of the policies is to be cruel. I guess the author just included it because they're very emotional about it and want me to be emotional about it too?
Although Dave Clark comes across as an unrequited villain in most Amazon reporting, he’s just a loyal shadow of Bezos’ dictum that Amazon employees at all levels are to unquestioningly serve his machine without thought of compensation. The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.
People very high up the corporate ladder often aren't motivated by money. They just get paid a lot. It's not the reason why they work. They work to get power, fame, respect etc. They believe that good workers are like them even if those people don't earn very much in comparison. They also believe that if someone is a bad worker, eg not like them, and you pay them a lot then they'll slack off and spend their money on things like holidays rather than working as hard as possible.
> The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.
Well, this is true. Google tried the opposite strategy with self-driving cars; they paid everyone so much that none of them had any reason to work for the rest of their lives. This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.
"The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me."
That seems to be widely spread modern management thinking. Executives always have a reason why they should be paid a lot no matter if the stock goes up or down, the company does illegal things, profits go up or down. They always need to be incentivized financially.
And the same pople will tell you that giving more money to the lower ranks will make them lazy.
I remember a discussion with my director where he explained to me that he doesn't want to hire people who work for the money while at the same time in a lot of meetings he talks about cost and profit.
There is one reason why Amazon gets away with paying smart white collar engineers lower than market and in general treating them bad. That reason is India and its unlimited supply of engineers to Amazon.
For last 10 years India has been producing more smart engineers than local market is willing to pay for. Note that the demand is more than supply but Indian companies still will not pay engineers top salaries.
So for years it became easy for companies like Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft to pay top of market and get their pick. And these engineers, historically, were willing to grind to any levels for a ticket to US. And Amazon offered that. 1.5 years in almost 70% of their Indian employees move to US on L1 visas. Even lower tech market salaries in US are life changing for most of these folks. Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians.
It hasn't mattered to Amazon if people leave after 2 years. Because they always have a next batch coming from India. But then local companies started to pay and Amazon struggled to hire top talent. At this point they were smart enough to realise they need workers more than engineers. And now Amazon hires more engineers than any product company in India. It goes to more colleges than any other company. It pays them in top 80 percentile of market, they get to go to US where get paid top 70 percentile of market. So what if they get treated like shit for couple years. That's the cost of buying a 3 bedroom house for many of them.
The day Indian market is big enough to absorb these engineers at their price, Amazon recruiters will be on their knees for their next batch. Unfortunately due to pure currency difference it's always going to better financial decision for most Indian engineers to go to US, at least for next 10 years and Amazon will not have to treat it's employees like humans.
We are rapidly entering a true global market for things like software engineers.
We've always had "off-shore" and "near-shore" companies, but now with this major push to remote work there is no reason outside timezone differences to hire locally if you can get someone elsewhere who has better skills and will take a 5x+ lower rate.
I know this because I am a Team Lead / Senior Architect on a large project that has a component in one of these countries. They are highly skilled and are literally 5x lower than US rates.
This should rightfully make highly paid software engineers in wealthy countries nervous. I'm one of them.
Basically this. Without the never ending visa supply, amazon would never get away with this. They can just burn through foreign workers, most of whom are just happy to be in the USA. The loser is the American worker, who now has to work way harder due to the expanded labor supply.
Paradoxically, I think Amazon has been able to get away with this because their stock is doing well. When your stock is going up 10%-30% per year, people will put up with a lot (my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now). I really do think that if they have a few down years, they'll have an incredibly hard time with retention and hiring.
> my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now
Are you saying in 2021 new graduates out of college with bachelor degrees in computer science are being offered $160k/salary + $340k in stock grants at Amazon?
Hot take here. Amazon is the harbinger of a permanent, systemic and pervasive bifurcation between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else as enabled by technology.
From a shareholder standpoint, it's an incredible business.
From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.
I think Amazon, as any IT giant, is a two-tier or a three-tier company. Meaning different HR principles are applied to 'line workers' compared to mid-management compared to VP level hires.
In my experience the farther left DEI policy goes the more chaos, distraction, and resentment it creates. There also seems to be some correlation between how far left DEI policy goes and how acceptable vocal political activism is. The final anecdotal observation is that the farther left the DEI policy is the more likely you are to destroy your career by being voicing any dissenting critique of the DEI policy.
Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.
HR exists to protect the company from liability and to enforce policy. Since the high attrition rate and generally miserable nature of the job are apparently intentional, that means it's a feature, not a bug. There's no HR failure here, because this is the kind of relationship management wants with (at least part of) the humans it employs.
Amazon's the poster child at the moment, but I think this is just how Americans have decided to do capitalism. At some level, we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Maybe there'll be congressional hearings if the story catches on, but then nothing will change.
> we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job.
Don't think the managers and politicians aren't also trying to remove that one power as well. Between work-tied healthcare and NDAs/NCAs your options as a low to mid tier employee are very limited.
This article has an inaccurate title. It appears that HR is not failing at all, they are implementing the desired process successfully. Many people seem to think that HR is there to help the employees, but it is not, it is there only to help the company, very often when the company is in direct opposition to those employees. While the Amazon process is cruel, one would be hard pressed to label it a failure, the warehouses appear to work flawlessly, I cant recall a single time Amazon has missed a delivery date of mine.
If one wants to say that people should not be treated like this, I agree, reducing people to nothing but statistics is inhumane but for Amazon the company it has been a complete success.
> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.
Performance is the point. It is just seemingly cruel if you cannot perform relative to your peers. It may not be the best tool to get that in some cases, but I am pretty sure that nobody is setting "make 6% of the staff miserable" as a goal.
[+] [-] cletus|4 years ago|reply
> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.
So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant.
Here's how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly.
How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design.
But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument's sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating.
Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door.
In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same.
This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.
[+] [-] xibalba|4 years ago|reply
> the cruelty is the point.
However, my reaction is quite different. It became hard to take this article seriously at all after they drew that conclusion. It is flagrantly false. To wit, they don't produce any documentation (whereas elsewhere the article is awash) to support this claim. No email threads where a sinister VP says, "Back to drawing board gang, this proposal isn't cruel enough."
Very clearly, the point is performance.
The author's fantastical conclusion ("cruelty is the point") reeks to high heaven of the sort of leaps in logic and interpretation that seems to be undermining the credibility of some of the West's most hallowed institutions.
[+] [-] duxup|4 years ago|reply
I worked for a company who acquired another company. Acquired company was bonkers dysfunctional. First day I met them one of the managers bragged about how hard he worked his people and how many would leave.
I just didn't get it. What good does that do?
He didn't get more out of his people, quite the opposite, his team didn't perform well.
He was unpleasant to just be around, almost anytime, his employees clearly hated him. I'm not super social but I at least like to work with people that ... I want to be around to some extent.
Let alone my question of "Why would you want to be like that to other people?"
It was weird because it was one of the only times I encountered this issue.
[+] [-] necrotic_comp|4 years ago|reply
You're basically put in a position where you don't want to do too poorly, as you're guaranteed to get fired, but you also don't want to do too well, because then you may hit your ceiling too early, end up being "overpaid", then underperform and be set up for the cull.
I've seen both, and the yearly ritual of managers coming in and tapping people on the shoulder, them walking out to never be seen again ... I hated that.
[+] [-] shishy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
I don't know if I could do that, I might be happier homeless.
[+] [-] matt_s|4 years ago|reply
They are literally telling you not to spend your time helping employees because some HR chart wizard is going to make you rank them anyways and you will have wasted your time.
The way this should be done is to recognize who are motivated high performers and make sure they get help on their path "upward". This isn't saying to ignore others but recognize that people are at different stages of careers and will have different needs.
[+] [-] u678u|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|4 years ago|reply
I just don't get this part. On an intellectual level the point they just got done making is that cruelty is not the point. It's a byproduct of the system. The "point" of the whole thing is having a motivated and efficient workforce, at almost any cost. This is arguably evil and immoral, but it's not the case that the ultimate aim of the policies is to be cruel. I guess the author just included it because they're very emotional about it and want me to be emotional about it too?
[+] [-] BeFlatXIII|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HillRat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrange|4 years ago|reply
Well, this is true. Google tried the opposite strategy with self-driving cars; they paid everyone so much that none of them had any reason to work for the rest of their lives. This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
That seems to be widely spread modern management thinking. Executives always have a reason why they should be paid a lot no matter if the stock goes up or down, the company does illegal things, profits go up or down. They always need to be incentivized financially.
And the same pople will tell you that giving more money to the lower ranks will make them lazy.
I remember a discussion with my director where he explained to me that he doesn't want to hire people who work for the money while at the same time in a lot of meetings he talks about cost and profit.
[+] [-] pfortuny|4 years ago|reply
Of course, I am NOT people.
[+] [-] throawayhn243|4 years ago|reply
For last 10 years India has been producing more smart engineers than local market is willing to pay for. Note that the demand is more than supply but Indian companies still will not pay engineers top salaries.
So for years it became easy for companies like Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft to pay top of market and get their pick. And these engineers, historically, were willing to grind to any levels for a ticket to US. And Amazon offered that. 1.5 years in almost 70% of their Indian employees move to US on L1 visas. Even lower tech market salaries in US are life changing for most of these folks. Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians.
It hasn't mattered to Amazon if people leave after 2 years. Because they always have a next batch coming from India. But then local companies started to pay and Amazon struggled to hire top talent. At this point they were smart enough to realise they need workers more than engineers. And now Amazon hires more engineers than any product company in India. It goes to more colleges than any other company. It pays them in top 80 percentile of market, they get to go to US where get paid top 70 percentile of market. So what if they get treated like shit for couple years. That's the cost of buying a 3 bedroom house for many of them.
The day Indian market is big enough to absorb these engineers at their price, Amazon recruiters will be on their knees for their next batch. Unfortunately due to pure currency difference it's always going to better financial decision for most Indian engineers to go to US, at least for next 10 years and Amazon will not have to treat it's employees like humans.
[+] [-] EMM_386|4 years ago|reply
We've always had "off-shore" and "near-shore" companies, but now with this major push to remote work there is no reason outside timezone differences to hire locally if you can get someone elsewhere who has better skills and will take a 5x+ lower rate.
I know this because I am a Team Lead / Senior Architect on a large project that has a component in one of these countries. They are highly skilled and are literally 5x lower than US rates.
This should rightfully make highly paid software engineers in wealthy countries nervous. I'm one of them.
[+] [-] cdstyh|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand this.
[+] [-] codingwageslave|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindvirus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u678u|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|4 years ago|reply
Are you saying in 2021 new graduates out of college with bachelor degrees in computer science are being offered $160k/salary + $340k in stock grants at Amazon?
[+] [-] aynyc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alangibson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seem_2211|4 years ago|reply
Chilling and true.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|4 years ago|reply
Private Military Contractor?
[+] [-] colinmhayes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newsclues|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devmor|4 years ago|reply
From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Amazon is well known for having a reasonably high hiring bar but also a strikingly high turnover.
I would not call it an "HR success" if people join the company mostly only for the FAANG name and the money and then leave.
[+] [-] JackPoach|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenail|4 years ago|reply
Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.
[+] [-] halbritt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meepmorp|4 years ago|reply
Amazon's the poster child at the moment, but I think this is just how Americans have decided to do capitalism. At some level, we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Maybe there'll be congressional hearings if the story catches on, but then nothing will change.
[+] [-] yardie|4 years ago|reply
Don't think the managers and politicians aren't also trying to remove that one power as well. Between work-tied healthcare and NDAs/NCAs your options as a low to mid tier employee are very limited.
[+] [-] GoodJokes|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wonderwonder|4 years ago|reply
If one wants to say that people should not be treated like this, I agree, reducing people to nothing but statistics is inhumane but for Amazon the company it has been a complete success.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
Performance is the point. It is just seemingly cruel if you cannot perform relative to your peers. It may not be the best tool to get that in some cases, but I am pretty sure that nobody is setting "make 6% of the staff miserable" as a goal.
[+] [-] inkywatcher|4 years ago|reply