When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.
> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.
> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are.
Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"
You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries.
Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.
And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.
Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
> So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.
If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)
I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.
I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to complete. I was shocked and tried hard to not cry during my review. I had never been told earlier that there were any issues with my performance.
This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job.
I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.
The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have been moved/retrained/let go.
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more).
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
In my experience at Amazon, line managers (5-20 people) still often act as if they have unregretted attrition goals.
It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.
Heck, I even saw directors and VP refer to "regretted attrition" and "unregretted attrition" in all hands meetings.
Companies implement stack ranking because the management does not have necessarily visibility to valuate each employee. Those who can't stand stack ranking should either join a small startup, where visibility is not issue by nature, or join a team with explosive growth, so each person's productivity and impact can easily be gauged.
I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of constant churn on what seems like baseless theories. If it's your immediate boss that's tired of one particular slacker that's one thing but it's a wholly different situation when HR comes down on your boss demanding they fire 6% of their team whether or not they're doing great. It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.
I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.
> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.
Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.
This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want.
It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it.
Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants.
Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh
Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you?
About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting.
About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved.
Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company.
It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.
Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."
I recently reread The New Economics. Deming talks about a factory worker screwing up on the production line, ruining a large quantity of product, and getting punished for it. He makes the argument that the design of the line, company policy, etc, have a far greater impact on workers’ productivity than the intrinsic qualities of those workers.
I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer.
Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.
Agreed. Anecdotally, I have never seen a PIP lead to a turn around. Honestly, I started to think it was just a way to cover for wrongful termination.
What I have seen is PIPs lead to so much stress and anxiety that people are unrecoverable.
I unfortunately worked with one person where a PIP led to hospitalization for thoughts of self-harm, because it was clear there wasn't going to be success in the current role, but there was no way to exit effectively (and there were confounding personal-life stress/factors). The whole thing was a horrific mess, starting with a nepotism hire, and finishing with unacceptably incompetent HR.
I was under the impression that a PIP was nearly always a "here's your chance to get another job" warning, and never really an earnest chance to improve. Does anyone understand differently?
From personal contacts, the same happens at Facebook. If your performance is good, it means you're not being pushed enough and you need to increase your workload. What a despicable work culture that you have to expect to be told that you're not meeting expectations and that you have to be worked to that extent.
With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.
If you can get fired because of some messed up policy like this then you don't need to take ownership for being fired anymore. Also, why show initiative if you're going to be fired randomly anyway? Why even work hard at all? Why show loyalty or goodwill? Just show up, do the work, participate in the general workplace nonsense purely for appearances and have your parachute always ready.
Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations.
On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way.
I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!
A friend with a background in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology was hired at Amazon a few years back and was shocked to discover the 10% turnover rate. As they shared, they took it upon themselves to find a better way to manage turnover and have a better performance assessment system. They implemented it and brielfy reduced turnover to 3%; until Bezos intervened and explicitly asked for at least 6% turnover. For someone with a background in I/O psych and interest in improving worker well-being, it was soul-crushing and they soon left.
It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams.
The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses.
Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses.
We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention.
Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.
As a former Amazon manager, I don’t like how this characterizes management as a mustache twirling Machiavellian. I don’t know what they saw, but I totally believe they predict a third of people on pips to fail. I’m actually surprised it’s that low of a percentage. It’s been my experience from more than Amazon that pip failure is higher than that. I was never encouraged to do anything that would contribute to something that looked like stack ranking. However, maybe this practice was not in place with engineers. I don’t really know, but it wasn’t my experience.
However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.
This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years?
1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.
There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.
It is possible that you are missing the point of this. While it works, it is saving company millions in compensation and keep internal upward pressures low. It is absolutely not sustainable, but it ever comes to the point that it has to be adjusted, it can be. And changing those policies will be so much easier with extra cash in hand to 'attract' new workers.
Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.
20% of the curve is ranked top tier? I'd like to work there. It's 8% at my company. Of course company also says they evaluate against a standard, but it's really stack ranking behind the scenes. It think it's always going to be stack ranked in IT since the standards/metrics are so vague.
While this is not the most popular imaginable method of selection, at least every hire gets a reasonably good chance to survive and will have the prestigious entry on the cv.
As for the 6 percent, most companies have more than that in every department. Usually people who only survive by brown nosing the right people or being friends with a manager.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plank_time|4 years ago|reply
So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.
[+] [-] acituan|4 years ago|reply
I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.
[+] [-] EarlKing|4 years ago|reply
Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
[+] [-] bob33212|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksaints|4 years ago|reply
Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.
And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.
Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
[+] [-] js8|4 years ago|reply
I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.
If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)
I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.
[+] [-] hollerith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spamizbad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|4 years ago|reply
What is the point of hiring the "best" employees except as an optimization of the stock price?
[+] [-] lakevieew|4 years ago|reply
This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job.
I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.
[+] [-] joshe|4 years ago|reply
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
[+] [-] discodave|4 years ago|reply
It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.
Heck, I even saw directors and VP refer to "regretted attrition" and "unregretted attrition" in all hands meetings.
[+] [-] plank_time|4 years ago|reply
This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch’s book. He was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.
[+] [-] wildfire|4 years ago|reply
That makes it way easier to meet an URA target.
[+] [-] hintymad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladyattis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|4 years ago|reply
Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.
[+] [-] xibalba|4 years ago|reply
*Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matz1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrocryptid|4 years ago|reply
It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it.
Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants.
Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh
Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you?
About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting.
About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved.
Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company.
It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.
[+] [-] retrocryptid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aranchelk|4 years ago|reply
I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer.
Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.
[+] [-] the_jeremy|4 years ago|reply
> The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show
I assumed it was much higher.
[+] [-] Cd00d|4 years ago|reply
What I have seen is PIPs lead to so much stress and anxiety that people are unrecoverable.
I unfortunately worked with one person where a PIP led to hospitalization for thoughts of self-harm, because it was clear there wasn't going to be success in the current role, but there was no way to exit effectively (and there were confounding personal-life stress/factors). The whole thing was a horrific mess, starting with a nepotism hire, and finishing with unacceptably incompetent HR.
[+] [-] everdrive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silicon2401|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breput|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TFortunato|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonladuke0311|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkssy|4 years ago|reply
Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations.
On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way.
I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!
[+] [-] alpha_squared|4 years ago|reply
It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
[+] [-] retrocryptid|4 years ago|reply
The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses.
Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses.
We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention.
Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.
[+] [-] madrox|4 years ago|reply
However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.
[+] [-] myroon5|4 years ago|reply
Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE
HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY
[+] [-] rejectedandsad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianeon|4 years ago|reply
1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.
[+] [-] retrocryptid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sevii|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w0mbat|4 years ago|reply
I've seen people quote 5%, 6%, 15% and even 30%. The 30% number was in the Amazon India post that was high-ranking here yesterday.
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rejectedandsad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMAAART|4 years ago|reply
For starters Amazon's policy is similar to GE's in the 90's, where every year they would let go the bottom 10% of the workforce.
Either way, we need to decide whether the part of the workforce that is let go are bad workers or a mismatch with the company.
I want to believe that there are very few bad workers, and that the majority of cases are a question of mismatch.
If that's the case, parting way is the best outcome for both the company and the workers; so that they can both move on and seek metter match.
Maybe we need to embrace more this practice, and - AT THE SAME TIME - fix the hiring process that is broken beyond belief.
[+] [-] yawaworht1978|4 years ago|reply