Stripped of fluff, the main point of the article seems to be that their engineers are doing too much manual repetitive work, due to bad tooling and processes. Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
Easy: tooling and process are often seen as being of little importance because they’re not easily associated with metrics that are important in toxic review process cultures. Engineers who like working on these things are treated as second class citizens and performance reviews will reflect that.
(I don’t know that this is the case with Amazon: I’m just providing an anecdote based on my observations at places I’ve worked.)
I’ve found tooling lags behind in places where incentives are too short term, or most of the funding comes from projects (rather than durable product teams). I’m not saying this is Amazon.
> Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
May be because their performance review prioritizes employee contributions that impact bottom line immediately instead of building infra that might improve developer productivity?
You can't manage what you don't measure. Developer tooling quality impact on revenue is very difficult to measure. Therefore, a rationally managed organization cannot authorize any work on developer tooling.
TBF, that was scrapped in 2017. Source: worked there.
There was a clear culture shock for some of the more seasoned Amazonians (and you could see a fall out effect with some "mails to your manager" every now and then if you crossed a Grand Poobah the wrong way), but to all of us "newer" hires, the times of adversarial review were just a story.
Have never worked at Amazon nor do I know anyone who did, what exactly did that entail? "Snitching" on your co-workers? I'm asking because a quick web search didn't help me too much.
jsnell|3 years ago
sidlls|3 years ago
(I don’t know that this is the case with Amazon: I’m just providing an anecdote based on my observations at places I’ve worked.)
mathattack|3 years ago
anderber|3 years ago
innagadadavida|3 years ago
May be because their performance review prioritizes employee contributions that impact bottom line immediately instead of building infra that might improve developer productivity?
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
closeparen|3 years ago
choudharism|3 years ago
There was a clear culture shock for some of the more seasoned Amazonians (and you could see a fall out effect with some "mails to your manager" every now and then if you crossed a Grand Poobah the wrong way), but to all of us "newer" hires, the times of adversarial review were just a story.
stevewatson301|3 years ago
jejeyyy77|3 years ago
paganel|3 years ago