[HN Gopher] Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company ...
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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out
office workers
Author : flowerlad
Score : 301 points
Date : 2021-06-21 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seattletimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seattletimes.com)
| [deleted]
| lakevieew wrote:
| 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.
| mulander wrote:
| > had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates
|
| Hope this makes you feel slightly better:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
|
| It is impossible to measure someones productivity using metrics
| like commit counts and SLOC. There are times where I don't
| commit for weeks and provide actual business value by solving
| direct client issues without even a ticket being present.
|
| At one time at my second IT job, I had a manager reprimand me
| (yelling over the phone) that I was away from my desk. I was
| remotely supporting a bank fixing consortium credit contracts
| (substantial amounts) after a migration. I was told to stop
| doing that. So, I told the support tech that my 1-up blocked
| this. He told the people at the bank; this went up the chain at
| the bank to the main accountants which resulted in a nasty call
| from the client to the skip manager of my manager. He called me
| back and asked me to resume what I did almost crying on the
| phone. Later that year I was selected employee of the year
| mostly because of that client constantly sending positive
| feedback on my help.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| What do you think the reprimanding manager's motivation was?
| The possibility that you were doing work he wouldn't get
| credit for?
| mulander wrote:
| He assumed I was not working or doing work for a different
| manager (they implemented matrix management and he was at
| HQ 70 km away from the town I worked at). I made a
| judgement call as that migration was a $20 mln project.
| That corporation had time budgeting. I was supposed to
| account in a production tracking system every task I did in
| 15 minute granularity. I have a ton of crazy stories like
| that out of that place.
|
| In essence, the guy was a micromanager with trust issues.
| They later replaced him, with someone that was actually
| worse.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by
| "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I wonder if people who are hired are being told about that
| before signing their contract.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Amazonian here, I speak only for myself. FWIW, 4+ years in
| as an SDE and I've never been judged on that metric. If I
| had a manager like that, I'd bail on them at the first
| opportunity.
| VRay wrote:
| To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too
|
| My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement
| plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much
| work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed
| out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out
| 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done
| substantially more work.
|
| I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a
| severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were
| working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and
| I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their
| report card when it was eventually canceled.
|
| Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at
| Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the
| most important thing about any job is your manager and your
| team.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| >retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device
|
| It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It sounded like that story was at Microsoft to me, but
| now that I know you thought it was Amazon, I can see that
| it's ambiguous and could be read either way.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Ah you're probably right that it was at Microsoft. My
| brain must have forgotten the first line by the end of
| reading the comment, among all the other Amazon specific
| stories in this thread.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| Or it's just an "objective metric" to use in a paper trail to
| fire a person.
| throw8881 wrote:
| Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is
| doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where
| management or executives literally count people's commits.
|
| Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you
| have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are
| going to be questions about where people's time is being
| spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that,
| people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The
| simplest reason is - it's much more expensive to let go
| someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't
| hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not
| so attention grabbing or interesting.
|
| Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that.
|
| But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If
| 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people
| are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News,
| Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every
| person at Amazon basically hates their job.
|
| And the other thing is the people who do respond with
| positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their
| experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often
| get down ranked and personally attacked.
|
| Lastly - No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a
| pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but
| anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally
| better. There are no brownie points for more code or more
| complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage
| frugality and invent and simplify.
| testing_1_2_3_4 wrote:
| they don't
| slumpt_ wrote:
| Morons at Google do it, too.
|
| I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting,
| and would make a point to bring up IC's CL counts and lines
| of code changed during calibration / promo review.
|
| He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of
| countless more competent individuals than himself.
|
| Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams
| are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty managers there.
| seahawks78 wrote:
| Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought
| that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers
| where programmer is the king and each and every decision is
| made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to
| be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the
| ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found
| their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they
| are at least 5-10x notch harder than interviews at FB,
| MSFT, AMZN and other tier-1 places for comparable level.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/M2p1Z
| myroon5 wrote:
| Highly Valued 1 (HV1): we expect 35% of Amazonians are HV1
|
| Least effective (LE): we expect 5% of Amazonians are LE
|
| HV1 Compensation recommendation: 0% YoY
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| That doesn't sound right, I was HV after promotion and still
| got 2%.
| myroon5 wrote:
| To clarify, HV1? There are 3 levels to HV
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Ah, I see. Perhaps it falls under the new "needs
| improvement" bucket while hv2 does not.
| habibur wrote:
| So what's the problem? Is that unethical or illegal?
| Traster wrote:
| The issue with it is that if your performance isn't up to
| scratch managers are more incentivized to force you out than to
| work with you to get your performance up.
| flowerlad wrote:
| Not just that. They can be more lax in their hiring
| processes. That is unethical.
| safog wrote:
| Have you heard of hire to fire? When there's an incentive to
| game a metric, the metric gets gamed.
| habibur wrote:
| Valid point. The system can be gamed.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you
| have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they
| are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people
| just so you can fire them in order to protect your most
| valued people.
|
| Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the
| company is literally wasting millions each year because
| Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea
| that people - except himself of course - are lazy so they
| need to be terrorized into being productive by firing a
| certain percentage of the employees.
|
| Ultimately, it damages not just Amazon's brand as a
| employer, it reflects poorly on Amazon employees and
| managers for going along with this charade.
| danuker wrote:
| > you are always going to hire certain people just so you
| can fire them in order to protect your most valued
| people.
|
| Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end,
| whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a
| manager has no incentive to do bad hires.
| mxvzr wrote:
| My understanding is that even once the manager has filled
| their team with top performers they'll keep hiring every
| year for the sole purpose of firing them later in order
| to meet the quota
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Uhh.. no. I don't know if you ever hired or fired anyone,
| but, in US at least, if you don't want your unemployment
| insurance to go up, you want to be able to prove that it
| was a firing for cause. Perversely, in Amazon case what
| this means that manager has to hire an employee just bad
| enough that the 'for cause' firing will be ready for him
| and he/she just needs to document it.
|
| I fail to understand how people do not see how this
| simple metric can be gamed. Am I the only person thinking
| in those weird terms imposed by the system?
| nkssy wrote:
| 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!
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I understand your argument and it is an interesting given the
| technical source of demoralization.
|
| What I submit to you that this level demoralization already
| happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do
| anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I
| won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds
| of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that
| is merely a 7 letter word with little to no meaning.
|
| I guess what I am saying it is not a new trend. Just a stepping
| stone in corporate America. The only difference is now, we
| don't get Mr. Burns choosing this, this and this one ( keep the
| egghead ); this time is a blackbox algorithm that won't ever
| touch the real decision makers ( cuz someone with enough
| forethought will add an exclusion list :P ).
| nkssy wrote:
| I definitely agree this isn't a new trend.
|
| What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain
| about retention and skills shortages and a host of other
| problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so
| temporary visas for acquiring talent.
|
| Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate
| with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't
| unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a
| dark pattern.
| RobRivera wrote:
| adopted this life policy for 2 years now. QoL sign. improved
| w0mbat wrote:
| So what is the percentage of people that must be purged every
| year at Amazon? Does that goal vary by country?
|
| 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.
| plank_time wrote:
| 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.
| casefields wrote:
| It's not just about work conditions.
|
| Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call
| the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.
|
| 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal
| master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the
| middle of the night, and so on.
|
| 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated
| infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so
| on). He gives the slave some free time.
|
| 3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things
| are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into
| account their needs, merit, and so on.
|
| 4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and
| requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The
| rest of the time is their own.
|
| 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city
| (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they
| send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains
| the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency
| threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths
| amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains
| the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain
| dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for
| example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.
|
| 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to
| vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is
| open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the
| power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of
| your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities
| legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.
|
| Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the
| master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot
| withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000
| masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed
| master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the
| benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master.
| However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in
| case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to
| persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed
| master can do this also.
|
| 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and
| are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the
| 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and
| to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off
| to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of
| their powers.
|
| 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion,
| the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they
| commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you
| mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In
| the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000
| for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it
| in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had
| occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might
| commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning
| him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)
|
| 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly
| tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no
| difference to the electoral outcome.
|
| The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it
| no longer the tale of a slave?
|
| --------------
|
| An excerpt from 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' by Robert Nozick
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 6
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| I have several friends at Amazon. They all love it. Mostly
| because they're workaholics. Most Amazon people you talk to
| will say the same things.
|
| However, you won't see that story featured on Hacker News
| because it doesn't fit the "bring down the bourgeoisie"
| overwork-porn yay-Sweden narrative that is HN/Reddit.
|
| My theory is it's because most high performers who work hard
| don't have much time for Reddit/HN and it self-selects for the
| opposite profile
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Ah yes, the imfamous antiwork news site controlled by a
| venture capital firm.
| EarlKing wrote:
| > 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Logistics workers aren't stack ranked, so that's a completely
| different problem
| civilian wrote:
| So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the
| logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're
| not getting stock? Why aren't they?
| thephyber wrote:
| > Why aren't they?
|
| Do you have evidence they aren't? I was under the
| impression Amazon warehouse logistics employees had
| extremely high turnover (averaging less than 1 year).
|
| I suspect I agree with you that logistics workers realize
| they are on a lower rung of the ladder and are willing to
| work for less compensation. I suspect much of janitorial
| and security staff in Amazon HQ probably have no access to
| stock options either.
| a3n wrote:
| > I suspect much of janitorial and security staff in
| Amazon HQ probably have no access to stock options
| either.
|
| It's likely that security and janitorial are 3rd party
| contractors and have no access to anything available from
| Amazon whatsoever.
| simfree wrote:
| Amazon's security works for Securitas at the Seattle
| campus, and turnover is extremely high as they try
| shenanigans like "Cover the Alarm Panel, do entryway
| guarding at the main entrance at the same time (despite
| both requiring 24/7 physical presence and not being in
| the same area of the building)".
|
| Amazon has very high security staffing requirements
| compared to most other Seattle companies. Absolutely
| bonkers IMO
| TFortunato wrote:
| On top of what other folks said, the warehouse folks not
| getting stock is a fairly recent development (2018, when
| minimum wage was raised). They do have a shockingly high
| turnover rate, but not sure if there is much that can be
| said about that relating to stock price currently, given
| how soon it's been since their stock comp went away,
| combined with the general strangeness of the Covid-19
| pandemic
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/amazon-hourly-workers-
| lose-m...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the
| logistic employees already be leaving in droves since
| they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?
|
| Wait, does "logistics" include warehouse, where the article
| mentions they had reached _150% annual turnover_
| prepandemic? Sounds a lot like "leaving in droves".
| a3n wrote:
| Yeah, they're leaving in droves. They're also arriving in
| droves, which is why Amazon has been able to withstand
| 150% turnover.
|
| But Amazon is now worried that they've worn out much of
| the US workforce available for "industrial
| athlete"positions. (Their term.) The droves of arrivals
| may slow down to dribbles.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Depends on who is classified as logistics: warehouse
| workers are a key component in the logistics l, and they
| have %150 annual turn over rate.
| htrp wrote:
| > Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives
| are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according
| to a new report
|
| Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-
| turnover-wo...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-
| wor...
| wiz21c wrote:
| because they may not have other job opportunities ? Because
| being screwed is better than having no job at all ?
| bob33212 wrote:
| 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"
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Golden handcuffs? More like golden shackles.
| hintymad wrote:
| It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many
| choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same
| dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one
| promising company to another every week from weeks.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Just curious, what hyper growth companies (with public stock)
| exist in the Bay Area that don't also have offices in
| Seattle?
| codezero wrote:
| This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different
| reason, the promise that you're on a rocket ship that is pre-
| initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock
| options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the
| lottery.
|
| Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs,
| this is one of the reasons "job hopping" is looked down on
| for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not
| the companies' failed promises. Obviously not keeping people
| is painful for growth too, but it's still a very one sided
| power dynamic.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value
| the money more than they value well-being, and the company
| values the money more than it values their well-being. That is
| pretty good alignment.
|
| Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock
| if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN
| stock.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade
| your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Grants vest over a period of 4 years, with overlapping
| grants generally granted each year. So you don't need to
| wait a full 4 years to begin selling.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years
| in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off
| because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker
| buying AMZN has only doubled _half_ their grant, the
| unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn 't moved.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Compare the performance of GOOG vs AMZN over the past 6mo, 1
| yr, 2 yr.
|
| Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer.
|
| Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph.
| Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a
| large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws
| based on the training I recalled.
| startup_excuse wrote:
| The reason you wouldn't work elsewhere and invest is the
| following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k
| (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years
| and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled,
| and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is
| too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for
| GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no
| guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That makes sense. I wasn't sure if SDEs get x units or y
| dollars worth of stock units each year. The former is most
| common, but everything about AMZN is unusual, including the
| vest schedule.
| TFortunato wrote:
| Amazon does it in dollars. Employees have a target comp
| figure in dollars, the annual stock refreshers are based
| on the price of the stock at that time, so if you got 100
| units one year, and the stock doubles, all things being
| equal, you would only get 50 units the next year at
| refresh time.
|
| In practice this means you can make good money off your
| hiring grant if price keeps going up, but you will also
| see your total comp hit a cliff / drop after a few years,
| since while stock going up is usually good, in Amazon's
| eyes, you've been lucky to be making more than your
| target comp those years and they aren't going to keep
| giving you the same amount of units if those units are
| worth more.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| That logic applies when you joined a while ago. However,
| with the stock sky high (P/E 66, double GOOG 33), joining
| Amazon right now may not give you that potential upside
| anymore. Your managers and long time careers will get a
| larger portion of the upside. It's already evident by the
| stock growth of GOOG compared to AMZN in the past one
| year/quarter. The P/E of Amazon is high, compared with the
| growth potential vs others in FAANG. Picking a company to
| join is also akin to pick a stock to invest. Low P/E is not
| everything, but it's an important part of the equation.
|
| For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a
| FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| > For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a
| FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.
|
| No, because mr. Market has been looking at everything
| except P/E, more essentially you can't spend P/E. You
| spend price.
|
| If you want to throw in P/E in the analysis fine, but
| then you have to throw in every other element which makes
| the stock move:
|
| 1) Cult CEO who is able to sell the narrative
|
| 2) Fed policy
|
| 3) Macro environment
|
| 4) Odds of company being targeted by the DOJ
|
| and all the other trillions of factors which influences
| the price of a security.
|
| As Druckenmiller reminds us: "There is not a phenomenon
| in the world which doesn't affect the price of a security
| in some shape or form, no matter how small"
| testing_1_2_3_4 wrote:
| Amazon's PE has always been this high
| state_less wrote:
| But their market cap hasn't. Odds are they won't 5x their
| size in the next five years as they did in their last
| five.
| bin_bash wrote:
| That's what people said 5 years ago.
| [deleted]
| htrp wrote:
| You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| That's irrelevant they give you the same amount in
| "signing bonus" with a 55/45/0/0 "vest".
| sokoloff wrote:
| But you're vesting 40% of your initial grant this year
| was the point, not that you didn't get the initial "fill
| in" cash bonus.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the
| proceeds you're in the same boat. And other companies do
| frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this
| (if you're smart enough to get better offers).
| wiz21c wrote:
| > The employees value the money more than they value well-
| being
|
| yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.
| [deleted]
| rkalla wrote:
| Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount
| (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't
| as enticing.
| _rs wrote:
| Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also
| aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it
| instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can
| choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary
| difference.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point
| of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to
| leave.
|
| It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through
| young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal
| jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really
| interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this,
| a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our
| current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the
| accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon;
| the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America;
| global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| The poor fellow at Amazon can always go to Zillow or
| Microsoft not really the same as deaths of despair here.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can
| leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of
| being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| If I didn't have so many distractions that could be me,
| honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is
| just evidence that I'm innately intellectually inferior
| and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts
| like hell.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| 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.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| My mother worked at a UK state school. They had this over a
| decade ago.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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."
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only
| the best"?
| 0zymandias wrote:
| Yes. The police in the US explicitly reject people with high
| IQs. It has been challenged in court but upheld.
|
| https://www.kake.com/story/32508747/court-oks-barring-
| high-i...
| acuozzo wrote:
| Your reply assumes that [High IQ] => [Good Police Officer],
| but the argument in the US is that [High IQ] => [Bad Police
| Officer[1]].
|
| I don't agree with this personally, but what they are doing
| is not equivalent to them exclaiming that "We don't hire
| the best". It would only be equivalent if they were
| explicitly filtering-out qualities they believe contribute
| to being the best, such as discipline, strength, and the
| like.
|
| [1] _Due to boredom, etc._
| weimerica wrote:
| Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was
| stated explicit in the interview.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share
| of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in
| management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't
| recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny
| enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.
| [deleted]
| crackercrews wrote:
| I once heard it said: government jobs are welfare for the
| middle class. IMO it's not 100% accurate but it's better
| than 50%.
| testing_1_2_3_4 wrote:
| 100% agree with this.
| joshe wrote:
| 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.
| discodave wrote:
| 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.
| throwme1234 wrote:
| My impression is that most teams have high enough natural
| attrition that it doesn't really matter and some teams even
| seem completely immune to any sort of real change, even if
| they do extremely poorly on their deliverables. I know a few
| teams that other teams actively avoid working with, even
| preferring to reinvent some of their solutions, yet, more or
| less the same people have been working on these
| underperforming teams for several years.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I've noticed this too in my time in my org, it's reasonably
| common to just rebuild something simple if the other team
| isn't responding to your tickets and escalations. The fact
| that they are three or four different time zones away from
| me on either side of the country doesn't help.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I ended up being on the losing end of the stack ranking at
| Microsoft and it was pretty terrible.
|
| My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine
| but because he had to rank _someone_ the lowest, it was my
| turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had
| actually been doing a bad job it wouldn 't have felt as bad
| because at least then I would have had some control over the
| situation.
|
| I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was
| pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a
| list of other developers on the other teams that I was
| helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt
| super shitty and I left the company right after.
|
| That happened to be right at the same time they did away with
| the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but
| it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of
| the company.)
| plank_time wrote:
| > So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have
| to fire any of the people they like.
|
| This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch's book. He
| was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.
| sokoloff wrote:
| At Amazon*, the "bar raiser" has to approve the hire though,
| so there's a pretty mechanistic control against the worst
| form of this.
|
| * - as I understand it; never worked there.
| ipaddr wrote:
| At Amazon you still hire good people you just mark them
| poorly because you don't want to break up your team.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I get that Amazon is known for their cold, calculated
| workforce, but it really takes a special kind of person
| to execute a, "hire someone just to fire them no matter
| how they do" plan over the course of like, an entire
| year, and honestly it's not even in that manager's best
| interest if the new person is actually pretty good.
|
| Are we really suggesting that's the norm at Amazon?
| Maybe, but wow.
| amzn-throw wrote:
| No, you don't:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378836
| ipaddr wrote:
| The link you pointed to mentions how hire managers are
| looking to hiring as many good people as possible. Of
| course they are if so many people are being fired.
|
| It says that managers who don't perform well will be out.
| And that was the reason given for why this practice
| doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the
| system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to
| get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing
| staff. Team members can't help the new person because
| them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It
| is setup to be toxic.
| throwme1234 wrote:
| You can still have bad hires. It happens rarely that the
| bar raising process outright fails, but it still happens,
| since the data you get out of an interview is very limited.
| For example, we had a team member that not only was doing a
| bad job on his own stuff, he was a drain on morale and
| resources for the whole team, since he constantly
| complained about everything, he never tried to learn
| anything, he posted big commit dumps every few months -
| hundreds of commits at once - and the code quality on those
| was abysmal. Luckily we got rid of him pretty fast, but not
| fast enough.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| wiz21c wrote:
| > Those who can't stand stack ranking
|
| Do you imply that standing stack ranking is a quality needed
| to work at big tech ?
| hintymad wrote:
| No, I don't think stack ranking is necessary. It, however,
| could be a consequence of bad management or of the belief
| that stack ranking is the most effective way of
| continuously improving teams.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers
| can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at
| the same time company is boasting about making billions and
| avoiding taxes.
|
| They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate
| to the value they produce.
|
| This is despicable.
|
| These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the
| taxes.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| I don't think this is news to anyone. Yes, Amazon has an
| "unregretted attrition" target. The only surprising thing was
| this:
|
| > The company expects more than one-third of employees on
| performance improvement plans to fail, documents show
|
| I assumed it was much higher.
| Cd00d wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| PIP means different things at different companies. It's true
| that some companies really just use PIPs as a documentation
| period to build a case to fire people.
|
| A lot of managers and companies I know have moved away from
| the "PIP" terminology because the acronym has become too
| toxic to be productive. Instead, they'll have different names
| for their version of the program.
|
| With few exceptions, managers don't enjoy firing people. We
| don't enjoy PIPing people, either. A good PIP (or whatever a
| company calls it) is usually structured as a mentorship
| program that lays out clear expectations for what is expected
| from an employee, pairs them up with mentors who can help get
| them there, and involves more frequent check-ins than normal
| to help get them on track.
|
| As a manager, I have seen many PIPs succeed, if executed
| properly. I've also seen many fail. One of the common failure
| modes is when the employee assumes the worst and doesn't
| bother trying to improve. That's one of the main reasons
| smart companies don't use the "PIP" terminology any more.
| breput wrote:
| 85% - 100% is technically "more than one-third".
| everdrive wrote:
| 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?
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I was "put on a PIP" by my boss at AMZN, but it turned out it
| wasn't really a PIP (i.e. - HR wasn't involved). It was just
| my boss trying to pressure me to work 50 hours per week
| during the holidays instead of the typical 60.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > It was just my boss trying to pressure me to work 50
| hours per week during the holidays instead of the typical
| 60.
|
| I'm not following.
|
| Is this sarcasm/humor? Why would your boss put you on a PIP
| to pressure you to work LESS?
| Cd00d wrote:
| I think they mean 50 hours a week during holidays instead
| of ZERO, which is the typical holiday workload. The
| manager saw the holidays as a minor discount to regular
| time-commitment.
| loopz wrote:
| Why would he work during holidays?
| tinyhouse wrote:
| You don't really know if HR was involved or not.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I was put on a PIP at Google and kept my job afterwards, they
| basically put massive training wheels on you. I had a
| director checking in with me 2-3 a week to put the pressure
| on, even doing some pair programming which was interesting.
| They really are trying to figure out why you aren't working
| well and see if you are a lost cause.
| todd_t wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the "interesting" aspect of pairing
| with the director?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I guess it shows that they weren't just going to take a
| manager's word it and that multiple levels of management
| engaged in a PIP. Especially with how busy this director
| was typically, it was a use of their time that I didn't
| expect. Also, having a director be competent enough as an
| IC to pair program was something I hadn't experienced or
| expected.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| 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.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Yeah, I've heard it's similarly bad at Facebook but people
| there don't seem to complain as much because they're the
| types of gunners that work 60 hours and claim they work 30.
| TFortunato wrote:
| I think they may be conflating Focus and PIP/Pivot, since they
| mention 35% w.r.t. focus later in the article.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| Curious about how effective this kind of "private" PIP can be?
|
| PIP is scary to foreign workers who are on temporary worker
| visa. Losing a job means that you may have to leave the
| country, which is a life changing event.
|
| It is so scary that, in immigrant communities I am familiar
| with, it becomes a common sense to not to even dream about
| getting out of PIP. If your manager put you on PIP, start
| looking for a new job immediately because you don't want to
| risk losing your immigration status.
|
| Don't try too hard on the PIP project, don't try to please your
| manager, only put reasonable amount of effort into the project
| so they don't have a reason to fire you immediately, and try to
| get the f** out as fast as you can.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| > you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next
| quarter
|
| Unless it's in writing, you should never, ever, ever take a
| statement like this at face value.
| 0zymandias wrote:
| Another tactic that Amazon recruiters use a lot to convince
| you to take a shitty role:
|
| "You are coming in at level X, but this role is actually
| scoped at level X+1."
|
| In reality, it means nothing and you can get promoted in lots
| of different ways. It is just a trick that unethical
| recruiters and managers play.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| That statement implies, in no uncertain terms, that the
| expectation is more work for less pay. It's a flowery way
| of telling the candidate they're getting a bad deal. If you
| the scope is X+1, and you pay me X+1, we have no issue.
| nunez wrote:
| 100% agree. "You'll have a direct path to promotion in _x_
| time" is a common sales tactic recruiters use.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Thanks for giving a great example for me to add Amazon to my
| "never work there" list.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter and did a brief
| interview. Rather than a screening call like most companies
| I've interacted with, the recruiter wanted me to immediately
| fill out their application and start on the technical
| assessment, as if it didn't even cross her mind that I might
| not be interested in working for them. I filled out the app
| as it seemed required for the initial call, and then when I
| explicitly asked, I learned that supposedly most people work
| 40h weeks. I don't blame her for doing her job and trying to
| get applications, but the complete lack of sincerity was
| astonishing. I had already decided I'd never work for a FAANG
| based on other experiences I've learned about online and
| through friends, but it was especially impactful to
| experience the culture personally.
| trhway wrote:
| >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.
|
| Diabolical thing. I remember laughing (other place, other
| times) as my manager friend told me about a manager in the org
| practicing it. It was an exception though, and I see how it may
| be a regular practice at AMZN.
| julianeon wrote:
| 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.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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%.
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| I used the same tool an the numbers were very similar 7-8
| years ago.
|
| The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that
| attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs.
|
| The 6% in the article is incredibely underestimated.
| jandrese wrote:
| Seems like there must be so much effort wasted in getting new
| people spun up on corporate culture, development style,
| internal tooling, etc... only to have half of them gone in
| less than a year.
|
| Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?
| nunez wrote:
| Amazon hires at an insane clip.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| Typical turnover in engineering is around 20% annually (maybe
| higher for Amazon), so this 6% target is unlikely to have the
| impact you are imagining.
| Sevii wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| 20% sounds high, I thought it was 15%. Getting ranked TT
| usually means you are ripe for promotion but haven't gotten it
| that year for whatever reason.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, at our company it means you can get promoted onto most
| teams (have your choice). I feel like they specifically keep
| some people below that so they can't leave as easily. They
| also have a "critical man" policy where each department can
| designate one or two people as critical so they can't leave
| there.
| aranchelk wrote:
| 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.
| ladyattis wrote:
| 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.
| xibalba wrote:
| A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one
| of the most productive companies to have ever existed.
|
| *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word
| "counterfactual" for quite some time.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Amazon can be one of the most productive companies ever, and
| still be doing self-sabotaging things that will erode their
| long term success.
|
| Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can
| simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage
| in the market and doing things that undermine their own
| efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the
| self-sabotage, they can be successful.
|
| Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume
| that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing
| to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get
| away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such
| a huge advantage in some other area.
|
| So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big
| financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook
| the work environment. But that may not always be the case,
| and the more people share negative experiences about the work
| environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether.
| The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to
| doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be
| even more successful in the short and long term if they
| didn't have a firing quota.
| maurys wrote:
| I've always wondered about this. I'd expect this to catch up
| with Amazon and not work out in the long term.
|
| But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up
| new markets.
| tines wrote:
| > Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to
| have ever existed.
|
| Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A
| counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a
| situation wherein the facts are different than they really
| are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a
| counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then
| so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If
| kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."
| xibalba wrote:
| Indeed, you are correct! *blushing face emoji*. Edit made.
| Thank you!
| nkssy wrote:
| They will fail in multiple ways and this will be a factor in
| what eats them out like a cancer. But it will take decades so
| really is it an issue for them? Unlikely. They'll still be
| profitable. It won't necessarily kill them either.
|
| Its the equivalent of the corporation being a person smoking
| cigarettes. It imparts some benefits and doesn't kill right
| away but given enough time it still causes disease. They'll
| start to miss opportunities. They'll run slower.
|
| The metaphor vanishes in a lot of ways though because the
| corporation can pivot and simply say "we were wrong".
| Microsoft is a perfect example. It regularly threw away
| people and this caused damage and various big failures but
| not enough to scuttle them. They are still successful. Still
| growing.
|
| Students of history know that Microsoft's story of success
| hides a lot of messy details including behavior where plenty
| of law had to get involved. Amazon will go down a similar
| path. Or has likely already begun.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I would go so far as to argue our assumption about Amazon
| even _wanting_ to "maximize" productivity may not be
| correct.
|
| It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum
| productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-
| at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system
| goes for the former.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| By what measure of productivity?
| xibalba wrote:
| Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and
| incomplete sample:
|
| Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer
| satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value,
| return on invested capital, end price reduction for
| customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs
| available for sale, new products/services launched, etc
| etc.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| And Amazon is very successful because it has dominated
| one of the main reasons we use the internet: online
| shopping.
|
| Comparing online shopping revenue to social media revenue
| kind of feels like comparing apples to oranges to me.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Customer lifetime value for non-prime members is under
| $1,000, $2300 for prime. Not exactly the leader.
|
| Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.
|
| End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest.
|
| Employee headcount, is more or less better?
|
| Things always seem rosier.
| void_mint wrote:
| The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is
| almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its
| employees.
|
| Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would
| still hold up.
| NathanKP wrote:
| As a current Amazon employee I have to say that is pretty
| ludicrous. If you actually think Amazon could scale back
| to 10% of it's current employees without losing massive
| forward momentum and capacity to deliver results then I
| don't know what to say. All those metrics would suffer
| greatly in both the short and long term.
|
| In order to scale back that far without suffering
| negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of
| people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would
| not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of
| insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.
| void_mint wrote:
| If a company makes a lot of money, does that mean every
| employee is responsible for generating the money they
| made? Is it possible to make a lot of money with not a
| lot of employees? Does Amazon make less money when
| employees take a lot of PTO?
|
| I'll add 90% was hyperbole.
| xibalba wrote:
| Just to be clear, I am using the word "productivity" in a
| very general sense: output over input.
|
| I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any
| of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90%
| workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of
| Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.
| frumper wrote:
| If Amazon downsized by 90% then they couldnt drive by my
| house two to three times a day so I can quickly get my
| prime widgets.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what
| point do we qualify productivity with some measure of
| quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces
| _quality_. For all the laurels and new features and
| gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings
| or new Amazon products are considered best in class.
| ptudan wrote:
| Top of market quality is obviously not IKEAs goal. There
| is no one in IKEA corporate who would argue differently.
|
| IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to
| Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not
| hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are
| striving for it.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for AMZN
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ikea has more similarities with Apple than Amazon. Amazon
| is a mishmash of stuff being sold, like Dollarstore or
| whatever. Ikea is more like the Apple store. Ikea is a
| streamlined and well thought out experience.
| influx wrote:
| What cloud provider is better than AWS?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If you ask me, digital ocean: top notch UX, good
| performance, good offering of services (k8s, load
| balancing, managed databases). A reasonable and nice
| service.
|
| I use it for some small businesses of mine but I wouldn't
| use it for a medium company. I would just get some
| servers from smaller provider in different data centers
| and deploy whatever I need.
|
| AWS, was definitely the service that convinced everyone
| they needed the cloud. Most of the companies I've seen
| move to aws are just wasting money, don't need the
| scalability and are massively over-provisioned.
|
| A few unicorns needs the cloud's powers to scale
| massively now - and, given how much it costs, they'll end
| up rewriting it anyway to save hundreds of millions a few
| years down the line.
| dafelst wrote:
| Better than AWS at what? Many are better than AWS in
| parts of their business - Google's Kubernetes offerings
| are far better than AWS's overall, Azure beats the pants
| of AWS in Windows hosting, Active Directory hosting,
| Confluent provides a better Kafka offering, Snowflake
| shits all over Redshift and Aurora (at least for OLAP)
| etc.
|
| That said, AWS is solid and best in class in many areas,
| and to paraphrase the old saying: "no one ever got fired
| for choosing AWS"
| ipaddr wrote:
| By price? All of them
| spoonjim wrote:
| IKEA produces excellent quality for the price. People who
| think it's low quality usually don't glue it together or
| attach it to the wall when appropriate.
| xibalba wrote:
| I think a better measure of IKEA would be "value"-the
| intersection of price, quality, and problem-solution fit.
|
| IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality
| furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell
| furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have
| they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted
| with resounding "yes".
| retrocryptid wrote:
| and then you divide it by # of employees and get
| something kind of low.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Doubt it
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread
| about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works
| at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the
| exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the
| art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.
| xibalba wrote:
| The size and growth of AWS' customer base and financial
| success is a very strong counterargument to your claims.
| Is it possible you are confusing your personal
| preferences for the goals of the AWS business? AWS _may_
| seek to advance the state of the art, but this is not the
| end goal, per se, but rather one factor that may or may
| not achieve the end goal. The end goal is more customers
| and greater revenue and profit.
|
| > someone described that the reason AWS works at all is
| the size of their firefighting team
|
| Customers don't care all that much _why_ AWS "works".
| They care _that_ it "works". And, again, it "working" is
| not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another
| means to an end.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| How does AWS advance the state of the art with
| undocumented services that frequently fail? I'm not a big
| fan of Azure, but at least they document their services.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Which services in specific are undocumented services that
| frequently fail?
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Worker productivity is measured as "amount of goods" over
| number of employees. If you say "revenue" is the same as
| "amount of goods" then Amazon gives you:
|
| 386.1b dollars / 798k workers = $483,834.58 / worker
|
| That's impressive, but... Alibaba: $717.3b / 251k workers =
| $2.8m / worker FlipKart: $436.2b / 30k workers = $14.5m /
| worker Texas Instruments: $14.38b / 30k workers = $468k /
| worker G.E.: $75b / 174k workers = $431k / worker
|
| I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most
| productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot
| of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to
| fire them later.
|
| And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm
| capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from
| its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues
| last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or
| around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple
| orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.
| random314 wrote:
| 436B$ for flipkart? Something is wrong!
| sjs7007 wrote:
| Maybe it was 436B INR cause USD is definitely wrong.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| If you backload RSUs this process saves you a ton of money
| actually.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Not really because they pay the same amount in cash in the
| first two years. They're just backloading any potential
| upside.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| 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.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| A couple of things come to mind. (Amazonian here, I don't
| speak for the company.)
|
| 1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager.
| I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been
| a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do
| change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I
| like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never
| even have to think about the whole 6% thing.
|
| 2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in
| so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied
| teammates leave our team because there was another exciting
| team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get
| into. These are the kinds of moves that you'd have incredible
| trouble making when jumping from one company to another
| ("you're a game developer? why on earth should I think you'd
| be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon,
| these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty
| exciting.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies
| keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such
| employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you
| started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As
| long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair =
| letting employees know months in advance that they are
| underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent
| severance package based on tenure, etc)
| crispyambulance wrote:
| It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months
| to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6%
| of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various
| under-handed ways.
|
| The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just
| fine for months and months, but then end up with a new
| manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and
| wham, performance improvement plan.
|
| No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would
| take an honest approach and come up with mutually
| beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good
| fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such
| size and with such growth?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I've been at several places which would have been improved by
| higher levels of management-directed firings. It's not at all
| obvious to me that the success rate at Amazon should be
| expected to be significantly over 85% of hire-to-performing
| employee. Given that, what should they do with the 15% who
| don't turn out to be performing employees (for whatever
| reason that isn't itself protected class membership)?
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I've been at several places which would have been
| improved by higher levels of management-directed firings.
|
| If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire
| the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep
| apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate
| programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from
| the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side
| with someone.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews,
| which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly
| noisy signal even for the best interviewers and
| management chain.
| rhexs wrote:
| Because they can continually fill the trenches with H1Bs
| willing to run the gauntlet.
| tmp60beb0ed wrote:
| I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would
| choose Amazon over most startups.
|
| In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is
| the manager. A good manager can create a great work
| environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can
| kill morale regardless of company policy.
|
| I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and
| well-trained.
|
| Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some
| of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was
| because they were inexperienced. It's like the difference
| between parenting your first child versus parenting the third
| child.
| jameshart wrote:
| There's a lot of jobs in the vast excluded middle between
| 'Amazon' and 'startups'.
| decafninja wrote:
| Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors.
|
| True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon
| on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard
| to get into as Amazon though.
|
| If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less
| prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at
| Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I
| could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
|
| If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean
| multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then
| ignore all of the above.
| titanomachy wrote:
| "the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple
| offers from all sorts of top tech companies"
|
| I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of
| these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja
| wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than
| they really are.
| decafninja wrote:
| I mean, as someone who has yet to crack one FAANG (or
| similar level company) offer, a FAANG engineer is someone
| that I look up to. But my friends and ex-colleagues who
| did crack FAANG did so with difficulty, and they got
| rejected from all but the one company that did extend an
| offer. They all say if they were to re-interview at their
| companies (or another FAANG), odds are they'd be
| rejected.
|
| So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is
| someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole
| another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
| htrp wrote:
| I'd argue FAANG offers are like college admissions,
| probably a good 40% of the applicant pool likely
| qualifies for the role and can succeed in it, but only
| 3-4% of the pool gets the offer
| ghaff wrote:
| You can argue the numbers and there's probably a top tier
| of people who are no brainers. But, yeah, in general at
| least for elite university admissions, they could
| probably toss most or all of the admitted pile in the
| trash, figure out who to admit from the rest of the pile,
| and the world would keep on turning just fine.
| titanomachy wrote:
| If you work at a top-tier company, you'll meet lots of
| people who can get multiple offers from top-tier
| companies. They are bright, but usually not geniuses. And
| they are often a bit obsessed with puzzles :)
| Frost1x wrote:
| >If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less
| prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot
| at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year
| so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future
| prospects.
|
| I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates
| just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work
| in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer _just_
| for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with
| software labor and hiring (which, there 's a _lot_ wrong,
| this is but one more example of how perverse the market
| is).
|
| A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position
| shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is
| really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if
| your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you
| doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's
| definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply
| can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
| [deleted]
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue
| per employee. Not always, but it's a pretty good rule of
| thumb.
|
| Companies that can't afford to pay FAANG wages, typically
| don't have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in
| software is closely tied to how effective the technology
| and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly
| portable across companies.
|
| So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total
| comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human
| capital. Not always, but it's a pretty good rule of
| thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k,
| they're probably doing something right, in a way the
| company who pays $75k isn't.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to
| revenue per employee. Not always, but it's a pretty good
| rule of thumb.
|
| I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true
| nor see any evidence of that in practice.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| In microeconomics, it's a pretty foundational tenet that
| wages normalize to marginal worker productivity.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic
| courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro),
| but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and
| has nothing to do with particularly efficient single
| firms.
| nkssy wrote:
| Personally, I'd work for Amazon and already be looking
| elsewhere the moment I signed up, given how random it seems
| in terms of being fired. They're going to fire you anyway.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I actually did that, kept interviewing about every 8-12
| months until last September or so. The problem is none of
| my offers were as high as Google new grad offers (all
| less than $200k, though one had a $175k base) so I didn't
| take any. This was from 4 startups and Citadel. Seems
| like being inferior has its own severe monetary costs....
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other
| fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige
| with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went
| to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they
| passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another
| round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period.
|
| Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares
| - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I failed Amazon like three times in a row (along with
| other smaller companies). This last year I expanded my
| search and got into Facebook and Google, despite failing
| Amazon again.
|
| Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as
| prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you
| had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon
| superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random
| startup, etc.?
|
| If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate
| against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of
| their culture.
| decafninja wrote:
| How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers
| from multiple FAANGs?
|
| I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly
| be wrong.
|
| The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to
| have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim
| that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview
| for the same position.
| [deleted]
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are
| lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the
| fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore
| I'm stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _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.
| matz1 wrote:
| I don't think it matter much, for many people few years in
| Amazon is worth it, in term of financial benefit/future job.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| 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.
| kevstev wrote:
| I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently,
| in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during
| the pandemic?
|
| I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any
| of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed
| mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job
| itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became
| almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story
| short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity,
| and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had
| only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to
| meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded
| like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just
| focused on filling this one specific role, but the process
| spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had
| already committed to another job, but figured I would see the
| process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest
| in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly
| culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you
| are interested I can dig it up.
|
| But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place
| (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder
| until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started
| hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but
| its much more recent that those stories started coming out from
| the engineering side of things.
| throw8881 wrote:
| >I feel like most of these stories are just coming out
| recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping
| point during the pandemic?
|
| Current Amazon engineer here. People have been complaining
| working at Amazon for a long while.
|
| At least in my organization, leadership pays close attention
| to whether folks are happy or unhappy in their roles. I
| posted this earlier, but we have a massive workforce of
| engineers at Amazon, across many countries. If 1% of them are
| unhappy, and even 5-10% of those unhappy folks are willing to
| say something about it online, you're going to see plenty of
| news sites picking up those articles and representing Amazon
| in a negative light.
|
| There's plenty of bad publicity around Amazon, and I think
| that's due to the insane growth of this company. Regardless
| of your view, Amazon has been insanely successful. With that
| success comes suspicion, and you can quickly go from being
| very trusted to everyone questioning every practice - from
| quality of AWS documentation to Prime shipment speed to
| hiring/promotion practices, etc. Alot of people have skin in
| this game because they're competing directly with Amazon.
|
| I'm not saying Amazon can't do better. We absolutely need to.
| But alot of the things being represented as systemic issues
| at Amazon are simply not so, but they certainly push a
| specific narrative. _shrug_
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Also wondering if the creation of platforms like Glassdoor,
| Blind, even r/CSCareerQuestions have allowed these issues to
| come to light.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Ironically, those are all the same platforms that made me
| want to contemplate ending it all because I work at Amazon.
| After I blocked them at the router level I started to feel
| better, until I realized people think I'm inferior no
| matter if I see them say it or not.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Those places are absolutely toxic (Glassdoor less so)
| when people praise themselves, but I think they're useful
| in sharing some of the harsh truths about different
| company cultures, including Amazon. But I'm sure they
| also miss the overall picture as corporations like Amazon
| are massive.
| kleiba wrote:
| No worries - in academia, the number is a lot higher.
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