"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the...
Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.
We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior.
The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.
The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight.
Nothing will change.
Edit: punctuation
Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow.
Plenty of managers do that today of course.
No, but you can use it to your advantage if you're so inclined. Being in control most of the time but allowing a minor crisis to develop from time to time that you resolve heroically can work.
You can look at it as being underhand or you can look at it as occasionally checking that Pavlov doesn't just work for dogs. Your choice really.
Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews. Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.
If you're not careful with what data you collect, you get exactly this - perverse incentives discouraging risk-taking and incident prevention in favor of success at limited, unnecessary tasks.
Seems like most organizations I've worked at.
That and organizational volunteer work get you awards.
I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.
The only problem is life is pretty much an accumulation of incremental experiences.
Most people just can't wake up one day perform like a superstar at work for the same reason why a person can't just wake up and run a marathon without any practice. Like physical stamina, mental stamina too comes from a lot of practice done over years and "from their earliest years" performance matters.
Plus rewards come to a lot of long time sloggers, because they've been around long and have been putting their heads down and doing a lot of work.
Really this is just neo-taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticis...
However my nephew didn't have such a fun time. He was working for one of their warehouses in Kentucky and they were ruthless to the workers like him. They had a snow storm, he got stuck in the snow and instead of being understanding they reprimanded him for it. He liked the pay but couldn't take the humiliating treatment, so he quit.
Punishing an employee for risking their life to try to come in to a job they already hate? That's textbook sadism, ruthless is too weak a word. In inclement weather our critical staff can depend on officers in 4x4 vehicles to bring them in, with no reprimand for being late due to the weather. Non-essential staff are encouraged to stay home and avoid injury and possible death trying to make it to work.
Incidentally, one of my coworkers actually suggested our manager pick him up in a 4x4 during a particularly brutal blizzard. The request was laughed off; there was no way it was worth the fuel and time to go pick up the worker to come to work. It makes sense; a sub- $20-per-hour worker is too cheap for it to work out in most cases. The humane thing to do is just to leave the store or bar closed if staff have to come in. But that extra $1000 of net revenue sounds tempting...
As long as there are more than enough people to hire for a position, managers and policy will tend toward lazy and controlling, it's easier than cultivating people.
I may have had a weird experience, but the entire pipeline process was a hostile and miserable one.
LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees. They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really cares about them. You get upper management worship anywhere. It's the same thing as obsessing over celebrities.
Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair. One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job.
Ok let's see, we'll need a bullet point list for it:
* Agreed on a time for the phone interview. They didn't call. Sat around waiting for an hour like an idiot without anyone even sending an email / text / or calling to apologize. Ok, that's fine stuff happens, understand. No bid deal...
* Scheduled on-site interview. Show up. Manager, the main person who was supposed to interview me, wasn't there. I thought ok, this is getting ridiculous. But fine, big company, yadda yadda.
* People who interviewed me didn't seem at all interested in my previous projects or my experience. I suspect they never actually read my resume before the interview. Asking ridiculous questions like "tell me about your biggest failure..."
* Lunchtime comes. I thought, well at least I'll get to meet some of the team members maybe others are a bit more friendly. So I sit there and wait,... and... nothing. They apparently forgot. After about 30 minutes I started wondering around the hallways hoping someone would stop me and wonder if I was lost. Maybe I would have asked them how they liked working there and such. Nobody even apologized for it either.
* Recruiter before the interview swore they'd get back to me in 3 days, as I already had a few offers on hand. It took them 3 weeks! I decided not to remind them just to see how long they'll take.
I don't know if I'd call that just a "busy day". Seems like a systemic problem to me...
> Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair. One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job
Yes it is. How a company treats all of its employees tells something about the company. How it treats manager, and top brass, CEOs, developers, down to janitors. All of that says a lot about a company.
At first I thought it was to teach me a lesson about hard work, which seemed foolish, as hard work was already my life, or humility, of which I probably did need a dose.
A few years later, he told me his true reason. He said,
"If you want to know who a person truly is, don't watch how he treats his friends or his boss.
Watch how he treats his janitors, his handymen, his surveyors, his receptionists, or his waitresses.
The measure of a man is not how he treats his supposed equals. It is how he treats the least fortunate among us."
Morality is not contingent upon income.
This tells you much you need to know about the Amazon mentality
That's completely backwards. Even asshole managers will treat their high-value employees relatively well, unless they're stupid--you don't want to kill the golden goose. It's how they treat the low-skill, low-wage guys at the bottom that tells you what kind of people they really are.
Yes, yes, because you earn more, you'd better work as a slave... wait, do slaves get salary at all? Ah, no, okay, so everyone who earns money must work harder than a slave!!!
I have never been able to figure out exactly what this is supposed to mean. Best I can tell, it means "You're fully qualified for this position, but I don't like you for reasons I can't or won't articulate."
There is a not so small cohort who parrot them.
They're a seriously good bit of Amazon culture that's been perverted into something you can use to submarine any meeting. If treated honestly, they seem (to me, anyway), like a fantastic set of rules for governing a company's actions. Sadly, it's difficult to align incentives with actually honoring and encouraging those principles :(
Something needs to be done to help people financially who are looking for a way out from the abuse.
The most sensible option is to do the bare minimum acceptable work and use all the leftover energy to find some other place, as the clock is ticking. Depending on the company, you have until the next quarter or the next performance review. Or the next headcount reduction.
Satisfactory: fulfilling expectations or needs. But not in Corporate Nu-Speak.
I see a company that, 5 years ago, was 80% outsourced and now is more like 20% outsourced and continuing to change. I see a company where the developers and technical experts are given a huge amount of power and influence in the direction of the company. As I type this at 8:15 in the morning, I look around the floor of my building and see only two other people in early; yesterday at 5:45 PM there were only 4 others and they were playing Foosball. Sure, when you're on-task you are expected to cooperate with your teammates and to be productive, but the attitude is not one of "deliver or die", more of "let's see what we can achieve!".
Please don't think I'm dismissing your experience: you are probably in a different part of the company and have a different experience. But your description didn't resemble my own experience, and I thought that was worth mentioning.
PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out", offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on.
(I know, I know, I know: "because laywers.")
He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones. We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with which I'd be evaluated.
If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going strongly for years.
The third was a master at reading the PIP, pulling just above the written requirements, then six months later was back in the same stew. Was delighted when they finally accepted a job at our main competitor.
There are others, I just remember three in particular right now. You have to take the PIP seriously: of course it's designed to protect the company, but it should really be the message of last resort rather than a formality.
Also if you have to issue a PIP you need to go back to the manager to see what went wrong. Did you have a hiring mistake or a management mistake or what? Every time I have fired someone I have felt sorry for them (not that I tell them -- they don't want to hear that at that point!). We shouldn't have brought them on, perhaps causing them to quit their previous job or forego another offer, if in the end they didn't work out.
I know some companies assume that if you're on a PIP it's impossible for the emp to recover. If a company is like that I don't see how the PIP would protect them from a lawsuit. It's like H-1B: if you take it seriously it costs you a lot more to hire one than to hire a local. It's again, an action of last resort.
Then, because the PIP actually defined the job standards, and involved checking with people who actually could evaluate the employee's performance, it became patently obvious that the employee was meeting them (and actually doing a great job).
Of course, in both cases the process was so insulting that the employees began interviewing around immediately and quit within a few months. And, no surprise, it left such a bad taste in everybody's mouths that almost the entire team quit over the next few months as well.
But, I don't think this is common. :)
After being put on a PIP, the colleague focused on other projects within the same team and eventually succeeded.
When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will be the domain name in your email. Everything else will be coincidental.
A good team at a bad company -- unlikely.
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
* I worked at AWS for 2 years.
What this means is that in four years, despite glowing reviews every year and a promotion, I never got a meaningful raise/bonus/stock grant, because the stock was doing so well. My W2 income went up, but it was completely unrelated to my performance -- I could have done just enough to not get fired and would have made essentially the same amount. People who performed worse than me were regularly given larger stock grants.
It was super demoralizing to figure that out. Big part of the reason I left.
Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year.
The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered food is a cute perk, but it's hardly critical.
I don't drink soda, but they had free coffee and tea. Tea is my drink of choice, so I was happy. Soda is bad for you anyway. ;)
They did have free "snacks" if you count breakfast cereal. Which many people would grab a cup full of as a snack (there were no bowls, oddly enough). There were a mountain of breakfast cereal boxes on every floor near the kitchen. But yes, they also had paid snack machines.
The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.
Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
And I think the latter really makes the difference. There are 20,000 people working at Amazon, according to the article. When you scale that big, some corners of the org are going to suck, and some will be better.
I may someday return to Amazon, now that they have an office near me in Colorado. But I'm still working on the game that I put on hold while I worked at Amazon, and I need to finish it before I reattach the golden handcuffs.
I've been in many teams and I can agree there are many strong developers.
> Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop.
Maybe not like sweatshops, but I've met many tenths of people that left because of the constant pressure to deliver combined with the oncall duties. Once I witnessed a whole team disappearing in a short time.
> We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
We too, but phrased like this makes it sounds like Amazon is a relaxed and laid-back company. Far from it.
I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.
> - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
I haven no equity in my company or opportunity to get any.
> - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
I don't think my company offers any relocation packages (I could be wrong on that) but even so this policy doesn't strike me as completely crazy.
> - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
My vesting schedule only vests after 6 years (with 20 percent vesting every year after the first). It's not great but on average it's not the worst AFAICT.
> - No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself
> - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
Both of these... We have nothing like it at all, I'd kill for a "shitty cafe". We have coffee and that's about it. This comment comes of as extremely spoiled to me.
> - Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
My job doesn't include being on call but I work with people who are, I don't fully understand what this bit is talking about. Are you woken up just to be told your "shift" is starting or is this just referencing being woken up because there is a problem? Cause that's kind of the definition of being on call....
Maybe I'm just naive and stupid to think my job is good (every job could be better of course) but from where I'm sitting 90% of your comment comes off as entitled and spoiled and it colors the rest of it.
To answer your question about being woke up in the middle of the night, there is no such thing as a "shift". Most of us are expected to work at the very least 60 hour work weeks (no additional pay, everyone is salaried), with many jobs beings 'always on', extending our work into nights and weekends with take home laptops. A typical (though not universal) day at Amazon is like follows:
- Wake up and open laptop to check emails and get some work in.
- Shower, eat, etc. before going into work.
- Work until around 7-8pm.
- Come home and eat, then open up laptop to work (maybe with the tv on in the background) up until going to bed.
Waking hours are pretty much consumed by work, and on weekends a lot of people will do a couple hours here and there and between other things, to stay current with issues.
If people in SV look like they're asking for a lot or getting upset over petty things, it's because of the sheer soul sucking amount of work that's being imposed on them. Small conveniences like a catered cafe makes the difference in helping them work through it.
I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.
Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.
Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.
They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news. There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.
I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good (<=40) except around launches.
2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor.
When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I stayed because I liked the people and the work was fine. If my team culture changes and I don't like it, I'll look external and internal then leave.
I decided to not go back, but in the end having Amazon on my resume (even as an internship, as I'm relatively young) was basically a free pass to interview anywhere else I wanted. I'd say it was a shitty experience while I was there, but net positive in the long run if only because of Amazon's klout.
How do you know? Based on what they sell through AWS? This is not super evident - they might have duct taped bunch of shitty stuff and rely on people on-call 24x7 to keep system running.
Citation needed.
I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.
Is this weird? I only know of one or two coworkers who knows how to write bash scripts..
Despite almost knowing no bash, I was hired as an SDE1 at Amazon so your story adds up though!
This seems totally out of place to me. You have to pay for your own food, who cares? That's the way it is for pretty much everybody.
They did not make me an offer, which is just as well as I would have declined. I doubt I did a great job of sounding interested past the 15 minute mark, which is really out of character for me.
Now to address some of your points, tech must be a different animal. I'll tell you about my benefits since I really like that HN is a place to really get some transparency, and probably by design, there isn't a lot of Fortune 500, non-tech firm representation here. So you can stop reading if you aren't curious, but for those that are, here goes.
I work in finance tech, but with a large, somewhat oldschool company, not a startup. I recently became a (junior) officer of this company. Comparatively, I don't think Amazon sounds all that bad in terms of the fringe items. For instance:
- I don't even get a free cup of coffee here - the cafeteria is pretty good, but not cheap
- Most people here don't get equity. We do have an employee stock purchase benefit that lets you buy at a discount with a reasonable holding period (90 days or 6 months, can't remember). For those that do have what I'd call retention incentives (either cash or stock), our vesting period starts at 3 years. This is separate from our bonus, which varies by level (and all levels get something), but vests when deposit hits your account
- Our 401k match is comparatively better. We match 1:1 up to 5%, and then I think we kick in roughly the same as a defined contribution, since we no longer offer a pension. So 10% in "free" retirement money each year. I believe matching begins on day 1 and vests immediately
- Tuition reimbursement is a funny thing. I haven't tried our benefit here since I'm done with school. However, I've been around my industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Fortune 500. Most companies offer 5-6k a year, and they all try their best never to pay it. At one company, who I won't name, I was told that my degree was not related to my job, so no benefit. Great, but the policy makes no mention of that, and the recruiter certainly doesn't undersell the benefit
- Oncall sucks. I've avoided it since I manage backend financial/data engineering processes, nothing customer-facing. I've covered myself as much as I've delegated, though, it's only fair
- Relocation was I think a year, and they covered everything - packing, moving, transporting our 3rd car, etc. Package is based on level and some other factors. As an employee now, though, I don't think there's ever any repayment period for internal relocation. They just cover it, and from what I hear, it's pretty comprehensive
I realize I'm not entry level, but the above applies to everyone here, except where noted. I used to think we don't pay Amazon salaries, but a peek at Glassdoor says that Amazon doesn't really pay that well, particularly for the cost of living around the HQ.
Having escaped from an abusive manager myself, I can imagine what this person went though. Managers that are skilled in the art are able to inflict pain without leaving much of a paper trail.
I did ask for (and got) professional help, including medication. There's only so much stress 24/7 that you are able to handle before you start to crack. Who knows what would have happened if I just tried to ride it out.
I'd have gone bananas if I had been placed in a PIP instead. This was one of the possibilities identified by my branch predictor, so I was collecting a mountain of evidence against said manager. Thankfully, it wasn't needed.
(I realize that nowhere in the article it says a manager was the issue, but corporate pattern-matching gets pretty good after a while)
Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.
(Disclaimer: I completed an Internship at Amazon and I am returning for a second one)
Does anyone else do this?
So, the package for a typical SDE I will look like the following:
Salary: x Starting bonus year 1: 0.2x Starting bonus year 2: 0.15x
RSU grant is 0.6x, vesting 5/15/40/40 (4 years).
So when you add it up, assuming a constant stock price, you get:
Y1:1.23x Y2:1.24x Y3:1.24x Y4:1.24x
So at a basic level the back loading of stock is just making up for the starting bonuses ending. Thinking more broadly, many employees get promoted within 2-3 years and the stock has generally gone up over time so the predictions after the 2 year mark aren't exactly set in stone.
Internet: Let's get this thing to the Hackernews frontpage!
From reading other articles, it seems he is alive and jumped from the 4th floor.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/27/body-appl...
Hats off to those folks. It seemed like no time at all before they showed up and moved very quickly to help the injured man. I was really impressed.
The facts are: a guy put in for a transfer, got put on a performance improvement plan, threatened self-harm, and then jumped off a building.
There are no details why he requested a transfer, the reasons he got put on a PIP, and if he was mentally unstable or not, where these fairly common life events would cause him to contemplate self harm.
Nope, the pitchforks and the torches come out.
Just in this thread alone I've been accused of:
* Screwing employees over * Being a slave in a sweatshop * Insulted for not being able to use Bash (I can) * Disorganized * Not be trusted to talk about working at Amazon (lol) * Fostering a toxic workplace * A communist (my favorite insult)
Anyone know how many managers were terminated because of that.
EDIT: Found this example, who knows if it is true:
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for...
To be completely ridiculous (I already started this in another comment), let's imagine Amazon as sort of a tiny country with a Stalinist ruling party running it. Here are the similarities:
* Personality cult: Bezos = Stalin
* You sing praises to the great leader: the 14 leadership principles.
* Officially they have a zero-tolerance policy for harshness. But I bet if anyone complains to HR they get sent to Siberia (i.e. put on performance improvement plan) or shot (terminated).
* The top management is the Central Committee. They wield massive power. Officially it is a meritocracy but it is all about gaining favors with the ruling party.
* In the warehouses I hear they do these group exercises: Stalin loved public performances.
Anyone wanna add more?
Companies with a flat-like structure buck the trend a bit, but even they aren't run on purely democratic principles. I'd love to see a company built on democratic principles (either direct or representative democracy).
Read enough https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ and it's a consistent picture though. Speaking as a Seattle local, I hear these sort of anecdotes all the time.
The fact that they felt it important to mention this (and qualify it) definitely started me thinking...
Also as a Seattle local, all you have to do is ask around a little bit and these stories start crawling out. A few people have a good time, but that's not normative.
I had a great manager. I had a wonderful time working there. My biggest problem was that I was too fast; I'd get things done too quickly and run out of things to do. This happened even when I would ask for more work.
Otherwise the people were great, the pay was amazing, and I did most of my work from home, coming into Seattle for a few days every month to connect with the team in person.
Edit: s/should/would/
1. Much better parental leave
2. Easier to transfer internally (no longer need to wait 6 months, transfer can't be blocked by the current manager)
3. At least in my org, more transparent promotion process.
Pour one out.
And yes colleges are responsible for making students resilient. That's the 'job training' part. Many have courses in professional ethics, in responsible management, in meeting deadlines with quality work. These are not incidental to the education mandate, they are central.
First off, you'd need to demonstrate an effect that focused on that age group. But suicide rates are going up much more quickly for the middle aged and the poor. [0] Second, you clearly have no idea what "safe spaces" are. They're not "every part of life", they're specific meeting places in the community and focus on problems that have to be grappled with constantly, everywhere else. People who have access to safe spaces are consistently living with unsafe spaces; providing a small space of momentary refuge isn't coddling.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/hea...
