Performance management is a necessity in any company, but whether you’re in “Focus” or not is besides the point.

There’s no company policy that managers cannot or should not discuss performance or providing coaching until an employee enters focus. This is absolutely false, and if someone’s doing this, they’re a bad manager failing at their job.

Performance feedback and discussing career growth is exactly what manager 1:1s are for. You’ll know way in advance if there are performance problems. If you don’t know or somehow it was never communicated with you, that sounds like a manager who is failing their team. And among the size of Amazons workforce, the probability of no manager ever dropping the ball or failing at their job is 0. Managers can be ineffective, just as the people who report to them.

But to repeat, company policy is NOT to hide performance feedback from employees. The article is editorialized. One example the article provides is a person who was put on Focus who is a person of color. Actually, I’m a person of color too. You could try to argue my perspective reeks of survivorship bias. On the other hand, a significant chunk of the workforce in engineering and tech related roles are people of color. Amazon is significantly more diverse than other industries I previously worked in. Again, I 100% don’t believe your skin color, race, religion, gender, or any other type of discrimination is a factor in performance. That’s simply not the company I know.

And my question stands - yes, there are employees who under perform. And when they’re let go, they’re going to be upset with the company. Most people, no matter how brilliant they are or are not, are not great at receiving feedback, particularly negative feedback. But the issue I see here is it’s implied that these are all solid performers who were put into performance management for no reason at all or they were blind sided. I don’t believe that’s a systemic issue.

In my opinion, the hiring interviews do their best to establish a high bar for candidates, but we do make hires who are great on paper, can white board problems, but they fail to deliver at their work. These people are given plenty of feedback PRIOR to Focus or any performance management plan kicks in.

This article makes it sound like Amazon hires and fires at will. From my personal experience, this is not true where I work in the engineering organizations. Given the interview bar, it’s difficult and costly to find and hire candidates. Once someone joins your team, your team puts in an investment in ramping that person up. If that person isn’t so effective at the tasks they’ve been assigned, the first step is to identify their strengths and place them in projects or tasks where they can flex those muscles and grow in whatever areas there are gaps.

Now did some team somewhere have a manager who dropped the ball or senior engineers who didn’t come together to help the new hire? Yeah - probably. But that’s not a cultural or systemic problem. That’s a problem with that specific team. And if that’s how that team is run, it’s going to be obvious when they fail to deliver. But yeah, this unfortunate case is what drives outrage and readership (for this paper), and so that’s what you’ll see in the news media.