Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively and how to minimize bias. Verbally, it's all about numbers and probability. The organization wants X number of people to leave this year, to do that they want Y number of people in performance improvement plans.
There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn't exist, Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.
As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. Behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time advocating for my team and trying to poke holes in the performance ratings of other teams. It was exhausting. There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not. I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.
Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear...
Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.
Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.
"Sun Tzu then set the women a simple drill and made sure they understood what to do. However, when he started ordering them to perform the drill, the women burst out in laughter. He tried again with the same result. Sun Tzu claimed that this failure of the troops to obey was the fault of the commanders. So, despite the warlord’s pleas, he ordered the two concubines beheaded as an example for the rest of the company. Thereafter, the women did not utter a single sound and performed the drill exactly as commanded."
This is a depiction of Amazon. However, a "simple drill" is not high speed software engineering.
End result being snakes, backstabbers, and sociopaths rise to the top of the chains. Engineering is a collaborative effort so it speaks to the culture of AMZN how they incentivize this nonsense.
I agree. I’d hate to work at any org that does this as a rule.
To play devils advocate however, I’m sure many of us have been in a situation where a co-worker was coasting, or doing the minimal amount of work, while spending energy to look busy.
I’m thinking this cynical outlook could have contributed to this practice being implemented in large organizations.
An illustration of why these performance evaluation systems are always going to produce statistically irrelevant results was the Red Bead experiment[0] designed by the late, great W. Edwards Deming.
Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR.
This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.
Of course teams of employees with emotions and institutional knowledge are a bit more complex than a hand of cards, but that has never stopped bad management strategies.
Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out.
By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.
Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.
His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.
This is just one (very depersonalized) approach to not keeping 'dead weight' around, or optimizing staff to always be on an upwards trend. It's like an evolutionary algorithm; trim off the worst performers and the remainder will evolve to higher levels. In theory.
In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you.
Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.
Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)
The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.
Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?
I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.
It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave.
In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful.
Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.
Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP.
The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said something that pissed off a Director, I'm sure we can think of many more possibilities.
I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org.
This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve.
This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.
Explanation: Jack Welch wrote a book called 'Winning' in which he describes a system for rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% on a regular basis to foster a performance culture. From Wikipedia [1]:
> Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.
I've never seen a manager face any sort of criticism. They just lead with impunity. Often they are promoted for miserably failed projects because they took a risk, and in large tech companies with big cash cushions, risks are worth it.
In my experience most of the time managers just maintain status quo. Run standup, do 1:1s, hire, and pass on orders from above. They keep their jobs forever.
Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.
Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers.
Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager
> I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.
Is n't OP's manager actually did that?
I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.
No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.
That's funny, because from the other things you said:
There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year.
As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team.
It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.
I ended up switching teams and had a decent time at the company, but the nightmare situations are very real. You are replaceable and there’s no mercy
I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace.
My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.
Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev.
They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed.
The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do.
A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough.
It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.
It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.
Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).
It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.
My BS filter is highly developed now.
"We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives.
"If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)"
"Give it 110% people"
"If we dont get this done ....... "
This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it.
I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project.
This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant.
I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time.
After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming.
I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin.
I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple.
> ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))
This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.
Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.
I try to be professional, hard working and I even do some unpaid overtime when deadlines are strict.
But the moment you pressure and stress me to do more it's the moment I say no and all my commitment goes away.
I'm not here to clean up poor management, project planning and low budget.
Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is....
The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.
That's why a PIP puts said pay checque on the line though.
I mean I don't want to do any project with a deadline, ever again, if possible, and I haven't even been exposed to the level of stress and pressure that people get at certain companies.
I thought deadlines had gotten rid of a decade ago in software engineering with the rise of agile software development and the realization that software is difficult to neatly scope, and development time is almost impossible to predict.
In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.
Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it's off the table and all I can do is wonder :).
People like to talk about how great a teacher failure is, and how it teaches you valuable lessons... and it's true! Failure does teach you lots of valuable things, including things that you don't learn by succeeding. However, succeeding at something challenging generally teaches you more.
Or to cast it in ML terms... you need examples of both success and failure in your data set, but the "success" data points are more valuable.
And like any great, secure, lasting and stable engineering giving you the knowledge and time is key here.
When a company overloads the safety officer with tasks, so they and up not being able to do their work propperly and an incident happens, the company is at fault because it failed to provide the officer with the resources needed for the job.
If they don't give a dev the resources to do their job it is not different in my eyes. The fact that there might be some magical dev who would be able to get something working out of the same circumstances doesn't matter — maybe it has a company crippling flaw in it because of all the haste.
The last 1.5 of those I worked with what I consider two amazingly brilliant a####les.
I ended up leaving the most amazing place I had ever worked at until then (worldwide traveling, learning new stuff, actual high performance systems).
It has taken years to recover and I still cover myself more than I should.
My boss (who I liked) tried to get me back twice after he realized I had not been the problem and the two others had left but by then my salary had increased so much I was out of reach for him (edit:,) and telling my family I'd go down a double digit percentage in salary to work for someone who had not stood up for me back the was out of the question.
I don’t understand this though? Eventually someone’s head needs to roll. If you fail your project and get fired, how is your manager immune from consequence? They failed too (probably more).
Sounds generally like most jobs.
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far.
One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.
The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company.
It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch.
At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture.
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways.
So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit.
Nothing toxic so far.
One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool.
Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them.
However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it.
I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.
The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by.
I moved to another project within the HR space.
Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures.
Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception.
He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it.
Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving.
Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did.
So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
erm, this makes it sound like he was a not a very good engineer. Your code should always be written so that if you get hit by a bus one day, the rest of your team could pick right up where you left off
Usually you need to gather evidence that you've contributed significantly to a project. And the easiest way to do that is to work on new projects. Maintaining an existing codebase is usually a thankless job, which is also hard to get you promoted.
And once the new project is released it eventually gets abandoned and people move to the next one, which would help them get promoted. Think of all the Google projects that have been discontinued, which were also a product of similar processes.
So they go on the offensive and try to manage the dev out before senior management realises that yet another dev doesn’t want to work with them.
The manager might not be incompetent, but they sure are an asshole
Well, for starters, this LinkedIn post.
I've found bad managers are able to exist, even thrive, due to a culture of loyalty. Having worked in several countries this is a very Corporate America thing (IME). Loyalty is the only trait that matters. Fealty might be a more accurate description.
So that bad manager's manager looks at a situation where people are leaving. Those people are disloyal and thus bad. The bad manager is completely loyal and thus good.
Seriously.
There are very few Senior Managers who take the time to look beyond what’s immediately presented to them.
The same manager never fired anyone he hired. He fired a few that he had inherited (even calling them 'deadwood') around other employees. Employees who had worked with the 'deadwood' for decades. But his hires? They could be the worst performers, and even though they were contract to hire, he always hired them. To not hire them would be to admit his hiring practices were crappy. And considering he had little technical knowledge, he was susceptible to hiring people who kissed the ring (and stroked the ego).
Some managers are just bad. Peter Principal and all that. Some are great at telling everyone what they want to hear, both up the chain and down.
So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team.
The other pathological result is hiring dummies just to put them on pip, again protecting the core team from it.
This sounds like a lie people tell themselves after being PIP’d.
Engineers have an average tenure of 1.8 years. You can’t guarantee you’ll hold together anything. No manager PIPs someone for just being TOO good. It’s already difficult enough to find competent people.
Contrary to some other comments, the folks I’ve seen PIP’d did have performance issues. And I doubt they were hired to be fired. Teams are consistently understaffed and fighting for head count is a blood sport.
During review, PIP candidates come from all managers under a section of an org. There could be 3 from one team and 0 from another. The incentive is then to hire people who are actually good and defend your team’s performance.
Engineers lack visibility into cross team performance and this leads to thinking this system works differently.
Eh, in my company, I've seen managers that will use tools to prevent people from leaving. Fortunately, they have tools other than PIP. But if they didn't, I'm sure they would wave the PIP wand.
One guy was senior and core to the team. When he wanted to move, his manager bluntly told him he needed him for another year so he would not let him leave.
One of the orgs in my company famously classifies all employees as "essential" (nothing to do with the pandemic). Because of that, any time someone wants to leave for another org, it has to be approved by the top staff of the org (this org has thousands of employees, BTW). Although they don't prevent everyone from leaving, they do often prevent people - to the point that during internal interviews some of them were dropped by the interviewing team as soon as they discovered the org they were currently with: "We've been burnt too many times going through the interview loop only to have your org block the transfer - we just won't hire from your org any more."
So yeah, I totally can believe someone would use PIP to keep a good performer in a team, if that's the only way they have.
OTOH, I think I'd be insanely stressed about being judged unfairly for things outside my control (or even being made into a sacrificial lamb) in an environment like that. Even if they kept telling me everything was fine, I'd feel like I had the sword of Damocles hanging over my head all the time.
Source?
Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like "Be right a lot" or "Frugality."
Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.
Still making more money than GCP and Azure (both of which are worse to use, IMHO) so...who cares?
As a thought experiment, suppose all of AWS was down for a full week? What would happen after that?
More realistically, how many times can us-east-chaos-monkey bring down various global services before a lot of its users start making moves to mitigate or eliminate their exposure to AWS?
For a more concrete example, I'm working on a project that has an easy but critical use of cloud services. The more I read about Amazon following Microsoft into Ballmer era stack ranking madness, and the most AWS fails objectively fails, the lower the priority it gets for which cloud platform to support first and best.
I interviewed for an Engineering Manager job at MSFT and they looked like they had about 35 hours of meetings a week. On top of that they are expected respond to urgent issues from their direct reports and respond from urgent issues from upper management. Then there is the corporate politics of other middle managers.
The kicker was that most of the interview they were wanting me to do leet code. Really, I'm going to take this job and spend 50 hours a week of dealing with management tasks AND you think that I'm going to be keeping up my coding skills?
But I agree, I've been considering the shift to management (I like people) but the schedule seems punishing. As an IC only 20% of my time is scheduled, which is hard to give up.
Uh. Seems like folks being potentially unfairly pushed out are the ones with the worst jobs?
Everything about the toxic culture, the (unpaid) on call every 4 weeks, management doesn't care about estimations they just set you impossible deadlines, lots of turnover in the team, custom, unstable not documented tools, the "customer first" narrative to make you work overtime and feel guilty. I hear about this everyday. Even me not working at Amazon I have sev2 PTSD.
Never replied to those recruiters, and honestly at this point I try to stay away from FAANG's in general, they have the cash and prestige but I'm sure it's like any other F500 once you're working there. I don't need the stress of being a cog in someones megamachine.
Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story…
I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down!
However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment?
It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue.
But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away.
Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?
Don't date women that are easily confused with Bezos in drag?
"He was then PIP'd for accepting the gift card and not being frugal"
Such an utterly shallow pretence for engaging a discussion.
That is also:
- Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility (We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers)
- Deliver Results (Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle)
- Bias for Action (We value calculated risk taking)
- Think Big (They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers)
- Are Right, A Lot (They have strong judgment and good instincts)
- Ownership (They never say "that's not my job")
- Dive Deep (No task is beneath them)
Clearly, Will Ye Will Ye is operating at an Amazon final-stage boss level, if only they knew [0]!
How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423
> One night, when I was a dev manager at Amazon, another dev manager in Seattle sent me a 20-page design document at 11:30 pm and told me that he wanted me to get him feedback by 5:30 am the next day.
How fucking rude is that? It’s indicative of an absolutely staggering level of toxicity.
Honestly, what a waste. Imagine how much better Amazon could be if they didn’t treat their staff like cattle.
Dunno if I would automatically side with his story from that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
Edit: I think it's https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hire-jiawei-wang_hi-linkedin-...
Hmm, I think I've known this type of fuckabout whose massive submissions totally screw any hope of team cohesiveness and trust. Ok, slugger you can write shitloads of lines of code. Is it any good? Why would I want that much code when a factor of 10 less is more manageable?
Ugh this hits too close to home.
Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?
Additionally, because of the internal transfer policy and teams frequently switching out members, a lot of work is designed to be picked up by a new person, especially at the SD1/SD2 levels, so people are generally replaceable. Couple that with the fact that the interview process only tests for academic knowledge, without really proving that you can set up infra and services in production. And even more on top on top of that, Amazon gets a never ending candidate pool. So you get a combination of both poor performance that actually need to get PIPed out mixed in with poor teams that are ran like crap because managers themselves are not really technical and end up not delivering and then having to PIP people out.
That being said, because of this sort of structure, if you know how to make moves and "read the room" so to speak, Amazon is the best company for finding that sweet spot of maximizing revenue/actual hour worked. If you are a talented software engineer, not just a developer and generally know how to navigate around managers, you can hit senior engineer or manager levels quite easily, and then cruise control your way at $300k a year, and with an added benefit of lots of remote positions right now (since wfh is a big selling point in order to not get rejected by good candidates). From talking to people at Google/Facebook, those kind of moves are a lot harder to do.
PIP is a tool in manager's hands and above L6 no one gives a squat. They even encourage using it.
I’ve been an EM for a while. I have a lot I can discuss on a lot of different topics.
Nope. All they wanted to hear about was PIPs. I said I’d never had to do that, the goal after all, is to help people improve before it comes to that.
The guy explained that PIPs are a very large part of what their EMs do and are heavily emphasized in the interview process.
I politely declined round two.
What do they offer over their competitors? Same work and pay at other big tech, but you don't have to worry about potentially crazy hours or getting fired for no reason. Or any of the other great companies outside of big tech. Good pay, good impact, no PIP culture.
Recruiters from AMZN are trying to lure me away from Google (as recruiters do), but why on earth would I leave my good job and risk being a sacrificial fire?
I think I would be deathly bored at Google from everything I hear.
There are some great directors and executives at Amazon. I enjoyed my time there. There are also some toxic, toxic people with too much power and ambition.
I worked there for 4 years on the AIV / Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn't hear my colleagues talk about it either, "under-performing" laid off employees were rare (and unsurprising). Was I ignorant of what was going on around me?
From my perspective, the 'bar raising' in Amazon worked through the hiring process, of which I did many interviews. You only hired someone if you thought they were better than average either technically or on leadership principals.
Did this PIP quota thing always go on? Does this go on now to the same effect as people are talking about, or is this an echo chamber magnification of something that happened within a subset of one org?
However, I was part of the Retail org between 2018-2020. I strongly back the PIP horror stories here. I don't want to share more details, because I'm still not brave enough to publicly bash an employer on the net. But I want to emphasize what I think others have also mentioned here, which is that, due to Amazon's size, there was definitely no one "Amazon culture" to speak of. The variance between orgs (and sometimes, between teams in the same org) was bafflingly huge.
Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved.
PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatisfactory results. It's a few months long plan where you got assigned some tasks you should complete. If you are not able to complete them in time, you are fired.
I would not take his given statement at face value.
There are teams at Amazon full of some of the best technical and professional managers on the planet. There are teams at Amazon that are so brutally driven that they will sacrifice anything, even accepting an incomplete pentest audit and a forgoing week's worth of sleep, to hit a launch date.
I personally had a close friend on my team get PIPed and it was obviously a play from management to get rid of him. I have another friend who had to take months off after leaving because of the abuse she experienced. I have other close friends who have stayed for years.
It's such a big organization and the leadership chains are so decentralized that you get a wide variety of emergent patterns, and the decentralization makes it hard for people across the organization to know about the experiences of other teams.
Edit: in general I wouldn't say the horror stories are the norm at all from what I've seen.
Big companies are often far less consistent across teams than you'd expect/they'd like it to be, for better or worse
> I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective"
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he works 10 hours 6 days a week. Of course he takes no bio breaks, doesn't eat or drink and is not required to attend any standups or status meetings or design reviews.
This nets you 15600 minutes to code. So even under these absurd conditions he has managed over 3 lines of code per minute. What a god.
$ npm updateThough it may also be common to request a transfer when you sense your boss doesn't value you.
As an aside, I don't see much horror in this story - this happens in many industries and is especially prevalent in companies that try to cull their lowest performers. The only sad part (and maybe illegal) is that it appears to be retaliation for requesting a transfer.
To the engineer who posted this on LinkedIn, producing three-fourths of your teams code shouldn't be a metric you use to measure yourself. Communication with the computer is perhaps 20% of your job - communication with your coworkers/customers is the more important 80%.
First, the mandatory minimums. If an org is full of superstars, the org still has to ensure it has at least X% turnover per year, so a superstar has to go. Usually well-performing devs whose manager wasn't skilled enough to convince the larger group that all of their people are superstars.
It's cruel, unfair, and harms the company far more than it has ever helped them.
The second problem is that sociopaths can and do abuse it. There isn't supposed to be a way for a manager to fire someone on a PIP when they ask for a transfer. There's also at least one manager in the Toronto office who openly brags that he does it. He's been there a long time, and the devs warn each other not to go work for that guy if you value your job.
Being a sociopath is not a requirement to become a senior leader at Amazon, but the qualities of a sociopath strongly overlap with the qualities it takes to get those promotions. So naturally, the systems in place are designed to favour sociopath behaviours. There is no system to try to identify and remove such people who abuse the PIP system, because the people in charge would never want such a system.
Kind of glad I left. When I chose which offer to take, I decided to turn down a much higher paying offer because "That company feels too much like Amazon".
Can anyone explain the motivation for this?
I've never understood why a company would want to routinely fire X% of otherwise well preforming employees in a team, when they're going to need to hire that many again anyway.
Let me hazard a guess: Microsoft, Coinbase, Uber, or Airbnb?
I’d love to see the data correlating PIPs of reports to manager tenure. I bet there is an inverse correlation. So to prospective hires, ask your hiring manager how long THEY have been a manager AT AMAZON before you waste time going through the whole interview process.
I had a manager who was one of those org-psychopaths you speak of and it was entertaining to watch him tear apart managers of other teams. Absolutely shred their OP1 docs and argue that their team was working on utter bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong there was a lot of good stuff about Amazon, their operations culture is second to none, but a lot of the ways I saw people being treated and bad behavior from managers being tolerated rubbed me the wrong way. I absolutely saw PIP being used reactively to block a transfer to my team, for instance.
I think the lesson of this story is to apply for another role after the performance review season.
Or to not express intention to transfer to current manager?
Companies are just collections of people who are delivering goods and services to customers and returning money to shareholders. The PIP story isn't even surprising based on reporting from Big Technology and even the New York Times story from a few years ago.
I suspect Amazon is going to be in decline the next 20+ years and the start of that decline will be the company breaking up and selling off it's "non-core" businesses.
> The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package.
> 50% of his CRs are merged without approval.
> So, yeah, there you go !
Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line. Aren't you being too generous with an anonymous comment that you provide no link to? Is not possible that is just Amazon propaganda?
Maybe someone who's knowledgeable with the development of CDKs can shed some light on how reasonable those numbers are.
For example: * Yes, he "submitted" >50k lines of code. Most of it is auto-generated from infrastructure generation templates.
* His teammates are submitting less lines of code because they're working on business logic
* Amazon doesn't let you put people on performance improvement plans because they are trying to switch teams. What is happening in these situations is that someone is ALREADY on a performance improvement plan because of a problem (and it could be technical, or it could be personal or professional), is receiving feedback for improving, decides they are not interested in working on fixing these issues, and tries to switch teams. This is when they find out that Amazon (like most companies) doesn't want you to just run away from problems by moving internally, and that you are not allowed to transfer. Then they go run to Blind or Linkedin to talk about how their manager is trying to sabotage them or hit PIP quotas.
Just saying. There's always more to stories like this.
that is well beyond real.
Unless this is generated boilerplate, it just isn't possible to create that much code, that quickly, and have it be correct.
The manager got what he/she needed, which is meeting the attrition target and thus will get a TT or HV and carry on, doing the same thing again next go-around. Amazon still carries its brand value and millions of CS grads will still be clamoring to join the company, or experienced SWEs looking to switch company and start the recruiting process.
Jiawei Wang is leaving a big tech company, which happens at thousands a day, and unfortunately he is looking to join another company as a 9-5er, fading into the oblivion of corporate history, like a single blade of grass in a million square mile field.
Unless of course Jiawei join/starts a unicorn and gets a couple Bs, then he will get a nice bio entry in wikipedia and do something like what Tepper did to Corzine to get his ultimate comeuppance.
At least it's not every other week like it was for my team for a while. Now we're up to every 6 weeks.
Some people work a short period to get a taste of the tech stack and pace of a FAANG while other people post to HN about upcoming interviews at Meta and how they may hate the company's morality but want that big fat comp package. Everyone has their own reasons for taking a particular job and sometimes that calculation needs include the cost of associating your work history with the brand of the company you are working for, but if you think that what you are doing and the impact it has on the rest of the world is important then that warm and fuzzy feeling is a part of the compensation you are maximizing. In the long run no one will care, so anyone who is not maximizing compensation is probably a fool.
Big companies are actually like a conglomeration of small companies under an umbrella company. The culture is 20% upper management, 80% local management, and so your experience will differ greatly from department to department.
Bad managers exist in most companies. They can and do target people for personal reasons, and usually the targeted person doesn't have the protection or political clout to defend themselves, so they're killed off and life goes on.
I had a similar experience at Canonical of all places, which was a real drag because they were one of the few fully remote companies at the time, and I like the company.
Not everyone has the opportunities you have had. Some people actually have to struggle to climb for X reasons, and make tradeoffs to enable them to survive / grow.
Some people actually need money and can't just ignore wads of cash being thrown at them for the first time in their lives.
You're fighting ignorance with more ignorance.
wait wat? how is this possible? I'm not sure I would be able to even mindlessly type 51k lines of code in one month
* It promotes lazy managers who easily put engineers on PIP. I have heard so many stories where managers put engineers on PIP as soon as they apply for internal transfers and execute very shady stuff like suddenly sending MoM for 1:1 meeting 3 days later with stuff that was never discussed, etc.
* It creates an environment of distrust amongst engineers for the system. I've talked to engineers who have lost trust in all internal mechanisms like Connections, Forte, etc. Blind is full of stories & have seen personally where none of these mechanisms are able to surface structural & cultural problems. Examples like: Managers putting unnecessary pressure on a smaller team due to inability to hire good talent and literally abusing them when they decide to leave. Managers not talking about growth and not doing anything & more importantly not knowing enough to be able to grow their engineers.
* When faced with a bad manager or bad culture, a skilled engineer faces 2 choices, either fight the good fight, try escalating, try reaching out to HR or leave the team or leave Amazon. Even if there were no bad stories, its so hard for an employee to choose the former, but with so many stories floating around, the first choice becomes impossible. That leaves Amazon with a huge blind spot around bad managers, bad teams, and bad orgs.
* In terms of impact, a bad manager has 10x more negative impact to Amazon as compared to a bad engineer, yet the PIP process is carried about when IMO Amazon should be investing in re-establishing trust with engineers, creating processes to discover bad managers, bad teams and then establishing a process to weed them out.
Disclaimer: Amazonian here (soon to be ex).
I internally transferred at Amazon and had many internal offers to choose from - so I went with a team that had great tech survey results and where the manager seemed like an honest guy that I could trust. In < 2 years I had 6 different managers at Amazon, so I felt like I could read managers pretty well and knew what I was looking for. I joined the team and was ecstatic, up until the manager announced he was leaving 2 weeks later. I had to report to his manager who I had interviewed with and could tell I didn't work with. He had newly been hired by Amazon just a few months earlier, and he was exactly the type of micromanaging bureaucrat that Amazon gives too much power. He also clearly didn't want to manage ICs and they weren't clear to him during the interview process that he was going to manage ICs rather than managers.
Things went about as poorly as you can expect. The new manager had no technical knowledge, poor leadership, and blatantly favored the people he was managing before he inherited my team. But I'm not sure if I can convey how bad he was. He would have engineers manually updating excel spreadsheets for his monthly business reviews as part of their oncall work (which was literally his job). He would gaslight engineers into telling them they'd be promoted, and then hand them a PIP. He would lie at status meetings and has numerous documented performance issues and complaints in his connections and directly to his manager and director. His performance was so dismal that our Senior Manager made his team meet together and write down ideas (anonymously) for the manager to stop being so bad. He would blatantly not pay attention in meetings and ask us to repeat whatever we went over in the previous day's meetings (which he attended himself) in standup. He would never back up his engineers on any push back, even when we would get paged to do things outside of our SLA windows and completely let our stakeholders run us over with requests and expectations.
No list about all of his horrible practices could be complete, but I want to emphasize that he was so disliked that he caused 9 people to leave his team in 10 months. I don't want to say I was the best engineer, but I got positive feedback from all of the senior and principal engineers I worked with and I thought I was on a steady path to being promoted. But it turns out this manager realized he could weaponize performance ratings, and gave me and the other L4s that he inherited the lowest performance rating possible while giving his original reports promos and the highest rating possible. This wasn't an absolute shock to me and I already intended to leave Amazon because I couldn't stand him any longer, but this set my team's senior engineer off. He was absolutely livid and escalated the issue to the senior manager that this was a disaster and completely ridiculous. The senior manager met with me personally, told me it was a problem and that he'd make it right. He and the director decided to have my team report to a new (remote) manager, but for me it was too late and I decided to leave amazon.
But what happened to the manager? Well, I wish I could say HR stepped in and fired him for weaponizing ratings, or his bosses PIPed him for being awful, but actually none of those things happened! He caused ~60-70% attrition, had documented performance issues, and abused tools in a documented way and still manages at Amazon! A few months ago he internally transfered and as far as I know his new team doesn't have him on a PIP yet.
What is the takeaway for anyone reading? Just remember that just because you interview with a manager doesn't mean they'll be your manager forever, or even really at all. And it's okay if you underperform at Amazon, as long as your title is SDM. The last thing I wanna say is that I really liked the Senior Manager as a person, but he was too nice to the shitty manager. PIPing is inherently a bad system, but if it can't even catch someone who is so blatantly underperforming for a year straight then it doesn't even do what it says on the box.
Also no matter what don't join Amazon Go Boston. Just as a heads up.
EDIT: See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204 for more info and https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-does-not-re... from a few years ago. They may of "made up" since, but I've not been using CF for DNS for a while now.
Not saying this guy is wrong, his manager is right, or vice versa. I'm saying you don't know by this post, and by many of the pitchfork comments I'm reading, a lot of folks feel an unwarranted sense of surety in their outrage.
My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it'd be time to get out. Like what's the point?
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5fj9mh/amazon_e...
I have friends with horror stories about Sr. SDMs going behind their back to put down names they fought to save. Imagine that SDM now having to tell that report they're at risk of being fired at a performance review.
L6 SDM is the most difficult job at Amazon.
---
SDM - Software development manager.
L6 - Entry level for the role (L5 SDMs exist, but are more rare).
"Here is a dev good enough to get through your screens and panels, they will be keeping their actual job, but will make enough appearances to pull the secondary salary for whatever period time you need before your team is required to lose someone to attrition"
I really doubt that companies raise the average with stacked ranking.
The real reason tech companies use agrressive hiring (and firing that funds hiring) is to steal the most possible fresh IP from competitors (in a legal way).
This is all anecdotal of course, but my experience in working closely with the Smart Home side of Amazon makes me not want to work at Amazon.
If you're a workaholic, you'll do well. If you aren't, you'll hate it.
Again, just one guys POV.
Especially with new grads, they've lowered the bar and stopped doing interviews since it's so hard to hire, that there's a lot of people not cut out for the job so they rely on pip to calibrate quality.
Good luck hiring into a toxic workplace culture, Amazon recruiters!
If this happened in the US and the warning came from managers at Amazon, wouldn't this be an infringement against protected concerted activity and thus illegal?
Perfect example of betriebsblind
This may have happened, but doesn't align with my experiences at Amazon. Maybe things are different based on what org you're in.
Or Polynesian infrastructure project.
It's all a matter of perspective in planning.
(although to be fair pip and the python package ecosystem has come a long way in the last few years)
Fuck you bezos!
It would have been more pragmatic to fire up leetcode, take a few interviews, and leave the job professionally. This probably would have come with a small pay bump, even with this persons limited professional experience.
Maybe I'm just lucky and I've never had a bad experience like this, but I couldn't see myself posting something like this professionally.