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the_amzn_race
RHSeeger
> 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.
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.
wpietri
Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member.
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.
malfist
Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political.
Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.
So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.
Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.
rehash3
Internal culture, process and behavior is what decides if a job is stressful.. while at Amazon I worked fewer hours outside work hours but was a lot more stressed as every one around you is busy proving their worth than looking at what needs to get done collectively.
pyuser583
“ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.”
This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!
Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.
My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.
But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”
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timhrothgar
Completely agreed. The credible threat of termination drives employees to perform even if they also misbehave in other ways (e.g. CYA and office politics). Consider the Lesson of the Concubines by Sun Tzu:
"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.
cvhashim
>Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.
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.
linspace
I was thinking along similar lines yesterday, although it was about patents: how things I value like science and software have benefited much more from collaboration than competition. And yet we have been convinced of the power of greed. Where are the works of these powerful people now? Turned to dust. All this chit chat about impact. Impact is about helping others. If your workplace doesn't encourage you to help your coworkers the best case is that you are building nothing.
ek750
> > 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. > Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this.
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.
JJMcJ
It turns work into a war of all against all.
ziggus
These kinds of examples are great illustrations of how damaging stack ranking (and most other performance evaluation systems) really are. Instead of focusing on improving their team's performance by reducing the friction inherent in any corporate bureaucracies, this manager is forced to spend time playing Machiavellian games that only serve to reduce effectiveness and engender an anti-productive spirit.
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.
mistyislands
Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience.
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.
allochthon
I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.
mistyislands
hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).
ltfey
It continues because we live under capitalism and the upper class wants to divide working people amongst themselves at all levels, because it keeps them on top. It really is that simple.
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zelos
What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.
wongarsu
If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards. At the beginning your worst cards are probably below average, so any new replacement is statistically likely to be better. But even when you reach the point where all your cards are above average it can make sense to keep redrawing a small percentage, since that's the only way to get more aces.
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.
vvvnnnnvvv
That may be the public way of explaining it, but I see it slightly differently. Amazon doesn't like "good intentions", rather it prefers "mechanisms". We all know that managers should put low performers on PIPs, but Amazon doesn't really trust managers' good intentions. It wants to make SURE that low performers are put on PIPs. The mechanism they've selected is an unregretted attrition target. The target represents the number of people they expect to be under performing and only applies to orgs greater than a certain size.
source: recently left Amazon as SDM
zelos
I kind of see that, but it completely ignores the cost of hiring (financial and in lost productivity in the team that has to onboard the new hire) and the loss of knowledge and experience from firing as well.
anonymous8979
I've been an SDE at Amazon for 8 years. What I've noticed over time is that the quality of hires and employees has gone down. I think the stack ranking is partly responsible for it, because it couldn't evaluate engineers in absolute measures, but only relatively.
This is where your cards analogy falls through, in a deck of cards, you know that there are better cards you don't have in your hand, you know exactly what your Jack is worth in absolute terms.
At Amazon, you can have a Royal Flush, and because of stack ranking decide to discard your 10, and if you know your poker, that makes you go from the best hand to one of the worse.
The issue is you wouldn't know your 10 at Amazon was a great engineer and a key asset to your team, and that all replacement candidates are going to be worse, except now you've lost precious time, ramp up, and moral, as well as a great employee.
For a smaller company, it might make sense as you're building a core team and might need to go through a few people before you find a set of good ones, but where Amazon is now, at its size, over time, it has lost engineers that in industry wide averages were above it, and it has created a reputation that hurts it from attracting them back or other engineer's above the industry's average.
Due to this, Amazon is becoming a second pick. Good engineers will pick Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and even sometimes Facebook (due to their higher comp) over Amazon. And since all these companies hiring process are the same, it's common that someone who can pass the Amazon interview can pass one of those other ones as well. In fact, almost 70% of everyone I've seen be released from a PIP went to work at one of the other big tech companies.
The other big problem is that the stack ranking works like American reality TV competitions. It doesn't matter if you've excelled year over year, if you have one bad year, where for whatever reason you get identified as a low performer, you'll get PIPed. In my experience that's often contextual, a new manager or you look like a bad performer because the business and leadership couldn't figure out good projects for you to work on and own that year, or they themselves couldn't get their act together and you're a scape goat. Other people on your team might have performed better simply out of luck of having been assigned better projects.
Amazon used to get away with simply finding the best talent, but in my experience there, that's now backfiring, and instead of growing the best talent, their quest to find it is turning into a system that recruits more and more mediocre talent as time goes on.
abeppu
> If you have a hand of cards you want to optimize it makes sense to keep discarding and redrawing your worst cards.
But this makes sense _in a game with a fixed hand size_. But a company's staff should grow over time. So shouldn't one have an ROI-based criteria where you want each team member to help grow generate meaningfully more revenue than they cost to employ. If my "lowest" performing team members still make meaningfully more money than they cost to employ, they still increase my ability to hire more.
mateo411
It's an interesting analogy, but employees aren't cards. One important difference is that employees get better over time, assuming there is a decent culture of communication and mentorship.
Maybe you hired a 7 of clubs, but given time they can gain institutional knowledge and improve their skillset to become a Jack of Spades.
I'm happy there are companies that set attrition metrics as a KPI, it makes it easier for me to hire and build out a technical team for my company.
matthewowen
The devils advocate answer:
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.
praptak
There is a gap in this reasoning though. "X% of employees are not worth their salary" does not imply "mandatory firing X% employees is good for the company".
In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.
steveBK123
Sure, at a given point with low attrition this may be true. However if you are forcing the "bottom" 10-15% out every year, you tend to run out of "bottom" people to exit.. unless you are very bad at recruiting (or purposely hiring to fire).
Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..
efitz
> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.
Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.
bathtub365
And as a nice side effect you begin to collect exactly the types of people willing to fire 10% of their workforce every year.
sangnoir
Are managers stack ranked too? If not, and assuming the whole scheme works[1], then steady state is accumulation of bad managers, while they keep firing above-average ICs (that are still in their bottom 10).
1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.
user_named
There is no reason to believe that the lowest 10% performers are the same as the 10% put on PIP/forced attrition.
contravariant
I can't really imagine a normal work environment where 10% (or any significant percentage) is actively harming the company.
SNosTrAnDbLe
This becomes more difficult when you have dont adjust for variables like out of work pressure. For example, the year that I had a kid, my performance was not the best. It took me an year to adjust but now I have bounced back. I wonder how this would have played out in Amazon or similar companies.
pcurve
It's Jack Welsh playbook and it's stupid. I remember reading an interview with a head of company long time and he said something to the effect of "In any given company, top 20% of the workers push the company forward. middle 60% maintains status quo, and bottom 20% of the workers actively drag the company down." Interviewer ask: "why not just fire bottom 20%?"
His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
efitz
Thank you Jack Welch (the guy who drove this insane idea in the first place). Hope it’s warm enough for you down there.
dehrmann
A while back, on HN, a manager commented that people do their best work in the first few years. I suspect it's a combination of novelty and hunger. After a few years, you're done contributing what your experience and perspective can to the project, and your main skill is maintaining the status quo. Now, Amazon is big, and you can transfer, so this doesn't apply in the same was as it does for smaller companies.
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.
hughesjj
> High churn improves the bus factor.
High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems.
Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable?
I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system.
However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.
Cthulhu_
I think at some point, which Amazon passed a long time ago, you become too big to be able to 'notice' everyone; there's plenty of stories where there's employees, usually white-collar office workers, that do nothing for years if not decades and still get paid.
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.
mistyislands
On theory it makes sense. Any large organization experience bloat and there are lots of white collar employees who do nothing while collecting a salary. Regularly trimming the fat is good.
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.
AndyMcConachie
Why do masters whip slaves?
allochthon
That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.
geekbird
I have worked at a subsidiary, and other companies worse than Amazon. Imagine if, instead of annual reviews are required to put 5% at the bottom of a stack rank and then "manage them out", you have quarterly stack ranks, where everyone knows who is in the ranking pool, and with two bad quarters you are out, even if it was just the luck of the draw, because management had to dump on someone.
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.
ctvo
> The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless.
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?
ltfey
Performance reviews are garbage. They are not needed. They exist as a way for the capital-owning class to remind workers that they are seen as subhuman and will be thrown back on the streets the minute they are no longer seen by their masters as productive.
If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.
PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.
In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.
In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.
And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.
noblepayne
> but you're against performance reviews?
It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time.
> How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job?
Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.
allochthon
Stack ranking is not my cup of tea at all. But, yes, I'm kind of leaning against performance reviews as well. It's an open question in my mind. I appreciate that big companies might have a challenge on their hands, and I don't have a lot of answers, here. But in my experience, performance reviews have not added anything obviously positive to the workplace, and they're invariably a source of friction. Which seems willfully obtuse when a company has an attrition problem. And I say this as someone who is not considered a low performer.
lkxijlewlf
> As a manager, you get verbal (never written)
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.
Firmwarrior
I did that at Amazon, and it didn't help me too much, since basically my entire org got burned to the ground after our VP lost a fight with another VP. Proving I did my job for the year I got a bad performance review didn't really mean anything when 4 layers of management above me all disappeared.
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.
argc
I'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our VP has tried to get out of the system (there are some quotas that he didn't go into detail about) we are stuck in the system and the result is that over the entire org, people are stack ranked (or something similar to stack ranking but not explicitly called "stack ranking" and if, for example, he was able to make the case that his direct reports were all doing well and improving, then inevitably other teams in the org would somehow be forced to have more low ranked individuals. I don't know how these things are enforced but there you have it. He also mentioned that someone explicitly said that the way to think about it is to "stack rank individuals in your head". Pretty blatant and it seems to be very much built in to the system.
JJMcJ
> force a certain amount of attrition each year
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.
geekbird
That's why I told my manager at an Amazon subsidiary that performance reviews were a farce. Because they were. I was burned out, and seeing all too clearly what a shit show it was. I got a layoff in April.
greatpostman
I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”.
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
hughrr
A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me.
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.
octagonal
I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang.
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.
urthor
700 a day???
Why did you undercharge by so much.
I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money."
Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.
rehash3
Amazon's orientation and internal culture is structured to make one think that it is a matter of personal pride and worth and if you do not align you are worthless.. it is a mind F** for fresh college hires.. I like to think Amazon is the tech industries' Pedo***..
hughrr
Spot on. Another relative point to note is that I learned pride should be ranked well below dignity.
serial_dev
One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee.
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.
democracy
i had to check twice that it wasnt me who wrote it )))
gkop
Those cofounders are terrible leaders. Was the startup successful?
ThinkBeat
This is a great comment and how one should evolve to stay sane and healthy.
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))
kitd
This is exactly why I think contract work is the most honest form of employment in the software industry. "Mission statements" and "customer zeal" are meaningless when you're having to do endless weekend and evening hours. If it means so much to you, pay me by the hour first, then we can talk about devotion to the customer.
urthor
During log4j, I was a contractor embedded in a team that was 2/3rds fulltimers.
Guess who got called in on the weekend for log4j?
Guess who only heard about the problems on Monday at 9am?
You guessed it, the call was made to not pay the (documented) day rate for contractor call outs on weekends. Full-timers got "days in lieu."
hughrr
Completely agree with this.
Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…
sp332
If my health insurance weren't so dependent on employment, I'd agree more.
square_usual
> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace.
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.
hughrr
Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it.
Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.
It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
indigochill
I think it's healthy to not care about something you have no real stake in. But you can compensate for that condition in a day job with hobbies or pets or friends or generally something to care about outside of work. I personally do a number of regular social things outside work as well as occasionally writing and producing music on a purely amateur basis, where the only reason to do them is _because_ I care.
np-
What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.
vaughandroid
I imagine that's a good place to be, but I don't know if it's possible without going through a lot of trauma and building up substantial mental scar tissue.
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.
hughrr
I was at that sort of company, finally. They got bought out. It changed. I’m staying for the retainer at the moment.
epolanski
Same, I couldn't give two damns if the project fails and burns.
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.
pnutjam
Bingo, you find a problem that's been broken for 6 months, it's not an emergency. It will still be broken tomorrow.
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.
Cthulhu_
I mean, you even attempted it. I would've looked at it and told them their deadline or scope was unrealistic.
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.
mjrbrennan
I’m in the same boat as you, haven’t worked on anything with a deadline for the past 2 and a half years and I never want to go back to it, totally pointless arbitrary dates that are never met.
BossingAround
Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot?
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 :).
greatpostman
I’ll be honest, I learned an absurd amount. Like more in those six months than in four years if previous work. It was real software development, with actual distributed systems problems. But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now
mytailorisrich
> But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now
This is the normal approach. You are experienced and wise now.
klodolph
My go-to aphorism in for questions like these is "you learn more from success than from failure".
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.
xmprt
Isn't that simply because you experience failure many more times than you experience success. In fact on your path to success you are almost guaranteed to experience multiple failures. So by that metrics one success teaches you the lessons of many failures.
tpxl
You will learn more if you're working under a competent lead in a similar situation.
atoav
In my experience you can learn from such stress situations, but the goal of a company is usually not to form a bootcamp for new employees, but to have it's devs create great, lasting, secure and stable software.
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.
urthor
Amazon's mentality is pretty clever I think. The entire company is designed to repeatedly test all its employees till failure by piling on the workload until they say uncle, then backing off 20% if they push-back.
It's a crazy approach that probably falls apart if you're unsuccessful. But they're very successful so they can just keep burning money to attract new hires. Also, I imagine it's a huge career builder if you work in FMCG or development to have "Amazon retail" or "Amazon Web Services" on your resume. Since everyone uses those platforms.
I imagine what is left at the end is a residue of "born again" workaholics, who're probably pretty great at their jobs. Who then ascend to and form middle management.
And the global express trundles on, powered by these workaholics.
skinkestek
I worked for three years in a extremely customer driven company.
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.
ngc248
You may/may not learn, but living in situations like the OP was put in is horrible. Every day feels like hell, and if you burn out it may take years to recover.
BossingAround
This is my personal experience, which is why I'd advise people not to go through with the above thought experiment.
Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this:
> How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server")
> Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ...
> Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5 servers?
> Hmm, probably write shell scripts.
> How about 50 servers?
> Shell scripts?
> Even with 500 servers?
> Hire more people..?
And I keep feeling that these people don't have 10 YoE, they have 1-2 YoE times some coefficient.
I feel like if you're in a "successful rut", that's what it will do to you. You feel like you're successful, but in fact, you have fallen horribly behind, without even knowing it.
Your quality of life is probably fine, until you're laid off one day.
cabirum
No idea how things work at Amazon, but why did you accept such a tight deadline? Have you provided your own estimates for dev time?
MattGaiser
At least everywhere I have worked, deadlines generally come down from on high, often with no real developer input. If you are lucky, your manager will be successful in fighting for more time. If you somewhat lucky, the missed deadline will be ignored. If you are unlucky, the deadline will approach and people will suddenly disappear.
Cthulhu_
I mean the project management triangle comes into play then, and when it comes to SWE, throwing more money at a problem usually doesn't make it go faster.
Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.
greatpostman
I was naive but it wasn’t really negotiable. Don’t meet the deadline by a large margin? Expect to be out of the company relatively soon. I think this particular team was much more hardcore than other parts of the company. Most of the horror stories come from the core amazon services
slt2021
amazon has Leadership Principles (corporate koolaid) that makes deadlines top-down and non-negotiable, otherwise you are deemed as not meeting a bar
deltaonefour
What if the deadline is fundamentally impossible? No room for leeway here?
hughrr
That’s why I never touch a new Amazon service for 12 months.
ngc248
In big companies, there is program management which comes up with the overall schedule. There will be buffer time, but you still have to work within the given time whatever challenges there may be.
Aeolun
> You are replaceable and there’s no mercy
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).
giantg2
"You are replaceable and there’s no mercy"
Sounds generally like most jobs.
wing-_-nuts
I'm surprised you were allowed to switch teams. Most companies explicitly disallow it for people under any sort of performance review (even informal).
abledon
Having all that responsibility were you SDE-2 ? SDE-3 ?
dininski
Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. 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.
dorianmariefr
Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great.
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.
crowbahr
I wish I had realized your comment was better spaced before slogging through the previous text brick.
BeetleB
That was a very readable comment. I'm reminded of the times I've posted here about "If it's 3 paragraphs or longer, my coworkers won't read it" only to get responses like "Must be poor writing on your part!"
I wish to thank you for proving my case.
pcthrowaway
I really didn't think the "linkedin-style spacing" was necessary. The OP was not exactly short, but had a good enough sense of spacing and used paragraph breaks appropriately.
aasasd
Found the guy who does formatting for BBC.
Sevii
Had a similar experience where I tried to switch to another team. But wasn't able to move because I missed expectations the prior year or something along those lines. Was never put on pip, but I left 2 months later. Team had horrible 50%+ attrition that year.
peteradio
Thank you I could tell it was a good read but my morning eyes kept getting lost in the paragraph.
spaceywilly
“ eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it”
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
dogecoinbase
This doesn't sound like something a good engineer would do. I try to work with people competent enough not to walk in front of buses.
ok_dad
> I try to work with people competent enough not to walk in front of buses.
Sounds like if you work at Amazon you might choose to walk in front of a bus one day...
dininski
Unfortunately this is a quite common scenario in big enterprises, such as Amazon, Google and the lot. Main reason is the promotion process.
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.
transitory_pce
This is a phenomenon common to all low grade/incompetent dev managers: When a dev asks for a team change they view it as a slap in the face because it has happened to them so often in the past and they take it as a personal offence. The fact is they are lousy managers and usually incompetent and nobody wants to work in their team.
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.
aaviran
This might not be the case here. As the OP theorized, they were already on the way out of the team, so why not use them to fill up the PIP quotas?
The manager might not be incompetent, but they sure are an asshole
chickenpotpie
If you get PIPed at amazon, you can't transfer teams. It locks you to your current team until you "improve"
phendrenad2
I wonder what the logic there is. If someone isn't doing well on a team, shuffling them to a new project might help. But the downside is managers might be annoyed by a new person on the team who is a suspected low-performer. Could lead to a game of hot-potato where people try to avoid having PIPs added to their team through politics.
minhazm
The logic there is that this person was already going to leave your team either way, so if you PIP them they will just leave the company and you don't need to PIP someone else instead. Still a sociopathic thing to do though.
jldugger
> they were already on the way out of the team, so why not use them to fill up the PIP quotas
Well, for starters, this LinkedIn post.
onlyrealcuzzo
Then senior management should be wondering why so many low performers are ending up with certain managers...
cletus
In my experience it almost never works like this. The fish rots from the head.
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.
mleonhard
This is true. I suffered a lot until I learned that showing loyalty is necessary for having a career in a big company.
Most people don't care at all about doing a good job. They just want more money. To get along with them, you must help them get more money. If you oppose them on anything, they will make you suffer. And if they have the skills, they will manipulate and gaslight you. You can't make anyone do their work well. People work well when the organization is set up for it. If you can't tolerate your teammates' behavior, just move to a different team or company.
siva7
That’s exactly how management usually works
square_usual
TFA mentions a PIP quota and implies that OP was used to fill the quota, so I'm pretty sure upper management won't blink at this happening. They expect people to get PIP'd, and they have no visibility on the actual internals, so to them OP is just as good as anybody else who got PIP'd.
0x002A
The upper management only gives a blink when it becomes more known by the public. They don't want to hear (just not to be in the responsibility zone) and when it's widely known they would go whitewashing or PR stunts.
Why they had to invent "to be the best employer of the world" as a leadership principle?
The more people should stand up and make the stupid policies known, that's the only way this can stop. Otherwise this policies will be the norm for many companies since "it can work"
pm90
It’s difficult to not feel empathy for people you have a relationship with. Even if a manager is incompetent, they will get the benefit of the doubt from vs a lowly engineer whom the Senior Manager does not have a personal relationship with.
There are very few Senior Managers who take the time to look beyond what’s immediately presented to them.
drclau
So M2s+ are expected to have empathy for M1s, but M1s are not expected to have empathy for engineers. And, M2s+ having been M1s prior to being promoted, have to develop empathy when becoming M2s+.
Have I described correctly the situation?
Legend:
M2 - senior management, has other managers reporting to them
M1 - first layer of management, has workers / engineers as direct reports
jonathankoren
Instead they’ll be wondering why these managers are so good at identifying poor performers. /s
greedo
I had a boss who lost a new hire to another team. This new hire was an outstanding performer, and the boss simply couldn't see what he had done to cause this. He seriously was in a funk about it for 6 months. Anytime it came up, he went through the stages of grief. Turns out the employee simply didn't like the caliber of teammates, nor the pace of work. He was able to move to a team that tended towards more of a cowboy mentality.
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.
praptak
The pip quota is a HUGE perverse incentive here. Choosing someone to put on pip is hard because it is in manager's best interest to protect their core team from pip.
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.
ctvo
> 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.
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.
BeetleB
> No manager PIPs someone for just being TOO good.
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.
commandlinefan
I always wonder about that. I've never worked at Amazon, but I've worked at places with people who really, really, ought not to be working in computer software - yet they blunder around, causing problems for everybody else, because nobody knows how to or can think of a way to get rid of them.
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.
endisneigh
> 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.
Source?
ctvo
This is a secondary source: https://buffer.com/resources/employee-tenure/#employeetenure...
The original source from Paysa seems to be down (the entire site looks down).
Edit: It's all employees, not just engineers, but I don't think engineers would differ too much.
2OEH8eoCRo0
I don't understand how Amazon leadership doesn't see how the pip requirement encourages cheating the system and how that somehow benefits the organization as a whole.
mistyislands
The root cause for almost every Amazon horror story is the URA goal.
goldenkey
Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle "Leadership Principles" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc
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.
tobinfekkes
I logged in simply to comment a huge "thumbs-up" to any Brian Cantrill reference. I've got an entire playlist of all his various talks around the interwebs, just to listen (and re-listen) in the background while coding. It checks off all the education, tech, history and, critically, humor boxes.
tandymodel100
> Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There
Still making more money than GCP and Azure (both of which are worse to use, IMHO) so...who cares?
Throwawayaerlei
When you're running a world wide service with lots of moving and connected parts this dramatically increases the danger you'll have catastrophes that will cost much or most of that market share.
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.
gitfan86
While I feel bad that this guy didn't understand what he was getting into when joining Amazon, it is the middle manager at these companies that have the worst jobs.
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?
titanomachy
EM isn't a "middle manager" job, it's "line manager". Middle management manages other managers, e.g. a "director" is usually middle management.
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.
blueplanet200
> it is the middle manager at these companies that have the worst jobs.
Uh. Seems like folks being potentially unfairly pushed out are the ones with the worst jobs?
flr03
This echoed so much what my girlfriend is experiencing at Amazon (London) that it is scary. She was not put on pip but one of her co-worker was last week. According to her the guy is competent and hard working.
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.
_fat_santa
I remember first reading about this a few years back. I was getting recruiters in my inbox wondering if they can poach me to AWS. Back then I thought Amazon was just like the other FAANG companies, but to be safe I searched `r/CSCareerQuestions` on Reddit and found stories similar to this one.
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.
sgt101
This comment killed me :
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?
duncangh
Lmao this is great because on my "virtual on-site" final round of interviews at Amazon, the fire alarm of the person who was interviewing me went off. She switched to audio on the call and continued to try to work through the little coding challenge as she was shouting implementation details above the echo-y wails of a fire alarm raging in a crowded stairwell. Baffled, concerned for her safety and bewildered by her priorities, I hung up and pretended the call had dropped. No offer. No interest
snowman-yelling
My apartments fire alarm went off during my virtual on-site with Amazon too. There was about 10 minutes left and the interviewer said I should go and he had what he needed. Got an offer the next day!
_fat_santa
Amazon vs Amazon on Blind
coliveira
This was probably a fire drill. The alarms sound off, everybody leaves the building at the same time, but it is just for training.
the_af
Assuming it was a fire drill -- back in the olden times before the new normal, when I worked at the office, fire drills were mandatory exercises. That's the whole point of them: you don't get to ignore them. We were always told in no unclear terms that we were expected to take part in the drill, no exceptions, and people even got told off if they took the time to shut down their computers or go back for backpacks or whatever, because "in a real fire there's no time for that".
I suppose people working in critical positions were cut some slack. I can't imagine doing interviews is one of those positions.
sydthrowaway
So you applied for the job just to shit on them?
largbae
It sounds like GP had learned enough about the culture from the interview.
beerandt
>taught me lessons I’ll never forget.
Don't date women that are easily confused with Bezos in drag?
tapoxi
Hey man, don't kink shame!
rPlayer6554
When I saw that on bind the follow up comment was.
"He was then PIP'd for accepting the gift card and not being frugal"
undefined
danjac
That's Linkedin level quality.
mikeyjk
The "agree?" is quintessential LinkedIn.
Such an utterly shallow pretence for engaging a discussion.
pc86
Keep in mind the only people using LinkedIn as anything other than "resume holder" or "mediocre job board" are also the type of people to think "Agree?" is some sort of enlightening prompt.
ren_engineer
it's a marketing hack, LinkedIn's algorithm boosts posts with lots of comments and engagement. So people post those artificial questions at the end which are basically preaching to the choir
the fact people actually fall for it is depressing
bluedino
Now it's more like for agree, for xxxx, for ....
There are supposed to be emoji's in there
snalty
I remember seeing this as a shitpost on linkedin
belval
I like that we've come to a point where people are shitposting on LinkedIn as a counter-point to these insipid:
> "TODAY I interviewed a SINGLE mom that had her BABY on her lap and apologized when it started crying. I gave her the JOB on the spot because motherhood is HARD. Let's all give single mom a break and be more human in the process! :clap: :clap:"
I've unfollowed so many people at this point because I use it as an address book for coworkers and recruiters and these virtue signalling posts are not even trying to look human.
CobrastanJorji
As it happens, many years ago I worked for Amazon and encountered a small microwave fire in the break room. I dealt with it myself, but I realized I had no idea what the appropriate way to notify somebody about a fire. I inquired and discovered that in the event of a fire, the correct behavior would have been to return to my desk and file a Sev-2 incident with the Facilities team. This should in theory page someone who could respond to the building being on fire. I asked if they meant Sev-1, but they said Sev-1 would be reserved for a fire that was impacting website traffic.
akersten
If anyone's curious, the correct response to a fire, presuming you couldn't immediately extinguish it, is to pull the fire alarm and evacuate the building.
simonswords82
Or dial 0118 999 881 999 119 7253
IT Crowd reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
slopirate
I don't think anyone was curious.
ignoramous
> “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down!
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]!
hughrr
Do these come with a sick bag?
ignoramous
Don't blame the leadership, as apparently this is exactly what they need to be doing: To paraphrase [High Output Management], the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
— What do executives do, anyway?, https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
undefined
moffkalast
> $5 gift card
This makes it.
phgn
I've read this before, it's likely not by "Will Ye Will Ye" ;)
slt2021
How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg
How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423
HL33tibCe7
The second post in your second link is shocking too:
> 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.
Cthulhu_
And I wouldn't be surprised if that Seattle dev manager got pressured from above themselves. But at some point, someone has to set boundaries. If that manager then got pissy about it not being finished, there's a few lines to be used. One is "I was asleep". Another is "Night shifts and overtime are not in my contract", or "I do not get paid enough to do night shifts".
And another one, "A lack of planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine".
But here's what I think is going on: Amazon's higher-ups (the level(s) above these people) are intentionally making these managers put pressure on each other to keep them overworked and sedate. I feel like this is the case for a LOT of US work culture across a lot of areas. It applies to low wage jobs with a high chance of being fired as well. Keep people stressed about the short term and they won't have the headspace to worry about things outside of their sphere of influence. This allows the rich to get richer and the politicians to become more powerful (and incompetent).
hashimotonomora
It’s not so deep. Possibly the manager needed that feedback and forgot until the last moment and doesn’t care how the employee can fulfill it.
BeetleB
Honestly, in some orgs in my company "I was asleep" would be the only acceptable answer. All the others would put you on a path of getting fired. If the whole org operates like this, no one cares about your witty remarks.
If you really don't want to work like this (and I don't), have a 1:1 with the manager, discuss boundaries, and if you can't come to an agreement, change teams or jobs.
And better yet, ask these during the interview! One question I often asked:
"In my current job, I typically leave my laptop at work when I leave at 5-6pm (unless there's a genuine ongoing emergency). Would that work in this role?"
jonathankoren
That’s when you CC (don’t BCC, you want them to know) yours and theirs managers on the email that says that says plainly, “If you expected this to be done by 5:30 am, you should have sent two days before. Perhaps this can help you be more efficient with your time.” and include a link to a YouTube — or better yet, an internal training video — on effective time management or setting deadlines.
Seriously. You publicly stick the knife in for this shit.
TrackerFF
Maybe said manager used to be a banker? Would certainly explain the casual attitude towards dropping docs at 1130PM, and demanding feedback 6 hours later.
deepsun
Why not just ignoring the email -- you're not supposed to be awake at 11:30pm at all.
severak_cz
I expected some timezone difference was here but no - this is a just a toxic person.
shrumm
it’s also worrying this person was checking his email at 1130pm.
zo1
We get paid to do a job. And sometimes that requires odd things like helping out with urgent problems at odd times. At that point it really is too-"fucking"-late (too borrow your crassness) to complain about project planning, politeness and schedules because everyone involved already knows those failed.
If it was me asking for feedback, I wouldn't have sent it if I wasn't in a pickle that I probably had no control over. Okay, so you didn't read the mail and you only get to it the next day at 8 when your working hours started, cool leave it at that.
Aeolun
So at 9am the next morning, you send a reply that you were sleeping?
odonnellryan
Better for who? Probably not the shareholders.
tgv
That first post, is that the acceptance speech for a Nobel prize?
vultour
Are you not on Linkedin? This self-aggrandizing cringe is 95% of the content in the feed, I'm always amazed people can write this with a straight face.
bdlowery
After grinding leetcode for months, and going through 4 interviews, you feel like you’ve “finally made it” which is why people post cringey posts like that.
pm90
It’s normalized on the platform because that’s how people higher up the food chain speak like. Eg when a VP switches companies. Most of the time these things are written by a PR person to be as grateful and inoffensive as possible. But then it caught on because everyone loves to humblebrag.
tgv
I guess linkedin has a different vibe over here. I've seen some self-congratulatory and groveling posts, but nowhere near this level of influencer-style humblebragging.
oblio
I would like to thank my cat, Mr. Freckles, for being there for meow.
udbhavs
I'm also curious about that. I'm just starting out in industry and am confused if most people are expected to do that. Do future recruiters go through your old linkedin posts for stuff like this? Or is it just a general update for their personal circle - basically the corporate version of instagram stories.
ljm
It's just people being happy about something that's happened for them. Given how capricious a company like Amazon is, though, the professional speech is probably to avoid giving Amazon a different reason to complain.
It's gonna be a different situation for someone taking their first programming job out of college, and someone who's been doing it for long enough that they don't care (and would probably fire a company like Amazon before being fired themselves).
MattGaiser
Recruiters won't even read my programming languages. I have gone to so many interviews where they didn't even check that the skills they wanted were on my resume.
freewilly1040
The latter, and about as worthwhile.
ActorNightly
His post 5 months after joining was a repost of someone criticizing Amazon. And then he ended up getting PIPed recently. His linked profile is all over the place too with work experience, he never held a job longer than 4 months.
Dunno if I would automatically side with his story from that.
amrocha
I would expect him to not have worked anywhere longer than 4 months considering he just graduated and those were internships
ActorNightly
The Full stack developer and ML engineer seem like full positions, considering he listed internships specifically in his prior experience as explicit internships.
Also he has a background in bio, and managed to land a full stack and ML engineer positions, implying he is self taught, and therefore should be already fairly intelligent...but he decided to go get his MS in CS, without even doing any research project and just opting for the GTA instead of GRA route.
None of us can really know for sure, Im just saying it smells a little fishy. If his resume came across my desk, Id have some specific questions about his experience. If you are that smart to have a background in bio, and land the jobs that he did, your career would look very different.
vintermann
"Why do you hire dead wood? Or why do you hire live wood and kill it?"
At best you're arguing that Amazon is dysfunctional in a slightly different way than the rest of this thread thinks.
ramchip
Is there an alternative link for the second? `archive.fo` doesn't resolve on some networks[1]...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
Edit: I think it's https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hire-jiawei-wang_hi-linkedin-...
peteradio
> if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a "Least Effective".
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?
colordrops
> Being oncall every 4 weeks for a team that lost 50%
Ugh this hits too close to home.
labrador
He's still just a youngin' with plenty of time to figure out what he did wrong. Everybody's gotta learn sometime.
yrral
Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right?
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?
ActorNightly
The issue with Amazon is that due to its size, working on a team is essentially like working for a separate company. If you are moving across big orgs, you are just a blip in the system should something like this come up. And just like a group of startups, some are going to be run worse than others.
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.
selestify
> 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,
How do you “navigate” your way around an 11:30 PM email that contains a 5:30 AM deadline, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread?
robertcope
"I was asleep. The expectation that I would see it, much less respond to it, is crazy."
hprotagonist
Pre-declare available working hours, and adhere to them.
I have a cronjob that signs out of {slack, email, zoom, ...} at a particular time of day, my work accounts aren't attached to my personal devices, and i respond promptly to communication during working hours. I genuinely don't see work-related comms when i'm not working, and my work availability is in my slack profile, my internal email signature, and in my outlook calendar.
ctvo
Don’t let it get to that state? If you can’t, find a new team?
Snoozus
ignore it
ignoramous
> The issue with Amazon is that due to its size, working on a team is essentially like working for a separate company.
Not really; esp when the processes and priorities are alike across the company (with exception of few organizations that are experimenting newer processes at any given point in time).
> Amazon is the best company for finding that sweet spot of maximizing revenue/actual hour worked.
I don't think a single tenured co-worker who, during the pandemic, moved to Airbnb, Uber, Google, Stripe, and heck, even Coinbase, look back fondly upon the management structure they were subject to at Amazon, now that they've seen how other companies in the space are setup.
> If you are a talented software engineer ... cruise control your way at $300k a year.
Well, there's this: https://nitter.net/quinnypig/status/1386803846970675200
schrute
How are other companies setup that make them distinct from Amazon?
bambataa
At the risk of sounding like someone who clearly doesn’t have the skills you’re talking about, what do you mean by “reading the room” here? Knowing when to push things, when to drop them, being trusted enough by management that they don’t blame you for failing to meet absurd requests?
undefined
goldenkey
HR at Amazon is a shit show. I had $100 of pizza stolen from the fridge at Amazon and I mentioned it casually to HR, as something notable but not too important. And HR then decided to tell my manager without my knowledge. The manager then berated me over communicating about a "trivial matter." So yeah, wouldn't put much stock in HR at Amazon.
dec0dedab0de
I know it's not the point, but how/why did you have $100 worth of pizza in the refrigerator?
Edit: I'm trying to imagine scenarios where that could happen, I have two so far. You ordered pizza for a meeting that got canceled, and the office refrigerator was huge. Or you ordered from a fancy pizza place that had waygu or something as a topping. I'm sorry, I don't know why this is bothering me so much.
goldenkey
It was 5 of the expensive pies from https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/serious-take-out-ballard/
I had gotten them for myself and a friend. They are small pies so a single person can easily eat two of them.
oceliker
Maybe it was paid for with bitcoin, like the infamous case: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/cryptocurrency/bi...
cerved
it's clearly a lie!
The value of pizza is inversely correlated to the time it's been out of the oven. Once it's in the refrigerator it's worth max 1%
orlp
Or it was $100 worth of pizza spread over a longer period.
undefined
akomtu
You should've played the game and claimed you've never said what HR says you've said and in fact (here goes the distraction part of the lie) you heard another guy was talking about pizza, so HR must've overheard that conversation and misremembered the details.
winrid
The problem is the manager would probably start with "did you have a pizza stolen?" without mentioning HR
danjac
$100 of pizza? Isn't that a whole AWS service's worth?
goldenkey
I was making good money. And this chef makes pizza to die for: https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/serious-take-out-ballard/
Seb-C
If you had got an NFT for your pizza, this wouldn't have happened since this would prevent them from... Oh wait...
thinkharderdev
One piece of advice I always offer to younger software engineers about corporate politics is to ALWAYS try your best to make sure you have a relationship with your manager's manager. Cutting out links in the corporate telephone game is invaluable sometimes.
franczesko
> 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?
PIP is a tool in manager's hands and above L6 no one gives a squat. They even encourage using it.
freewilly1040
People don’t get friendlier up the food chain. It’s highly likely the line manager is reacting to pressure coming from above themselves.
mistyislands
Agree. It is unlikely the manager did this out of pettiness. He probably got pressured by his L7/L8 to fire someone for his org to meet the URA goal. He made the obvious choice and picked the guy applying for internal transfer. Why lose two people when you could just lose one?
zeckalpha
Yes, there was an exemption process for this while I was there. (Though it wasn’t called PIP)
coffeefirst
I took one Amazon interview for an engineering manager role. Literally all they wanted to talk about was PIPs.
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.
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I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form.
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.