Amazon Pip Horror Story

902 points by vikinghckr 4 years ago | 737 comments

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.

RHSeeger 4 years ago | |

> 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 4 years ago | | |

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.

timhrothgar 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

>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.

ek750 4 years ago | | |

> > 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 4 years ago | | |

It turns work into a war of all against all.

ziggus 4 years ago | |

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.

[0]: https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm

mistyislands 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | | |

I'm curious why these practices continue despite what seem to be obvious deficiencies.

slopirate 4 years ago | | |

URA?

zelos 4 years ago | |

What's the justification for an attrition target? It seems such a weird thing to want your staff to leave.

wongarsu 4 years ago | | |

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.

matthewowen 4 years ago | | |

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.

pcurve 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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.

Cthulhu_ 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

Why do masters whip slaves?

allochthon 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

> 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?

lkxijlewlf 4 years ago | |

> 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 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | |

> 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 4 years ago | | |

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.

tylerdurden91 4 years ago | |

The stack ranking has another really bad effect for Amazon.

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.

zippergz 4 years ago | |

And sadly most of this is not unique to Amazon. Almost every company I have worked at over the past 15 years or so claims "we don't do stack ranking" but they do calibration and then effectively force managers to change ratings to fit the "expected distribution." It has the same effect as a stack ranking, except it's less transparent and even more open to manipulation. If you have a manager who is good at playing the game, you're a lucky one. If you don't, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe not this round, but soon.

arendtio 4 years ago | |

Sounds a bit like Jeff asked Jack how to win.

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

zerr 4 years ago | |

Are managers also put on pip? Especially those who try to dodge their teams from stack ranking? Is stack ranking practiced for managers as well?

schadenfriend 4 years ago | | |

Yes. I was an L6 manager and was put into Pivot (the umbrella process that surrounds PIP), which I managed to beat. I saw two other SDMs in that org successfully PIP'd out in the same ~18 month period. I'm sure there is some magical level where you're "calibrated" but not put into Pivot, but I suspect it is pretty high up.

wnolens 4 years ago | | |

I would love to know this from the inside. My gut says: no.

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.

mistyislands 4 years ago | | |

Yes they can be. Managers also get evaluated the same way. But replacing a manager is usually more hassle, so it's not as common to push them out to meet your URA quota. I've seen it happen once, and they re-org'ed and abolished the entire team (distributed everyone to other teams).

Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.

subsaharancoder 4 years ago | |

> Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers.

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

broknbottle 4 years ago | | |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Amazon

mandeepj 4 years ago | |

> 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.

Is n't OP's manager actually did that?

odonnellryan 4 years ago | |

Lazy? It seems like you were not doing the job Amazon wanted you to do but rather some other job that you decided was better to do.

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.

thecleaner 4 years ago | | |

Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.

mjdude 4 years ago | |

In my experience it was the same at Goldman Sachs.

anon7725 4 years ago | |

> lazy manager.

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.

mistyislands 4 years ago | | |

He has to push the big red button on someone. That's the problem.

vanusa 4 years ago | |

I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.

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.

pm90 4 years ago | | |

I read this as the manager being lazy because they were giving in to the unwritten pressure from their manager to force attrition (less work) rather than trying to help their team members by protecting them (more work).

greatpostman 4 years ago |

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

dininski 4 years ago |

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.

transitory_pce 4 years ago |

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.

praptak 4 years ago |

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.

goldenkey 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | |

> 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?

gitfan86 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | |

> 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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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.

melzarei 4 years ago | |

Oncall is paid in Amazon Europe

dot1x 4 years ago | | |

Amazon EU here. Not it's not.

sgt101 4 years ago |

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?

slt2021 4 years ago |

How it started - https://i.imgur.com/7Cyia1U.jpeg

How it is going - https://archive.fo/pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423

yrral 4 years ago |

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?

coffeefirst 4 years ago |

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.

asdfman123 4 years ago |

At this point, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to work at Amazon over other companies.

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?

ABeeSea 4 years ago |

Same thing happened to me. After 8 years working at amazon including multiple raises and promotions, I got piped. I was trying to transfer to a new team led by a new senior manager who was a peer of mine at one point. Exiting the pip requirements were vaguely defined and included tasks with dependencies I knew wouldn’t be fulfilled. So I took the 50k they offered me to leave and I left.

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_love_limes 4 years ago |

I have a question for other former/current employees of Amazon.

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?

patch_cable 4 years ago | |

I was at Amazon for almost 10 years and my experiences echo yours. The few people that I saw PIPed were people who were under-performing. I never saw people who were performing their job be forced into a PIP category.

shikharraje 4 years ago | |

It's definitely possible that you were, as you put it, "ignorant of what was going on around you". I think you were at Prime Video at a time when it was really taking off, 2012-2016 was definitely a strong time for Prime Video, especially with the Twitch acquisition.

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.

eranation 4 years ago | |

Ex SDM (worked at AWS for 5 years, I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, had a pretty great time), I had a small team and there was no pip (pivot) quota mandated. But I can see how this can be come a pressure on larger teams, e.g. orgs below an L8 / orgs larger than 50 people. Not a pressure on pip (called pivot), but there is an expectation of some % of people as LEs (least effective / improvement needed), and LEs usually lead to focus / pivot.

xorandor 4 years ago |

(dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check...

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.

nickm12 4 years ago |

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

deltaonefour 4 years ago | |

He's the hero we don't deserve. Nobody wants to hire him because every manager is sort of afraid they themselves are sort of ass holes and will get called out. I think a good number of people who think this are right on themselves being ass holes.

Jasp3r 4 years ago | |

His job history agrees with you. It has been less than 2 years since he graduated, in which he has held 4 jobs. 3 months at his first job, then 4 months, 5 months and 10 months at Amazon.

I would not take his given statement at face value.

pseudalopex 4 years ago | | |

His profile said he graduated in 2021. He joined Amazon in May 2021. 5 months was a teaching assistant at his university. 4 months was the right months for a summer internship.

vletal 4 years ago | | |

This is a relevant insight, I do not understand why it got downvoted.

Even though Amazon has a history of such events, we should care about the bigger picture, yet be skeptical about the individual claims anyway!

renewiltord 4 years ago | | |

People usually call those internships but he's gone and described them as full jobs. Unfortunate. The timing lines up for a winter and then summer internship / coop role.

masterof0 4 years ago | |

So you need to be an experienced dev to speak up against a toxic work environment? I do also cringe when I see comments like yours attacking the guy for doing something you wouldn't do. He probably mentioned the amount of lines of codes as a way of saying he did put a lot of effort(is common knowledge that on itself is a shitty metric). Maybe he, also wouldn't want to be hired by someone like you either, not would I.

nickm12 4 years ago | | |

I'm not saying he shouldn't speak up against a toxic work environment. I'm saying he's doing it on LinkedIn in a way that makes him look bad and could hurt his future career prospects.

theli 4 years ago |

I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.

mr_beans 4 years ago |

After many years at Amazon I figured out that although managers were mostly engineers at one point and could still talk like engineers, they are first and foremost company bureaucrats playing a very different game to what you and I do.

muskmusk 4 years ago |

I smell bullshit

> 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.

slopirate 4 years ago | |

The fact that he thinks LOC has anything to do with how effective he's been as an engineer is a huge red flag.

dymk 4 years ago | | |

He didn't say exactly that, he said that he takes issue with his manager calling him the "least effective" person on his team. Which sure, there is some possibility that he wrote a lot of code, and it was all useless, but to be the _least_ effective while _presumably_ shipping at least some features...

Either he's incredibly, incredibly bad at what he does, or he just had the misfortune to step into the bear trap that is the Amazon PIP machine.

Knowing Amazon, he probably just got unlucky.

EthOptimist 4 years ago | | |

He mentions this because LOC is an objective metric that Amazon uses to analyze performance..

Kevincav 4 years ago | |

Amazon has a way to generate a lot of infrastructure with code templates. So I can push out a ton of infrastructure code in a short amount of time by simply running the generator script. So then I just need to plug and play functionality code. He could be factoring that code in with the count.

BrokenLButton 4 years ago | | |

^It's autogenerated code for sure, especially considering he's from AWS.

Raptor22 4 years ago | |

Really depends, some of it for sure is autogenerated code. I've seen similar situations.

dedoussis 4 years ago |

> 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".

  $ npm update

dininski 4 years ago | |

Funnily enough Amazon has its own internal repo, including NPM. And it can be a pain in the ass to add anything to it, especially npm packages. So sometimes you would have to spend 5 minutes, or sometimes an hour, to import a single existing public NPM package into the internal repo.

amrocha 4 years ago |

And in case anyone thought this was an isolated incident, I have heard from 3 different people about this happening to them. As soon as they try to transfer they get put on a PIP.

tyingq 4 years ago | |

It seems like a loophole if there's a PIP quota. Doing a PIP on someone leaving means you don't have to use a quota slot for someone staying.

Though it may also be common to request a transfer when you sense your boss doesn't value you.

ldiracdelta 4 years ago | | |

"Rank-and-Yank" always produces this kind of outcome. A system that rigid can never handle a team that has no losers.

smoyer 4 years ago |

Who in their right mind PIPs a yearling? You've barely introduced them to the real world and they're far cheaper than your seasoned contributors.

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%.

mabbo 4 years ago |

I spent almost a decade at Amazon. Their system for removing low performers has two key flaws.

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".

helsinkiandrew 4 years ago |

> Since it is performance review season at Amazon, he quickly sent me into a dev plan (PIP)

I think the lesson of this story is to apply for another role after the performance review season.

trenchgun 4 years ago | |

> I expressed my intention for an internal transfer to my manager at my current AWS team.

Or to not express intention to transfer to current manager?

helsinkiandrew 4 years ago | | |

He’d accepted an offer from another team so he had to eventually

polymerist 4 years ago |

Pretty sure GE had a similar bottom slicing program and look at how that company has performed. They were once a big conglomerate and they are now a shadow of their former self.

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.

donretag 4 years ago |

My new response to every Amazon recruiter that reaches out will simply be that post.

amazongoogle 4 years ago |

I managed at Amazon and Google. One nuance to the Amazon stack ranking is that it is supposed to be only applied at org sizes > 50 or levels > 50. In theory Line managers themselves shouldn't feel too much pressure on their teams to do this. I do agree that it should be an even larger N (e.g. 200) or larger as Google has the same effective policy but their N is much much larger. The scale of the stack ranking really matters for how toxic it can be IMO.

murderfs 4 years ago |

Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true:

> 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 !

Hokusai 4 years ago | |

> no one's challenged it so presumably it's true

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?

murderfs 4 years ago | | |

https://www.teamblind.com/post/The-guy-got-PIPed-VBvKiiXu

90% of the point of blind is to shit on your own company anonymously (at least, that's what I use it for). I find it hard to believe that it's false, given that probably hundreds of amazon employees have seen that post and no one's refuted it.

If Amazon is astroturfing blind, they're doing a spectacularly bad job at it, the general consensus (from Amazon employees even) is that it's a hellhole compared to its peers.

mijoharas 4 years ago | | |

> Amazon is well known for training employees to defend the company on-line.

I left amazon 5 and a half years ago, but never heard anything while I was there about defending the company online.

Could you elaborate on this?

abirch 4 years ago | | |

Let's assume that it's 100% true. This guy is young and it'd be better for him to delete this. I'm totally going to cyberstalk this guy to see where he goes.

My number one rule is not to sh*t on former companies with my main account.

noway421 4 years ago | |

Not sure there's enough context here to make a judgement. 24 change requests in a year seems okay? How complex were they? 50% no-approval sounds ok if he was the sole maintainer of a particular part of the code/etc.

Maybe someone who's knowledgeable with the development of CDKs can shed some light on how reasonable those numbers are.

dubbel 4 years ago | | |

I had no idea that code could be merged without at least one peer review at any of the big tech companies. That seems like a management failure to me?

hiyer 4 years ago | |

24 CRs can be huge in Amazon, depending on the team. It can take months to get a single CR approved and merged.

sergiotapia 4 years ago | |

What is a "CR"? And a "CDK"?

Aperocky 4 years ago | | |

CDK is an abstraction layer of infrastructure as code: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/

I've only seen it written in typescript so node-module and package-locks are a thing.

grumple 4 years ago | |

Is CR a merge/pull request?

mr_beans 4 years ago | | |

Yes. It’s taken me a while to say PR instead of CR. At least I’m not quoting LPs at my girlfriend anymore

amzn-throw 4 years ago |

Over 700 comments, and noone questions maybe there is a little more to this story.

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.

vorhemus 4 years ago |

The idea that there are KPIs that can be used to objectively measure the performance of an SE and that the worst performers will be fired is an illusion. In reality, the direct manager has it in his hands: If he wants to get rid of one of his employees, he will find means and KPIs to do so. It is a political and human decision, KPIs only serve to justify his decision.

trhway 4 years ago |

>I submited 51k lines of code in January

that is well beyond real.

desperado1 4 years ago |

Sadly, there is no comeuppance in this.

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.

giantg2 4 years ago |

"Being oncall every 4 weeks for a team that lost 50% developers over one year? Piece of cake!"

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.

treyfitty 4 years ago |

People say that working for Amazon for a year is enough “training” to serve as a resume badge. However, I’d like to provide a counter to that: when I see Amazon on a resume, I actually discount the candidate. In my opinion, the branding has suffered tremendously and I view the candidate as a compensation maximizer beyond all costs- why else would you join Amazon despite the well known horror stories, as well as their complete disdain for human life in the name of “customer obsession?”

cjbgkagh 4 years ago |

Rookie mistake, internal transfers after performance review not before. Also, pretend you’re happy there and will be a loyal worker right up until the last minute.

ab_testing 4 years ago |

I hope the guy was not on a visa. Seen many people with visa issues being played with just because they cannot easily move or are halfway down the greencard path.

kofejnik 4 years ago |

> I submited 51k lines of code in January

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

anshumankmr 4 years ago |

I don't know why is there a concept of a PIP Quota. IMO a PIP should be used if you really f*ked up. This just seems petty and small minded.

tylerdurden91 4 years ago |

From a big picture point of view, I understand the original intent of PIP. However, it seems severely disconnected from the ground reality.

* 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).

denysvitali 4 years ago |

Kind of OT: is it just me or the archive.TLD domains aren't working sometimes? I can't reach the websites, but sometimes they work

Crosseye_Jack 4 years ago | |

Who you using for DNS? iirc archive.today had a falling out with Cloudflare DNS because of a way they passed the requests onto archive.today so they stopped answering requests from Cloudflare DNS.

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.

denysvitali 4 years ago | | |

Oh yes, that's it. It seems like Google DNS is blocking it too for some reason: https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.fo

Weird. I have now switched to my provider's DNS to overcome the issue :)

hn_throwaway_99 4 years ago |

A good lesson I've learned over the years: there are 2 sides to every story, and on the Internet you usually get just one.

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.

deltaonefour 4 years ago | |

That's true, but the story is very consistent with things said about amazon pip practices.

throwaway22032 4 years ago |

Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a "performance plan" and then gone on to be successful in the company?

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?

otterley 4 years ago | |

Yes, about 15 years ago, I went from being on PIP at Yahoo to being nominated for a Super Star award. There’s no magic; you just need to have an open mind, take the feedback you’ve been given seriously, and work hard.

sparrc 4 years ago | |

(I work at AWS) I personally know multiple people who have been on the PIP before and are still here and happy. No idea the percent of people who accomplish this though.

throwaway22032 4 years ago | | |

Are they doing well or just getting by, though?

stevenhuang 4 years ago |

Getting a 403. Is there a mirror?

phgn 4 years ago | |

https://archive.is/pdYHy

dreamer6 4 years ago |

I was on a team at Amazon where I was in a role that had 5 peoople in and out of it within 2 years. The team had basically designated the role to be the one that they would PIP each year to help ensure that they could meet their UAR metrics.

happywater 4 years ago |

I think it is our holy duty to not be customers of such a company. Every time we pay Amazon(including AWS), we die a little inside.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5fj9mh/amazon_e...

pardesi 4 years ago |

After having worked for very long time(compared to people who wish to become managers just few years into the job) as a SDE & being managed by many different style of managers, I have found poor managers mostly are failed up engineers or those coming from non engineering background. Also, the tech rush has brought so many "managers" from outside the US who not only lack real management skills, but dont adopt to the US management style. I really worry for the future of the silicon valley if these sort of mediocre managers start to manage high performers in top tech companies.

donarb 4 years ago |

Oh, I thought this was a story about a Python installation that had gone rogue.

kstrauser 4 years ago | |

I did too. I’m grateful my job experiences made me think of Python before a slow-motion firing.

VirusNewbie 4 years ago |

This particular incident seems like an easy one to solve, if someone has an offer from another team, nothing the manager does should be able to impact it? This seems like a simple HR change.

tinyhouse 4 years ago |

I think the PIP quota is not necessarily evil. Amazon is a huge company. Like every big company, you'll have many coasters. With everyone working remotely it can get even worse. The problem however that the PIP quota is not a secret anymore, most employees know it exist (thanks to Blind). So it puts unnecessary stress on good employees who will never get PIPd . I think Amazon need to modify the plan in such a way that it's still effectove in removing coasters and bad performers, without stressing out everyone else.

ctvo 4 years ago |

Really what needs to happen is another New York Times story. The market for engineering talent is so tight right now that if this lands with new data points, Amazon will end this practice for another 3 years before quietly resuming it.

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).

Mandatum 4 years ago |

I personally wouldn't choose to get blackballed by every MAGMA/MAAAM if I was living in the US and taking that sort of career path. Glad some folks are making this decision.

namelessoracle 4 years ago |

With Amazon's "Hire to Fire" going on PLUS remote work, i wonder if there is a market opportunity for a recruiting firm to offer that as a service.

"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"

whatever1 4 years ago |

Piping the tail of curve only works if you can prove that people progressively fall from the high ranks and get piped.

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).

thehappypm 4 years ago |

Does anyone have any insight into what the culture for Product Managers in AWS is? Currently interviewing with them, and it’s impossible to determine the culture from their interview process. For example, I asked how large the team was, and the interviewer responded that he couldn’t tell me that information.

supergeek133 4 years ago | |

I've been on the phone with a whole fleet of Product Managers (on the Alexa side) and they all seemed very overworked (jumping to multiple meetings within the same 30 minutes).

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.

mr_beans 4 years ago | |

You’ll have to change your username if you end up working there.

thehappypm 4 years ago | | |

theburntoutpm is my fear!

wizwit999 4 years ago |

Somewhat controversial opinion but from my experience most people at Amazon who got pipped deserve it.

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.

b3lvedere 4 years ago | |

Great idea to use unhealthy stress to weed out the unqualified people. Should work amazingly for the morale of the qualified people.

https://www.savagechickens.com/2012/05/employee-morale.html

ok_dad 4 years ago |

Last time a recruiter at Amazon messaged me, for the umpteenth time, I told them "please remove me from your recruiting databases, I am not interested in Amazon" mostly because of stories such as this one.

Good luck hiring into a toxic workplace culture, Amazon recruiters!

mistyislands 4 years ago |

This article is pretty accurate: https://www.businessinsider.com/patrick-mcgah-quit-amazon-op...

chandrod 4 years ago |

I also believe that staying long in that culture also changes your personality at a deeper level. You might start treating your personal life in a similar manner as well. So someone either exits or stays long enough to start believing in it.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4 years ago |

> Since I was warned to take down this post

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?

GnarfGnarf 4 years ago |

PIP: "Performance Improvement Plan".

Perfect example of betriebsblind

scottious 4 years ago |

"hey welcome to your first day at Amazon! We're so excited to have you. Here's your desk, and here's your PIP. Oh yeah, here's your computer too"

whoknew1122 4 years ago |

Oh look, another PIP story. What is this, Blind?

This may have happened, but doesn't align with my experiences at Amazon. Maybe things are different based on what org you're in.

einrealist 4 years ago |

Such stories do make me thankful for working in a job that allows me to quit one day and to start somewhere else the next day. This is a luxury for most people.

Kharvok 4 years ago |

PIPs are a courtesy most of the time. You're giving 60-90 days notice that someone needs to find a new job instead of suddenly dismissing them.

hk1337 4 years ago |

I honestly thought this was going to be a development post on hosting a python package in AWS.

shepherdjerred 4 years ago |

This exact thing happened to me when I tried to transfer internally.

cvhashim 4 years ago | |

What was the result ?

shepherdjerred 4 years ago | | |

I applied to AWS Lambda and two days later my manager of two months (who was formerly my skip manager. My manager(s) quit and they couldn't find a replacement for several months, so my team shifted up the report chain.) told me that I had been under performing for the last year and likely put me in Focus [0] which is the precursor to being put in Pivot aka PIP. You can't transfer teams internally when you're in Focus, so I was stuck there.

My team's senior engineer he told me that I was nowhere near under performing during the last org-wide performance review. I received great Forte feedback that year. All of the teammates that I had talked to, and my former manager who was now at another AWS org, told me the situation seemed suspicious especially due to the timing.

I got out as fast as I could after my manager said that I was under performing. I applied to a handful jobs, interviewed, received an offer, and gave my two weeks notice all within 3 weeks of the start of events. Now I'm at RStudio [1] which pays about the same as AWS but has a significantly better culture while still being able to work on interesting projects.

That experience was pretty terrible. My team and former managers had all given me consistently positive feedback. There was always something I could improve, but overall I was a good engineer. My interactions with this manager still make me question if I am competent which isn't the best feeling.

I had a fairly positive experience at AWS up until this chain of events.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570579/amazon-performanc...

[1] https://www.rstudio.com/

all-hail-pip 4 years ago |

I'm neither supporting Amazon or the person who got Pip'ed. But 49k out of those "51k lines of code" are just auto-generated npm package-lock.json diff

sylware 4 years ago |

their captcha is not working with noscript/basic (x)html browsers, any copy of its content somewhere?

dschuetz 4 years ago |

PIP?

danesparza 4 years ago | |

Performance improvement plan.

Or Polynesian infrastructure project.

It's all a matter of perspective in planning.

kosolam 4 years ago |

What is this PIP thing?

avipars 4 years ago |

site is down ;(

cozzyd 4 years ago |

And I thought this would be another Python package management horror story.

seanmcdirmid 4 years ago | |

Or watching a horror story with Amazon prime in a Picture in Picture window on a smart TV.

qbasic_forever 4 years ago | |

pip needs to be put on a PIP

(although to be fair pip and the python package ecosystem has come a long way in the last few years)

malkia 4 years ago | | |

Python needs to be put on PIP :)

sgt101 4 years ago | | |

I'm a data person so I haven't cut any big code with Python, but the package management issues I have had have gone away with conda virtual environments.

So - curious; where does that break down?

amelius 4 years ago | | |

Yeah, the message "your version of pip is out of date" doesn't make sense, and no amount of pip install will fix it.

deltaonefour 4 years ago |

Why are people who do this never named? They should be named. This type of behavior perpetuates because despite this employee revealing a company issue.. the individual perpetrator can still hide behind anonymity. CALL these ass holes out.

MattGaiser 4 years ago | |

The problem is that society doesn’t really stand behind whistleblowers.

We claim to, but at the end of the day want someone else to do the standing behind them while we go back to our lives. And we don’t want whistleblowers around as we fear that we will be their next target. Whistleblowers, in their effort to restore trust, become automatically untrusted by large swaths of society.

Naming makes you persona non grata to a lot of people.

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

There should be a way to name these people anonymously. Maybe drop the ass holes name on blind or make a "shitbosses.com" where we name these jackasses and vote.

Heck I'll stand behind my words. If you ever apply to a company called Anduril. Watch out for a childish manager named Calvin Hareng. This MF: https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Calvin-Hareng/-1964480350

Anduril is hiring and if you're coming on board watch out if he's going to be your manager. He indeed PIPs you if you try to switch teams, just like this amazonian ass hole.

hhmc 4 years ago | |

It's possible (although maybe not likely) that this guy really _did_ deserve to be put on PIP, and the team transfer request is completely incidental.

Unless we can know for sure, or at least from a less biased source, we probably shouldn't doxx the manager?

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

Yeah that's true. We really need some service like blind where people can anonymously review and score managers. We need votes to prove that a manager is an ass hole. One anecdotal story isn't enough.

Maybe the service leaves the manager anonymous until the review amount crosses a certain threshold... 3 to 4 guys calling him out?

Submit this to ycombinator!

MattGaiser 4 years ago | |

See comments like these. Even this post is too much for some people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30204121

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

There are a lot of ass holes in the world. Not saying the post you linked to is an ass hole... but Ass holes do tend to empathize with other ass holes. I think the majority of people don't see it in the same light.

ActorNightly 4 years ago | |

Stop with the needless hate.

We are talking about people in the top 8% of the income bracket in US. Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood. If you have Amazon on your resume, no matter what, you will have no issues finding another job, because the acceptance rate by itself to Amazon is <10% of all candidates, which acts as a very good filter and indicator for other companies that your more competent than a large percentage of work force there, so you automatically get a shot at an interview and likely a job offer if you are actually competent.

The biggest drawback of something like this is maybe having to wait an extra few months before buying that sweet BMW M3 that you wanted.

If anything, this kind of stuff should be viewed as games, because that's all this is. Supply/demand of labor mixed in with a few political and psychological things. The manager is not even close to being an asshole, he is just playing the game like all the employees are. Lets not pretend that the majority of people wanting to work at Amazon care enough about changing the world, they just want that MAANG salary.

deelly 4 years ago | | |

Cool, basically, "I can abuse you in any way I want because I`m paying you a good money". So, why this is shitty? Mainly because thats inside thing, and there no way to learn it during interview.

>> Not a single engineer in Amazon that has or is getting PIPed is losing their livelihood.

Can you provide source for this claim?

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

>If anything, this kind of stuff should be viewed as games, because that's all this is. Supply/demand of labor mixed in with a few political and psychological things. The manager is not even close to being an asshole, he is just playing the game like all the employees are.

Firing people and putting them on PIP is just a game because amazon is such a great company to have on your resume? It's just a game because his livelihood is not effected?

What universe do you live in?

Let me tell you about how the world works. If you fire people for trying to transfer teams. If you lie and make up stories about performance because someone tried to transfer teams. You're an ass hole through and through. No one is being hated here. Just being called out, and people are expressing their extreme dislike for such behavior.

I can't believe you called it a game. This must be how ass hole managers justify their actions to themselves. It's like a bully in school calling it all a game because the person being bullied still has parents that feed him. Let's be real. It's not a game. Not. at. all.

mFixman 4 years ago | |

(I didn't read the article; the page seems to be down).

A lot of these cases end up with the manager not necessarily having a lot of blame since they might not have full information on what's happening. They might also be in a similar performance crisis of their own.

If the entire company is having cultural problems and PIP horror stories are common, then the fault is from the people on the top and not from the M1 that laid out the PIP.

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

That's like blaming your parents for you turning out to be an ass hole. I think the manager still needs to be called out regardless and if his boss is an ass then the boss needs to be called out.

raz32dust 4 years ago | |

I think that will be extremely unfair to the manager who is just acting on stupid company policies. Managers have a very difficult job of walking a tight rope. Why single out one person and ruin their career?

deltaonefour 4 years ago | | |

So firing someone for trying to switch teams is company policy? I doubt it. Many managers are ass holes because that's the definition of their personality.

I feel ass holes should definitely be singled out so that they can't be managers again for the future.

kkjjkgjjgg 4 years ago | |

Because then they could defend themselves, perhaps?

yakorevivan 4 years ago |

Amazon is a shit company with a shit culture and a shitty founder. This company is like a virus. Wherever it goes, it kills off the local business population. Never work for such a company.

Fuck you bezos!

amznbyebyebye 4 years ago |

Where is dang on this post. Why do we think so many of these comments and even this post are okay and on topic for HN. Next thing you know this place will revolve into blind. I guess dumping on amazon is on the right side of the line here but anything questioning Covid vaccine efficacy should be banned because it’s not science. This place has become a mockery of itself.

krapp 4 years ago | |

Your username suggests you originally came to HN to dump on Amazon yourself.

adomanico 4 years ago |

As much as I feel sorry for this person and their experience, it seems to me this wasn't the best way to handle this situation.

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.

In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance, And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks." And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell." And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it." And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength." And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong." And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful." And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects." And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy. And this, my friend, is how shit happens.