When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.
> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.
It has been known for a while that there is a link between leadership and severe mental health issues [1]. Unfortunately this is how a lot of organisations are being built and how they are fluorishing.
Yes. Once I passed a certain threshold of comfortable income, and it was certainly less than anything to be found in Silicon Valley, money stopped being any motivation to me at all. What's the point of going from "comfortable plus ten percent" to "comfortable plus five hundred percent"? That's not worth one single headache, let alone a mental breakdown.
> Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.
Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer.
> The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others
Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.
You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."
> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are.
Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
Where I live engineers aren't stack ranked either. Doesn't speak highly of the engineers to be honest to accept such conditions. Why should you? Money? Not really a problem in the industry, is it?
Although I do think that Amazon probably pays much more, it just doesn't seem worth it. It is hard to work with people in an eternal dick measuring contest. It just isn't fun.
Up until a couple of years ago, they did get stock (Amazon doesn't give you options, but stock grants). Not sure if that ended when they made the salary $15.
If by 'logistics' you mean the people who pack/ship etc, warehouse work sucks, but Amazon has better salary and conditions than most others (pee bottle jokes aside).
If you mean the warehouse supervisors, analysts, etc, they get paid fairly well.
The injury rate of Amazon's warehouse employees is the highest in the industry[0]. Annual turnover is almost double that of the retail and logistics industries [1]. On top of that, as you note, the work sucks. I would call those conditions bad, and the turnover suggests that the pay is not sufficient to retain employees.
So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?
I know I will never work for them, they constantly reach out to me and its all nope on my side.
As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.
Do you have evidence they aren’t? I was under the impression Amazon warehouse logistics employees had extremely high turnover (averaging less than 1 year).
I suspect I agree with you that logistics workers realize they are on a lower rung of the ladder and are willing to work for less compensation. I suspect much of janitorial and security staff in Amazon HQ probably have no access to stock options either.
Amazon's security works for Securitas at the Seattle campus, and turnover is extremely high as they try shenanigans like "Cover the Alarm Panel, do entryway guarding at the main entrance at the same time (despite both requiring 24/7 physical presence and not being in the same area of the building)".
Amazon has very high security staffing requirements compared to most other Seattle companies. Absolutely bonkers IMO
> So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?
Wait, does “logistics” include warehouse, where the article mentions they had reached 150% annual turnover prepandemic? Sounds a lot like “leaving in droves”.
Yeah, they're leaving in droves. They're also arriving in droves, which is why Amazon has been able to withstand 150% turnover.
But Amazon is now worried that they've worn out much of the US workforce available for "industrial athlete"positions. (Their term.) The droves of arrivals may slow down to dribbles.
"Arriving in droves" is much more telling about the external conditions of the job market. I think it's safe to say that it sounds like a good gig before you have a good understanding of what the work is. Then, after working for less than a year you see it for what it is and get out of there.
On top of what other folks said, the warehouse folks not getting stock is a fairly recent development (2018, when minimum wage was raised). They do have a shockingly high turnover rate, but not sure if there is much that can be said about that relating to stock price currently, given how soon it's been since their stock comp went away, combined with the general strangeness of the Covid-19 pandemic
Getting your salary raised is probably a better deal. I don't think you can fund a stock purchase program at those wages (obviously you can take RSUs though) and the main effect might be they have to pay for Turbotax.
I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"
When I interviewed with the AWS team I definitely did not get the impression that they were a happy bunch. Then again, periodically being on-call with a 6 minute response time for critical emergencies can do that to you.
Hell, Amazon doesn't even give its employees free Prime accounts.
I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here.
Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic.
Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy.
Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.
FWIW, I know quite a few people from FAANG and associated companies, and those coming from Amazon are consistently the most unhappy about work there. So, while this may not be universal inside the company, Amazon definitely does have a problem compared to the industry at large.
Not necessarily. Jumping around is fairly common practice for those who seek fast promos in large tech companies, because it's usually a faster track to get up to the higher levels than just grinding in place. It's not all that uncommon to find people who went Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook full circle, for example. And they aren't necessarily unhappy about their past stints. But, again, the recurring theme seems to be that Amazon is the worst of the bunch in terms of hours worked (and work/life balance in general) and career opportunities.
I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company.
Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon.
I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce.
Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them.
All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%.
Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with.
No, your experience does not represent a systemic problem.
It represents your lived experience.
(I'd also say that with only three different company cultures that you have personally expirenced, your perspective is skewed).
What you are missing is that you do not see similar news reports about (say) Google, Netflix, etc. Sure there will always be individual stories in any organisation but the fact that there are *continual* stories about Amazon in all areas (blue collar, white collar) indicates that this is a systemic, widespread problem that they are either unaware of (unlikely) or do not care about.
Whether it is not caring (probably) or unawareness you have to be worried if an organisation like Amazon is this complacent.
[ note: I work at AWS, and I've experienced all this bullshit from the inside. When people I know ask me for a referral in, I tell them to run away. I'm looking to leave shortly ]
We're comparing companies that all hire at Amazon scale, at least when it comes to tech talent. If scale was all there is to it, they'd all have the same reputation. They do not.
I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.
I absolutely don't believe AWS should be shut down. I do think AWS and Amazon(retailer) should be split up, and thats what a majority of sensible people believe.
You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries.
Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.
And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.
Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
I think the market will solve this soon on its own and it won’t be pretty. Amazon may be a great stock but everything falls in a market crash. I wonder what will happen internally when that happens. I never knew so much of Amazon structure was tied to the stock price until reading this thread.
> So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.
I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.
If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)
I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.
I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.
> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.
Reminds me of the poor fellow who jumped off a Facebook building because their manager blocked their transfer. I bet you wouldn't tell them "they could have gone to a different company". Visa issues non-withstanding, a rational, hopeful frame of mind is not always available to us at all times. (Not even talking about the stresses of immigrating itself).
Depression, despair etc are illogical narrowing our frames of minds and not being able to see any out. Kind of like getting stuck with a coding problem until you walk away and take a break, except you can't think of a way of walking away. (Or your "way" may manifest itself as psychosis or self harm.)
Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!
Interviewing is probably too hard to contemplate if you're depressed. Especially if you've been around long enough to remember Google-style torturous brainteaser interviews (whether or not those were real.)
If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.
I was curious about the first bit - the lower social class stuff is mostly right, I think, because of the huge gap between national narrative and reality on US socioeconomic mobility [0].
Fantastic analogy. The same fundamentalist narrow-mindedness only about "growth at all costs"; no regard to content of that growth. Just make the stock go up.
Kind of like King Midas wanting to make everything gold. No regard to the interiority of the objects, nor their real use. Just make them gold on the outside.
That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment.
Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.
The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.
That logic applies when you joined a while ago. However, with the stock sky high (P/E 66, double GOOG 33), joining Amazon right now may not give you that potential upside anymore. Your managers and long time careers will get a larger portion of the upside. It's already evident by the stock growth of GOOG compared to AMZN in the past one year/quarter. The P/E of Amazon is high, compared with the growth potential vs others in FAANG. Picking a company to join is also akin to pick a stock to invest. Low P/E is not everything, but it's an important part of the equation.
For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.
> For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.
No, because mr. Market has been looking at everything except P/E, more essentially you can't spend P/E. You spend price.
If you want to throw in P/E in the analysis fine, but then you have to throw in every other element which makes the stock move:
1) Cult CEO who is able to sell the narrative
2) Fed policy
3) Macro environment
4) Odds of company being targeted by the DOJ
and all the other trillions of factors which influences the price of a security.
As Druckenmiller reminds us: "There is not a phenomenon in the world which doesn't affect the price of a security in some shape or form, no matter how small"
I’m not seeing estimates of Amazon at 5x larger business (revenue). Estimates have Amazon at ~2x revenue ($850ish B) in five years and earnings growth slower than current levels. Folks think they’ll grow, just not quite as fast.
We’ll see. I think it’s going to be hard to maintain today’s growth rate at this size.
Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the proceeds you’re in the same boat. And other companies do frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this (if you’re smart enough to get better offers).
That makes sense. I wasn't sure if SDEs get x units or y dollars worth of stock units each year. The former is most common, but everything about AMZN is unusual, including the vest schedule.
Amazon does it in dollars. Employees have a target comp figure in dollars, the annual stock refreshers are based on the price of the stock at that time, so if you got 100 units one year, and the stock doubles, all things being equal, you would only get 50 units the next year at refresh time.
In practice this means you can make good money off your hiring grant if price keeps going up, but you will also see your total comp hit a cliff / drop after a few years, since while stock going up is usually good, in Amazon's eyes, you've been lucky to be making more than your target comp those years and they aren't going to keep giving you the same amount of units if those units are worth more.
Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker buying AMZN has only doubled half their grant, the unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn't moved.
Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.
It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.
This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery.
Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not the companies’ failed promises. Obviously not keeping people is painful for growth too, but it’s still a very one sided power dynamic.
I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff.
Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.
Roblox? I'm not sure if it's still in the class of hyper-growth companies, though. That said, what I had in mind were more of those pre-IPO companies. Some companies do set up office in Seattle, but not all. Plus, Seattle teams often had to struggle to get impactful projects given most of the executives and teams are in the Bay Area.
I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to complete. I was shocked and tried hard to not cry during my review. I had never been told earlier that there were any issues with my performance.
This review crushed me. It destroyed my confidence in my programming abilities. To be fair, I had made some mistakes during my first year at Amazon - had fewer commits and SLOC compared to my teammates. Being on a work visa meant I could not quit immediately. I had to endure working there for almost a year before I got a new job.
I took me quite some time to gain back my confidence. To this day, my time at Amazon makes me dread performance reviews.
It is impossible to measure someones productivity using metrics like commit counts and SLOC. There are times where I don't commit for weeks and provide actual business value by solving direct client issues without even a ticket being present.
At one time at my second IT job, I had a manager reprimand me (yelling over the phone) that I was away from my desk. I was remotely supporting a bank fixing consortium credit contracts (substantial amounts) after a migration. I was told to stop doing that. So, I told the support tech that my 1-up blocked this. He told the people at the bank; this went up the chain at the bank to the main accountants which resulted in a nasty call from the client to the skip manager of my manager. He called me back and asked me to resume what I did almost crying on the phone. Later that year I was selected employee of the year mostly because of that client constantly sending positive feedback on my help.
He assumed I was not working or doing work for a different manager (they implemented matrix management and he was at HQ 70 km away from the town I worked at). I made a judgement call as that migration was a $20 mln project. That corporation had time budgeting. I was supposed to account in a production tracking system every task I did in 15 minute granularity. I have a ton of crazy stories like that out of that place.
In essence, the guy was a micromanager with trust issues. They later replaced him, with someone that was actually worse.
Unfortunately at Amazon, that is the norm. When the review time comes, 90% of the orgs will use the no. of Code Reviews raised and no. of commits pushed as the first line metric. Impact, customer focus and everything else is secondary.
My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work.
I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.
Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.
haha, this was at Microsoft, and the dash button was a glowing success compared to the project I'm talking about
I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA..
What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering, though, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect us grunts to pull it off..
It sounded like that story was at Microsoft to me, but now that I know you thought it was Amazon, I can see that it’s ambiguous and could be read either way.
Ah you're probably right that it was at Microsoft. My brain must have forgotten the first line by the end of reading the comment, among all the other Amazon specific stories in this thread.
Zune was actually pretty popular and had its fans for its time, despite getting completely outsold and outshone by the iPod. I think it didn’t get cancelled until smartphones were clearly starting to replace dedicated music players.
If I had to guess it would be the Kin devices that evolved from the purchase of Danger, those things clearly fit the OP’s description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review.
He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself.
Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty managers there.
Any manager at Google who quotes "lines of code" in any context other than actively defending someone or noting something truly exceptional is doing so because they have no idea what their report actually does, or whether it matters.
Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x notch harder than interviews at FB, MSFT, AMZN and other tier-1 places for comparable level.
Hey buddy, I'm going to pull back the curtains a little on those coding interviews. Solving coding interview questions is a skill that you can learn, just like playing musical instruments or solving mystery novels or mastering a type of video game.
If you hit up TopCoder or Leetcode or one of those other corny interview programming sites and grind away at it for a few months, you can get to a point where you have a really solid chance of getting past any coding interview.
Google is a little sneaky, since they take "Can solve a leetcode question" as a starting point, then crank the difficulty up on the questions even more so you have to be able to solve the base question in ~10 minutes and then expand on it. It's like "OK, you solved the locked room mystery. But now can you talk me through a locked room mystery solution.. WHILE PLAYING DARK SOULS?"
There's a ton of luck involved too. I've run into a lot of interviewers who ask questions they themselves don't actually understand very well. Then I'm in the unenviable position of wondering "Do I tell the interviewer he's wrong? Is it a trick, or is he just an idiot? Is he going to get mad if I tell him?" Another problem is that coding interviewers will ask a question, not try to code up the answer themselves, and just assume it's way easier than it really is.
If you want to get hired by the GAFMAN, just grind out those coding questions (and write working code answers in your IDE of choice or on the command line with vim/gcc). Brush up on your CS when you come across a concept you don't understand. Then get some referrals to get past the HR filter, and roll the dice.
BTW, when you get an offer, don't sell yourself short. Check levels (dot) fyi and/or talk to your peers to make sure you're getting the market rate for your skills.
> programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers
Programmers at Google make no decisions. The only people 'making decisions' are the product owners and project managers.
> Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard.
A hard coding interview is not a valid metric on how good a place is to work.
> Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life"
I've known people who feel like this as well. Some of them are still at Google and it's the best thing they ever did for their career.
On the other hand, I know people who felt this way, got a job at Google and it completely destroyed any passion for programming/computers that they had, to the point where they never worked in tech again.
Personally I feel it's dangerous to attach "you made it in life" to getting a job at Company X.
My general impression is that there are only three broad ways to be happy in life:
1. Genetically (i.e. your brain just works that way)
2. Luck into it
3. Iterate towards it (continuously)
The whole concept of "get job X and now I'm done" doesn't really fit well into any of those. A job could be a good iteration or you could get lucky and have it turn out to be a wonderful team/position/whatever, but the likelihood of your plan being "I need to do x" and then you do x and are then happy seems immensely unlikely. Like Samuel Johnson said, "Life is a progression from want to want, not enjoyment to enjoyment."
It used to be, long ago. Lots of other places caught up and they went down.
Of course, like any very large companies, it's going to be fragmented. Some groups at Google are really that awesome. Some are awful.
It's no longer "the place to be" for the top engineers though who will frequently pick other places, though it does look good on your resume.
For the interview being harder, they give you a flier that tells you almost exactly what they're going to ask, and they expect you to prep specifically for those things, so it's a lot more of a test of will than a test of skill. If you "really want to get a job there", you just cram your head with whatever the PDF says you should know and repeat it during the interview and you should be in. It's of course not that simple for people with personal situations that prevent them from just cramming reading material, and they're somewhat famous in some circles for discrimination (especially gender based, from anecdotal evidence).
Its unfortunately pretty common. Measuring perf that way is bullshit.
It is, however, still a useful signal. It should never be how the final decision is made, but in orgs where managers have way too many reports (which is a separate problems), it can accelerate things a bit.
Eg: look at the team's or orgs LoC/Commits over a long period of time in similar roles (long enough to smooth out outliers). Then if someone is DRASTICALLY underperforming (like, 1/10th of the output), you don't jump to conclusion. You starts looking at the code itself and ask questions about the projects, get opinions from the rest of the team, etc. Stuff you should be doing ANYWAY, but with a little more focus.
Based on -those- data points, then you can start making a judgement call. But yeah, any manager who stops at the SLOC or number of commits to make perf decisions is awful.
I actually worked with a manager who used number of commits exclusively. He also did not know about squash + merge workflows. So people who squashed would get in trouble and those who didn't would get raises until someone in the team finally figured out which metrics he was actually using. That was so sad...
it's not the only thing they measure. but if you're at the front end of a project, you often don't have other metrics (issues closed, internal customers giving you props, etc.) so the classic (and mostly flawed) measures of performance are used.
It should also surprise no-one that design documents are not considered deliverables, only code. There's no motivation to fix a crap design. You generally have to do the absolute minimum documentation your management chain will accept, then push out some code, let it fail, then redesign it in your spare time and start pushing out incremental changes as part of your bug fixing work.
I never saw anyone intentionally build crap designs / code so they could then get props for fixing the bugs they introduced, but there were several times people didn't have time to think through the problem and built crap code that led to sev 1 / sev 2 problems. People weren't trying to build crap code, it's just a side effect of being judged on how well you implement code, not on how well you design systems.
I have given this feedback for a person at Google who made fewer than five commits in a year, each with just a handful of lines. The lines were good, so it wasn't about the quality of the work.
This is my favorite kind of Google story. It doesn't happen all the time. But I've seen it...where a person studies the problem for a considerable period of time, followed by a minimal and precise solution. Those are often followed by mass deletion of newly superfluous code. And those are generally worth a team celebration!
It doesn't, a bad manager (allegedly) did. Having said that, having say 50% fewer commits than your peers is probably a reason to dive-deeper...it could be a good thing, maybe you were unblocking tasks and writing docs, or tackling the thorny issues...but also could be you are less productive.
Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits.
Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The simplest reason is – it's much more expensive to let go someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not so attention grabbing or interesting.
Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that.
But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News, Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every person at Amazon basically hates their job.
And the other thing is the people who do respond with positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often get down ranked and personally attacked.
Lastly – No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally better. There are no brownie points for more code or more complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage frugality and invent and simplify.
EVERY manager I've interacted with at Amazon looks at CRUX statistics -- it is the actual reason that they exist.
My current manage (5 year badge employee btw) is counting my code. We are both L6s and he has shared with me the various target CR each level is expect to do (per week).
For L6 it is 4 (in the AWS org) per week.
The leadership principals also say "hire and develop the best", which ought to mean that they would be doing the damnedest to keep people.
But they don't. I've seen three people Pivoted in the last 6 months -- two of them had been with Amazon (AWS) for over 4 years.
These people did not "suddenly" become bad, or shit at their job, or etc. What happened is that they were stacked ranked, and they were at the bottom. The job was, and remains, exactly the same.
Which is why stack ranking is stupid. Same job. Same person. One year you are meeting the bar. The next you are the worst at it.
I've seen "lines of code" used against someone at Amazon before. I'm sure the manager knew that it isn't a performance metric, but the manager had to hit a Unregretted Attrition (PIP) target so they just threw whatever they could think of at the person.
The institutional mechanism behind this insane thing is the URA target, just like many other insane things posted in this thread.
I had relative number of commits mentioned as part of my negative performance evaluation. I was working on a project involving a long information gathering phase and a long design process for the architecture, but that wasn't considered an excuse. It 100% depends on your manager, though. I think managers might feel forced to make a comparisons and put an otherwise acceptable engineer on the bottom of the stack. Lines of code and commit count is a pretty low-thought way of doing that.
oh man. that is the kiss of death at amazon. ALWAYS BE CODING. ALWAYS BE COMMITTING. My director told me they looked at commit cadence, KLoC and (ugh) story points retired per sprint because it was something they could measure. You can measure code that compiles vs. code that doesn't compile. Architecture docs and designs can't be automagically evaluated; there's a lot of subjective judgement as to whether or not they're useful.
It seems unlikely this is universal, but at least in my management chain, focus on code was definitely a thing.
Amazonian here, I speak only for myself. FWIW, 4+ years in as an SDE and I've never been judged on that metric. If I had a manager like that, I would do what's best for my career. :-)
I had a similar experience. I had a great manager on a very insulated, experimental team working fast and delivering results. Our Program Manager changed teams, soon our Product Manager changed teams, and we got merged into another team with new managers. I was told by my old managers I was on track to promotion and found out at the end of that cycle that I had a negative performance review and it was going to be even longer. I was delivering during this, but so was the whole team.
I swapped teams hoping that a new manager for an old colleague's team would be better and things didn't really improve. I stayed for a year before quitting due to my mental health. I think it can be hard to find the right team at a big tech company and even if you do, there's no guarantee of how long it will stay that way.
that's very similar to my experience. i swapped managers about a year in and my second manager put me on a PIP. except that it wasn't really a PIP, it was just him saying "i'm putting you on a PIP." -- I didn't know the difference until I had left. A friend in HR told me (after I quit) that managers do this to try to get more performance out of people. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved.
Also, the best C++ coder I know got dinged 'cause he was refactoring huge amounts of redundant code checked in by a different developer. I think he was eventually able to convince his management chain that DRY is a good thing and got back on the promotion track, but not before the other developer (who introduced a metric crap-ton of crap code) got promoted. After taking a metaphoric crap on our project, he then left for a different team. It took two years to fix the codebase.
A real PIP always has HR involved. Note to any Googlers: If a manager tells you you're on a PIP, feel free to reach out directly to HR and ask for information about it. Or your skip level, who will be pretty surprised if it's not a real one, and probably not too happy about it.
On your second example, this is where having senior technical people in the calibration room is really important. The key there is ensuring that said technical people know about the work before they are in the room. It is really difficult to change outcomes after the fact. You can't expect them to defend something they don't know about.
The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have been moved/retrained/let go.
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.
It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more).
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
I ended up being on the losing end of the stack ranking at Microsoft and it was pretty terrible.
My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine but because he had to rank someone the lowest, it was my turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had actually been doing a bad job it wouldn't have felt as bad because at least then I would have had some control over the situation.
I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a list of other developers on the other teams that I was helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt super shitty and I left the company right after.
That happened to be right at the same time they did away with the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of the company.)
The current company I work at uses stack ranking. I had no idea what it was until I joined a new team and was told, "Well, no bonus for you, because you're the new guy. Mark always uses the new devs to rank against so he can give out bigger bonuses to his cronies."
Sure as shit, for three years, it didn't matter how awesome or shitty a job I did, I got the same middle of the road review. One year, I got a paltry bonus and no salary increase. The next was neither and the final year I got a pittance of both. By the second year, I knew what was happening and just completely checked out. I went full "Office Space" and did the exact minimum in order to get my work done and not get put on a pip. Would come in around 11, get my stuff done in a few hours and tell my team I was going to be "WFH" the rest of the day.
Finally left that team and two years since leaving that team, I've had several large bonuses and salary increases.
Stack ranking is some toxic bullshit and managers use it to make themselves look better to their own skip managers. Fucking corporate politics man, it ruins everything.
That's also the case at Amazon. And likely most large organizations. It's not a strict stack rank but an expectation that over a certain population size, there is a certain percentage of under-performers. It's also used as a method of calibration. Performance evaluations are hard.
In my experience at Amazon, line managers (5-20 people) still often act as if they have unregretted attrition goals.
It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.
Heck, I even saw directors and VP refer to "regretted attrition" and "unregretted attrition" in all hands meetings.
My impression is that most teams have high enough natural attrition that it doesn't really matter and some teams even seem completely immune to any sort of real change, even if they do extremely poorly on their deliverables. I know a few teams that other teams actively avoid working with, even preferring to reinvent some of their solutions, yet, more or less the same people have been working on these underperforming teams for several years.
I’ve noticed this too in my time in my org, it’s reasonably common to just rebuild something simple if the other team isn’t responding to your tickets and escalations. The fact that they are three or four different time zones away from me on either side of the country doesn’t help.
I get that Amazon is known for their cold, calculated workforce, but it really takes a special kind of person to execute a, "hire someone just to fire them no matter how they do" plan over the course of like, an entire year, and honestly it's not even in that manager's best interest if the new person is actually pretty good.
Are we really suggesting that's the norm at Amazon? Maybe, but wow.
The link you pointed to mentions how hire managers are looking to hiring as many good people as possible. Of course they are if so many people are being fired.
It says that managers who don't perform well will be out. And that was the reason given for why this practice doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff. Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It is setup to be toxic.
> Of course they are if so many people are being fired.
You don't seem to understand. Amazon grows by 15-30% every single year.
We're constantly hiring, even if there is no attrition. We also have a high bar. The ~ ratio is 20 phone screens to 4 onsites to 1 hire. That's a lot of work to get a butt in a seat.
> Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff.
Only if you presume that every single team has to identify that X% of people for the URA target. They don't. Period. Full Stop. It's a lie.
> Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk
The #1 thing that gets asked about individuals during yearly operational reviews is "what did they deliver"? We try to identify individual contributions but individuals can't ship. Teams ship.
You can still have bad hires. It happens rarely that the bar raising process outright fails, but it still happens, since the data you get out of an interview is very limited. For example, we had a team member that not only was doing a bad job on his own stuff, he was a drain on morale and resources for the whole team, since he constantly complained about everything, he never tried to learn anything, he posted big commit dumps every few months - hundreds of commits at once - and the code quality on those was abysmal. Luckily we got rid of him pretty fast, but not fast enough.
Most bar raisers are limp noodles that will just do whatever the hiring manager says. It's trivially easy to hire a mediocre person with full intent to fire them, and a bar raiser would likely be none-the-wiser nor would they stop it.
Companies implement stack ranking because the management does not have necessarily visibility to valuate each employee. Those who can't stand stack ranking should either join a small startup, where visibility is not issue by nature, or join a team with explosive growth, so each person's productivity and impact can easily be gauged.
No, I don't think stack ranking is necessary. It, however, could be a consequence of bad management or of the belief that stack ranking is the most effective way of continuously improving teams.
>> could be a consequence of bad management or of the belief that stack ranking is the most effective way of continuously improving teams.
I've never been at a company who uses it where the teams improved at all. Most of the time those regressed since people were actively working in silo's and shitting on other people's work to make their own work appear better.
Google's perf tools used to support stack ranking and layering. I used to love it...because it was completely open ended. You could stack rank on any dimension you wanted to, and you didn't even have to say what the dimension was. You could stack rack anybody, over arbitrary sets. AFAIK the results were only ever used in aggregate -- without the dimensions there really wasn't any other way to use it.
You could stack rank how nice you thought people were, making two layers -- like "really nice" and "mostly nice" (of course, there were no labels in the tool). Or you could use it to highlight two particular team-mates who really stood out by making a layer for them, and then a layer for everyone else.
It could also be used to stack-rank the entire management chain, which was fun.
I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of constant churn on what seems like baseless theories. If it's your immediate boss that's tired of one particular slacker that's one thing but it's a wholly different situation when HR comes down on your boss demanding they fire 6% of their team whether or not they're doing great. It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.
I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.
A couple of things come to mind. (I work for Amazon, but I don't speak for the company.)
1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing.
2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.
I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups.
In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.
I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.
Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.
Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors.
True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.
If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.
>If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is).
A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.
Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies.
So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.
I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro), but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and has nothing to do with particularly efficient single firms.
Simple thought experiment. Firms will continue to hire until wage = marginal productivity .. otherwise, you leave money on the table. Usual BS assumptions on perfect information/competition, cetrus paribus, and all that stuff.
In your simple thought experiment, why are wages going up for that one firm? You're hiring more people, not raising the wages of the existing people. And I'm not sure why you think unit economics apply to software with it's almost 100% fixed costs.
If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period.
Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
I failed Amazon like three times in a row (along with other smaller companies). This last year I expanded my search and got into Facebook and Google, despite failing Amazon again.
Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?
If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.
Amazon's culture is nothing compared to the stories I've heard about Microsoft's Mac software teams. I can't repeat them all but supposedly they weren't allowed to read any sample code including Stack Overflow questions.
I'd rank Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, etc. at least on par with Amazon in terms of resume brand name recognition/prestige. They're also probably at least as difficult to get into.
But "random startups" that no one knows about? Probably preferable to have Amazon.
How common is it for a candidate to be able to get offers from multiple FAANGs?
I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong.
The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
Common among the cognitive elites, but the rest of us are lucky to get one. For me, Amazon was the one. And the fact that people think the bar is lower (and therefore I’m stupid) has made me cry myself to sleep before.
- you aren't defined by who your employer is
- your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is
- you can't control what other people say or think about you
- you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually)
- life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so
At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that.
Getting into the FANG interview process doesn't seem that complicated, recruiters reach out to most developers / graduates on LinkedIn. Passing it requires learning a specific set of skills.
I would say the bar is pretty much the same for all FANGs.
If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple.
I see people that apply to multiple FANGS tend to pass some of them. Once you put in the work to learn those exercises (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), failing them or passing them becomes a matter of luck (the right set of exercises, the right interviewer).
As to how this translates to intelligence - I personally don't care if a candidate is able to pass a FANG interview or not (I've seen plenty of bad employees who were FANGs or ex-FANGs and plenty of geniuses as well), but I definitely will think of them as being driven individuals who achieved what they set up to do.
Incidentally the best employees who made a difference in the companies I've worked at were, incidentally, never ex-FANGs, just talented individuals who decided to put in the work.
> If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple
I don't know, I failed Facebook several times and never got an interview at Apple. Getting an interview at most companies isn't that hard, but with Amazon on the resume I'm out of the game for companies like top trading firms and Stripe, Airbnb etc. I think I simply don't have the intelligence to do so. I'm sure some people have the ability to get offers after doing thousands of leetcode problems but I've never met them - everyone I know that's successful has only done a handful and passed their interviews without any trouble.
I've put in the work, but I've gotten nothing out of it. It's hard not to be discouraged by that.
Curious as to why you think having Amazon on your resume is a dealbreaker to some companies? Is this something that is known?
Amazon is probably a better name to have on your resume than the vast majority of other companies out there. I'd imagine you'd instantly be considered higher at first glance than someone with say, JP Morgan, or Lockheed Martin, or IBM, or any number of no-name startups on their resume.
I am not sure why but I always assumed Amazon was easier to get into than Google, Facebook and Netflix. Microsoft/LinkedIn is probably same difficulty as Amazon. Just anecdotes and people I know I guess.
Personally, I'd work for Amazon and already be looking elsewhere the moment I signed up, given how random it seems in terms of being fired. They're going to fire you anyway.
I actually did that, kept interviewing about every 8-12 months until last September or so. The problem is none of my offers were as high as Google new grad offers (all less than $200k, though one had a $175k base) so I didn’t take any. This was from 4 startups and Citadel. Seems like being inferior has its own severe monetary costs….
"the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies"
I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.
I mean, as someone who has yet to crack one FAANG (or similar level company) offer, a FAANG engineer is someone that I look up to. But my friends and ex-colleagues who did crack FAANG did so with difficulty, and they got rejected from all but the one company that did extend an offer. They all say if they were to re-interview at their companies (or another FAANG), odds are they'd be rejected.
So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
If you work at a top-tier company, you'll meet lots of people who can get multiple offers from top-tier companies. They are bright, but usually not geniuses. And they are often a bit obsessed with puzzles :)
FAANG interviewing has nothing to do with your skill as an engineer. FAANG interviews only evaluate how good you are at jumping through the specific hoops they require for their special interview process. For Amazon, it's all about how well you can bullshit your way around the LPs.
It's the professional equivalent of "being good at taking multiple choice exams". But just because someone got 100s on every biology exam in high school doesn't mean they are an expert in biology, just that they are a good test taker.
If you want to look up to someone because they are actually a good engineer, then that's great. But don't look up to someone just because they are a good test taker. And don't look down on yourself just because you are a bad test taker. Taking tests has so little relevance to how good you actually are as an engineer. Amazon is chock-full of completely mediocre engineers, and also rejects plenty of actual engineering wizards.
I'd argue FAANG offers are like college admissions, probably a good 40% of the applicant pool likely qualifies for the role and can succeed in it, but only 3-4% of the pool gets the offer
You can argue the numbers and there's probably a top tier of people who are no brainers. But, yeah, in general at least for elite university admissions, they could probably toss most or all of the admitted pile in the trash, figure out who to admit from the rest of the pile, and the world would keep on turning just fine.
All companies letting some employees go. Why would companies keep employees who are consistently underperforming? such employees usually have negative impact on the company. If you started a company tomorrow, would you keep such employees? As long as the process is fair I see no problem with it (fair = letting employees know months in advance that they are underperforming and need to improve, offering a decent severance package based on tenure, etc)
It's all in the details of how it actually happens. "Months to adapt" is fine, but if the objective is to get rid of 6% of the employees that can be "made to happen" in various under-handed ways.
The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.
No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?
I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings. It's not at all obvious to me that the success rate at Amazon should be expected to be significantly over 85% of hire-to-performing employee. Given that, what should they do with the 15% who don't turn out to be performing employees (for whatever reason that isn't itself protected class membership)?
> I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings.
If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.
Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews, which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly noisy signal even for the best interviewers and management chain.
> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore.
Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.
No one publication is exhaustively tracking exec exits, but this businessinsider article gives you an idea of what's perhaps going on and why: https://archive.is/RwUZ9
> On top of that, Amazon typically doesn’t provide additional stock rewards, even when an employee is eligible for a raise, if the stock price grows to push total compensation past a position’s pay range.
Worker productivity is measured as "amount of goods" over number of employees. If you say "revenue" is the same as "amount of goods" then Amazon gives you:
I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to fire them later.
And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.
> Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed.
Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."
They will fail in multiple ways and this will be a factor in what eats them out like a cancer. But it will take decades so really is it an issue for them? Unlikely. They'll still be profitable. It won't necessarily kill them either.
Its the equivalent of the corporation being a person smoking cigarettes. It imparts some benefits and doesn't kill right away but given enough time it still causes disease. They'll start to miss opportunities. They'll run slower.
The metaphor vanishes in a lot of ways though because the corporation can pivot and simply say "we were wrong". Microsoft is a perfect example. It regularly threw away people and this caused damage and various big failures but not enough to scuttle them. They are still successful. Still growing.
Students of history know that Microsoft's story of success hides a lot of messy details including behavior where plenty of law had to get involved. Amazon will go down a similar path. Or has likely already begun.
Amazon can be one of the most productive companies ever, and still be doing self-sabotaging things that will erode their long term success.
Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.
Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.
So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.
Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample:
Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.
By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality. For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.
Top of market quality is obviously not IKEAs goal. There is no one in IKEA corporate who would argue differently.
IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it.
Ikea has more similarities with Apple than Amazon. Amazon is a mishmash of stuff being sold, like Dollarstore or whatever. Ikea is more like the Apple store. Ikea is a streamlined and well thought out experience.
> Ikea is a streamlined and well thought out experience.
It's so fascinating how diverse people's viewpoints are! My first experience of IKEA was that it was a confusing, frustrating, poorly laid out and inefficient labyrinth designed to get you lost, and also funnel you to the "hot dog" items that make them the majority of their profit. I've taken many of my parents and observed similarly people's parents and grandparents of friends get just as frustrated and confused at the layout. For god sakes, I just want to be able to walk in, go to the "kitchen decor" get what I need, and walk out. I don't want an "experience", but I digress.
I think a better measure of IKEA would be "value"–the intersection of price, quality, and problem-solution fit.
IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted with resounding "yes".
IKEA produces excellent quality for the price. People who think it's low quality usually don't glue it together or attach it to the wall when appropriate.
The particleboard on the back of Billy is not that high quality, but maybe it's fine against a wall.
On the other hand, I have all Ikea furniture and it's survived 3-4 moves and only gotten stronger - my last mover's hobby was repairing furniture and he fixed everything with his pile of spare parts.
If you ask me, digital ocean: top notch UX, good performance, good offering of services (k8s, load balancing, managed databases).
A reasonable and nice service.
I use it for some small businesses of mine but I wouldn't use it for a medium company. I would just get some servers from smaller provider in different data centers and deploy whatever I need.
AWS, was definitely the service that convinced everyone they needed the cloud.
Most of the companies I've seen move to aws are just wasting money, don't need the scalability and are massively over-provisioned.
A few unicorns needs the cloud's powers to scale massively now - and, given how much it costs, they'll end up rewriting it anyway to save hundreds of millions a few years down the line.
Better than AWS at what? Many are better than AWS in parts of their business - Google's Kubernetes offerings are far better than AWS's overall, Azure beats the pants of AWS in Windows hosting, Active Directory hosting, Confluent provides a better Kafka offering, Snowflake shits all over Redshift and Aurora (at least for OLAP) etc.
That said, AWS is solid and best in class in many areas, and to paraphrase the old saying: "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS"
As a current Amazon employee I have to say that is pretty ludicrous. If you actually think Amazon could scale back to 10% of it's current employees without losing massive forward momentum and capacity to deliver results then I don't know what to say. All those metrics would suffer greatly in both the short and long term.
In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.
If a company makes a lot of money, does that mean every employee is responsible for generating the money they made? Is it possible to make a lot of money with not a lot of employees? Does Amazon make less money when employees take a lot of PTO?
Just to be clear, I am using the word "productivity" in a very general sense: output over input.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90% workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.
The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.
The size and growth of AWS' customer base and financial success is a very strong counterargument to your claims. Is it possible you are confusing your personal preferences for the goals of the AWS business? AWS may seek to advance the state of the art, but this is not the end goal, per se, but rather one factor that may or may not achieve the end goal. The end goal is more customers and greater revenue and profit.
> someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team
Customers don't care all that much why AWS "works". They care that it "works". And, again, it "working" is not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another means to an end.
The reason why industrialization took off in Britain and not in India or China is unclear, but a regard for science, an undersupply of labour and internal stability all play a role.
You don't have any of that at Amazon, there is firefighting instead of research, they aren't running out people willing to work for them yet, and personnel turnover is stratospheric.
Yes, they do make money, but you can't buy advancement.
How does AWS advance the state of the art with undocumented services that frequently fail? I'm not a big fan of Azure, but at least they document their services.
I would go so far as to argue our assumption about Amazon even wanting to "maximize" productivity may not be correct.
It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system goes for the former.
This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want.
It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry. We have to hire you in at a lower grade 'cause we can only hire so many principal engineers per quarter. you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter." The money was still pretty good so I didn't think anything about it.
Eventually I figured out that they had stiffed me on typical stock options. The whole bait-and-switch thing was their way to try and hire Sr. people for Jr. engineer's option grants.
Of course I wasn't automatically promoted and my boss mentioned, "oh yeah, you have to do a Dev III project to get promoted to Software Developer III first." And they expected me to do that project on my own time. sigh
Then in the middle of doing a software project for Amazon on my own fucking time I get moved under a different manager. The first thing he does is say I've been underperforming and he was going to put me on a PIP (I had perfect reviews the year before.) How the hell can you review my work two weeks after I start working for you?
About this time I bumped into a former-coworker who mentioned how happy he was after leaving Amazon. So I say to myself "f** this sh*" and quit in a couple weeks after getting a decent offer from another company to do consulting.
About two months later our HR rep returns from vacation and calls me up asking why I quit and I tell her it was clear I wasn't Amazon material, having had perfect reviews for a year and then being put on a PIP. She then asks "you were on a PIP? that's news to me," and another friend I knew in HR tells me managers will do this slimy thing to get more performance out of people during the holidays where they tell them they're on a PIP, but they really aren't. If you're on a PIP, HR will be involved.
Amateur ass-clowns. Everyone talks about how much dosh you'll bank at AMZN. Not really. I now make about the same amount in salary, but have a significantly higher equity stake in a smaller company.
It might be okay for your first or second job (it's not all negative, there's plenty of opportunity to learn about computing at scale.) But you're going to be working 55-60 hours per week to be promoted and told you're on a PIP just before Thanksgiving.
That statement implies, in no uncertain terms, that the expectation is more work for less pay. It's a flowery way of telling the candidate they're getting a bad deal. If you the scope is X+1, and you pay me X+1, we have no issue.
Curious about how effective this kind of "private" PIP can be?
PIP is scary to foreign workers who are on temporary worker visa. Losing a job means that you may have to leave the country, which is a life changing event.
It is so scary that, in immigrant communities I am familiar with, it becomes a common sense to not to even dream about getting out of PIP. If your manager put you on PIP, start looking for a new job immediately because you don't want to risk losing your immigration status.
Don't try too hard on the PIP project, don't try to please your manager, only put reasonable amount of effort into the project so they don't have a reason to fire you immediately, and try to get the f** out as fast as you can.
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter and did a brief interview. Rather than a screening call like most companies I've interacted with, the recruiter wanted me to immediately fill out their application and start on the technical assessment, as if it didn't even cross her mind that I might not be interested in working for them. I filled out the app as it seemed required for the initial call, and then when I explicitly asked, I learned that supposedly most people work 40h weeks. I don't blame her for doing her job and trying to get applications, but the complete lack of sincerity was astonishing. I had already decided I'd never work for a FAANG based on other experiences I've learned about online and through friends, but it was especially impactful to experience the culture personally.
> you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter
This is always a HUGE RED FLAG. Never agree to this. Ever. For any reason. Even if you can get it in writing, you can be laid off, fired, etc.
Get the title when you walk in or don't walk in.
The problem is that titles generally have salary bands. You'd much rather be at the low end of a better title because the high end of the band is higher.
The flip side is that you better know that you can actually do the job. If you come in as a Principal, you're going to be expected to work as a Principal and not a Senior. If you're work is only up to Senior, you're going to get fired.
I, sadly, had to fire a guy who got into this position somehow. He was a nice guy. He could do Senior work. But he was at HR Principal level. We were a startup struggling to survive and I didn't have the time to teach him. So, I had to fire him to free up my slot so I could get an actual Principal that I desperately needed.
He took my advice to land somewhere else as a Senior, and I gave him a nice recommendation. He got pretty close to the same salary and killed it for them at that level.
>This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want.
Diabolical thing.
I remember laughing (other place, other times) as my manager friend told me about a manager in the org practicing it. It was an exception though, and I see how it may be a regular practice at AMZN.
Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."
Your reply assumes that [High IQ] => [Good Police Officer], but the argument in the US is that [High IQ] => [Bad Police Officer[1]].
I don't agree with this personally, but what they are doing is not equivalent to them exclaiming that "We don't hire the best". It would only be equivalent if they were explicitly filtering-out qualities they believe contribute to being the best, such as discipline, strength, and the like.
Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.
I hope so, since hiring "the best" is not a good strategy, it means you never hire any juniors. ("meritocracy" is also a bad idea and the word was invented for a book about how it doesn't work.)
As for hiring "the worst", I guess there's those companies founded to give ex-convicts honest work.
I recently reread The New Economics. Deming talks about a factory worker screwing up on the production line, ruining a large quantity of product, and getting punished for it. He makes the argument that the design of the line, company policy, etc, have a far greater impact on workers’ productivity than the intrinsic qualities of those workers.
I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer.
Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.
It depends entirely on what you're doing. I've worked in shops were I helped setup a golden way of building software.. and it worked great. We could take in junior engineers with no clue how to code and have them writing really good stuff in like two weeks, basically impossible to screw up. The tradeoff was that all of our tasks were.. basically the same kind of task. It was rare to do "revolutionary" work.
I work now in a situation where every single case that comes across my desk is actually unique. I still have a toolbox, but I need a really big variety of tools and picking the wrong tool is very easy. Suddenly instead of a golden way I'm actually focusing on testing designs quickly and in isolation to make sure we're picking the right tools for some given design.
Agreed. Anecdotally, I have never seen a PIP lead to a turn around. Honestly, I started to think it was just a way to cover for wrongful termination.
What I have seen is PIPs lead to so much stress and anxiety that people are unrecoverable.
I unfortunately worked with one person where a PIP led to hospitalization for thoughts of self-harm, because it was clear there wasn't going to be success in the current role, but there was no way to exit effectively (and there were confounding personal-life stress/factors). The whole thing was a horrific mess, starting with a nepotism hire, and finishing with unacceptably incompetent HR.
PIP means different things at different companies. It's true that some companies really just use PIPs as a documentation period to build a case to fire people.
A lot of managers and companies I know have moved away from the "PIP" terminology because the acronym has become too toxic to be productive. Instead, they'll have different names for their version of the program.
With few exceptions, managers don't enjoy firing people. We don't enjoy PIPing people, either. A good PIP (or whatever a company calls it) is usually structured as a mentorship program that lays out clear expectations for what is expected from an employee, pairs them up with mentors who can help get them there, and involves more frequent check-ins than normal to help get them on track.
As a manager, I have seen many PIPs succeed, if executed properly. I've also seen many fail. One of the common failure modes is when the employee assumes the worst and doesn't bother trying to improve. That's one of the main reasons smart companies don't use the "PIP" terminology any more.
I was under the impression that a PIP was nearly always a "here's your chance to get another job" warning, and never really an earnest chance to improve. Does anyone understand differently?
I was put on a PIP at Google and kept my job afterwards, they basically put massive training wheels on you. I had a director checking in with me 2-3 a week to put the pressure on, even doing some pair programming which was interesting. They really are trying to figure out why you aren't working well and see if you are a lost cause.
I guess it shows that they weren't just going to take a manager's word it and that multiple levels of management engaged in a PIP. Especially with how busy this director was typically, it was a use of their time that I didn't expect. Also, having a director be competent enough as an IC to pair program was something I hadn't experienced or expected.
I was "put on a PIP" by my boss at AMZN, but it turned out it wasn't really a PIP (i.e. - HR wasn't involved). It was just my boss trying to pressure me to work 50 hours per week during the holidays instead of the typical 60.
I think they mean 50 hours a week during holidays instead of ZERO, which is the typical holiday workload. The manager saw the holidays as a minor discount to regular time-commitment.
From personal contacts, the same happens at Facebook. If your performance is good, it means you're not being pushed enough and you need to increase your workload. What a despicable work culture that you have to expect to be told that you're not meeting expectations and that you have to be worked to that extent.
Yeah, I’ve heard it’s similarly bad at Facebook but people there don’t seem to complain as much because they’re the types of gunners that work 60 hours and claim they work 30.
With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.
I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic?
I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile at one point- Long story short, they were implying I couldn't handle their complexity, and I was just appalled at the mess they had made of it. I had only minor interest in the particular role, and was hoping to meet people and network around inside the org since HR sounded like it just had absolute tunnel vision and "my" rep was just focused on filling this one specific role, but the process spanned months and by the time my onsite came around I had already committed to another job, but figured I would see the process through. I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture. I wrote about this in more depth in the past if you are interested I can dig it up.
But in general, while it wasn't regarded as a cushy place (compared to say Google), I never knew it to be a meat grinder until recently. If anything about 3 years ago, I started hearing that working on the business side was problematic, but its much more recent that those stories started coming out from the engineering side of things.
> I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture.
I remember reading a blog about working at Amazon that was mostly about how they hated the dog friendly culture and couldn't get any accommodation for being allergic to dogs.
The reputation of Amazon as somewhere you go out of college and then quit after 2 years has been around a while, maybe about as long as the one about Google having impossible interviews.
Its entirely possible I just wasn't in the loop. I worked for Walmart at the time, so it seemed natural to give Amazon a shot. Previously I worked at many meat grinders in finance and was familiar with that type of culture. Being on the east coast I was one of the first people I knew to leave that world for more of a general tech focus, I only really knew about the super well regarded and hated companies.
Ironically, those are all the same platforms that made me want to contemplate ending it all because I work at Amazon. After I blocked them at the router level I started to feel better, until I realized people think I’m inferior no matter if I see them say it or not.
Those places are absolutely toxic (Glassdoor less so) when people praise themselves, but I think they're useful in sharing some of the harsh truths about different company cultures, including Amazon. But I'm sure they also miss the overall picture as corporations like Amazon are massive.
>I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic?
Current Amazon engineer here. People have been complaining working at Amazon for a long while.
At least in my organization, leadership pays close attention to whether folks are happy or unhappy in their roles. I posted this earlier, but we have a massive workforce of engineers at Amazon, across many countries. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5-10% of those unhappy folks are willing to say something about it online, you're going to see plenty of news sites picking up those articles and representing Amazon in a negative light.
There's plenty of bad publicity around Amazon, and I think that's due to the insane growth of this company. Regardless of your view, Amazon has been insanely successful. With that success comes suspicion, and you can quickly go from being very trusted to everyone questioning every practice – from quality of AWS documentation to Prime shipment speed to hiring/promotion practices, etc. Alot of people have skin in this game because they're competing directly with Amazon.
I'm not saying Amazon can't do better. We absolutely need to. But alot of the things being represented as systemic issues at Amazon are simply not so, but they certainly push a specific narrative. shrug
I got a glowing performance review at Amazon one year, and then with the exact same job/productivity level/attitude I got a bad review the year after. I did some digging, and it turned out that from the VP level down everyone in the org got a big "F U" from management as part of an effort to reduce the size of the org. I was wondering why all my teammates with more experience were jumping ship before that, and I learned the hard way.
What a fucking scam. You should quit peddling conspiracy theories and actually talk to people with a lot of experience in the industry. I just hope that you figure out how reality works the easy way (by listening to anyone in this thread).
After Amazon stabbed me in the back, I swore that I'd never again put work first over my own interests/family/health, and I haven't regretted that decision once in the 6+ years since then.
>I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.
I've never met anyone who was happy with their previous employer after getting let go. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but I'm entitled to my perspective. Your personal attacks towards me are just that – personal attacks.
I hope you found an employer where you're happier. :)
Offtopic: I'm curious to know why you chose to go with a throw-away account. All of your comments in this thread offer a glowing opinion of Amazon; so why the need to go incognito?
It's stood out for me because it subverts my expectations - that those with the most vituperative comments would use throw-away accounts to avoid burning bridges.
Ah, I can't blame him for using a throwaway account. People get canned for talking about their companies all the time. Maybe he's got high praise for Amazon today, and then tomorrow he wants to post about something personal
He's definitely delusional if he thinks that the tech world is a meritocracy though. (I doubt that myself and all of my friends/coworkers I've talked to and most of the people who post online just experienced a wacky freak coincidence.. Even the most kool-aid-chugging, gung ho company men I know will admit that there are a lot of politics and backstabbing involved in any big company)
If you can get fired because of some messed up policy like this then you don't need to take ownership for being fired anymore. Also, why show initiative if you're going to be fired randomly anyway? Why even work hard at all? Why show loyalty or goodwill? Just show up, do the work, participate in the general workplace nonsense purely for appearances and have your parachute always ready.
Not sure I'd care if fired from amazon - I'd just blame this policy. What a weird situation. Utterly demotivating in some sense if you have high expectations.
On the flip side I guess you could just treat it as a temp job. If you get fired you simply shrug and not own it as any kind of failure on your part. That's kind of liberating in its own way.
I kind of apply this approach in my sideline startup. I just pivot and redirect my effort elsewhere when things don't seem successful. I definitely just shrug them off. Next idea!
I understand your argument and it is an interesting given the technical source of demoralization.
What I submit to you that this level demoralization already happened. He already has very limited good will ( won't do anything extra unless there is a clear benefit to him ). I won't touch loyalty, because I myself have been through rounds of layoffs and have long accepted that in a corporation, that is merely a 7 letter word with little to no meaning.
I guess what I am saying it is not a new trend. Just a stepping stone in corporate America. The only difference is now, we don't get Mr. Burns choosing this, this and this one ( keep the egghead ); this time is a blackbox algorithm that won't ever touch the real decision makers ( cuz someone with enough forethought will add an exclusion list :P ).
What I dislike is that these corporations routinely complain about retention and skills shortages and a host of other problems. Including a desperate need for temporary and not so temporary visas for acquiring talent.
Also, I know a lot of people who regularly work and operate with the idea they'll be fired for no reason. These aren't unskilled labor either. This impacts societal cohesion. Its a dark pattern.
A friend with a background in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology was hired at Amazon a few years back and was shocked to discover the 10% turnover rate. As they shared, they took it upon themselves to find a better way to manage turnover and have a better performance assessment system. They implemented it and brielfy reduced turnover to 3%; until Bezos intervened and explicitly asked for at least 6% turnover. For someone with a background in I/O psych and interest in improving worker well-being, it was soul-crushing and they soon left.
It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams.
The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses.
Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses.
We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention.
Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.
As a former Amazon manager, I don’t like how this characterizes management as a mustache twirling Machiavellian. I don’t know what they saw, but I totally believe they predict a third of people on pips to fail. I’m actually surprised it’s that low of a percentage. It’s been my experience from more than Amazon that pip failure is higher than that. I was never encouraged to do anything that would contribute to something that looked like stack ranking. However, maybe this practice was not in place with engineers. I don’t really know, but it wasn’t my experience.
However, I absolutely believe Amazon comp structure is designed to encourage people to leave. Most of your comp is wrapped up in stock. If management wants you gone, they simply stop giving you more stock. You’re guaranteed to be out within four years. I remember being told that’s why the comp was structured with such low salaries. The person who told me was quite proud of that fact at the time.
That 2% is putting you slightly higher to the new bottom of band.
So to clarify, if previous years bottom of band was 100K, and this years bottom is 110K, your base bump + your projected stock value (current year + 15% increase planned YoY) will be 110K.
This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years?
1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.
There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.
Seems like there must be so much effort wasted in getting new people spun up on corporate culture, development style, internal tooling, etc... only to have half of them gone in less than a year.
Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?
It is possible that you are missing the point of this. While it works, it is saving company millions in compensation and keep internal upward pressures low. It is absolutely not sustainable, but it ever comes to the point that it has to be adjusted, it can be. And changing those policies will be so much easier with extra cash in hand to 'attract' new workers.
Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.
20% of the curve is ranked top tier? I'd like to work there. It's 8% at my company. Of course company also says they evaluate against a standard, but it's really stack ranking behind the scenes. It think it's always going to be stack ranked in IT since the standards/metrics are so vague.
Yeah, at our company it means you can get promoted onto most teams (have your choice). I feel like they specifically keep some people below that so they can't leave as easily. They also have a "critical man" policy where each department can designate one or two people as critical so they can't leave there.
While this is not the most popular imaginable method of selection, at least every hire gets a reasonably good chance to survive and will have the prestigious entry on the cv.
As for the 6 percent, most companies have more than that in every department. Usually people who only survive by brown nosing the right people or being friends with a manager.
6% per year isn’t that high for an “Up or out” culture. Seems par for the course for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, GE and (in the past) Microsoft. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that it’s par for the course for white collar work. (Overall attrition at these firms is even higher)
This whole article is framed as if Amazon is doing bad things. My impression is that this is a fair and pretty easy on the employees way to manage employee reviews.
It's not. Managers lie about performance of their employees in order to either save themselves or save their favorites in the group. I'm a current Amazon employee.
True - 7 years at my university as a grad student and I've been here longer than at least three or four of their new junior faculty hires (including replacements for some I used to work for)
Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people.
Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that people - except himself of course - are lazy so they need to be terrorized into being productive by firing a certain percentage of the employees.
Ultimately, it damages not just Amazon's brand as a employer, it reflects poorly on Amazon employees and managers for going along with this charade.
> you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people.
Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end, whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a manager has no incentive to do bad hires.
Uhh.. no. I don't know if you ever hired or fired anyone, but, in US at least, if you don't want your unemployment insurance to go up, you want to be able to prove that it was a firing for cause. Perversely, in Amazon case what this means that manager has to hire an employee just bad enough that the 'for cause' firing will be ready for him and he/she just needs to document it.
I fail to understand how people do not see how this simple metric can be gamed. Am I the only person thinking in those weird terms imposed by the system?
My understanding is that even once the manager has filled their team with top performers they'll keep hiring every year for the sole purpose of firing them later in order to meet the quota
The issue with it is that if your performance isn't up to scratch managers are more incentivized to force you out than to work with you to get your performance up.
no problems unless you are willing to be upfront about it and pay a premium for this 'feature'. Its highly unethical otherwise, especially for immigrants who may be putting their legal status in jeopardy. Cynical part of me suspects they want to use this kind of engineers to create work-slave like culture for everybody.
They delay if money 8s received in advance for floatand pipeline funds in India.If COD they deliver quickly.But they sometimes return the stuff without delivering.Funny and cranky in India.Many stuff don't confirm to the pictures and standards mentioned.Important household stuff delivery wantonly delayed.
It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at the same time company is boasting about making billions and avoiding taxes.
They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce.
This is despicable.
These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.
When the number of houses is fixed, the price of a house is infinite, so of course you can't save for it. The solution is to build more houses, not give everyone a raise.
Also Amazon is not dodging state income taxes because Washington doesn't have a state income tax.
