Seems like a classic case of "show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome".
You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
It's the natural outcome of stack-ranking systems. If managers know that the bottom 10% of their direct reports are going to be shown the door, protect the whole team by hiring people just to rank them in the bottom. If a manager oversees 200 people, is more likely ~20 of them will be bad hires and can be let go, but if a manager only has five direct reports, losing just one, even if that one isn't all the great, means losing 20% of the team.
On that note, I wonder how these forces might work to fix ideal team size to align with these flawed incentives.
There are plenty of teams at Amazon which could be significantly larger than that. How many employees do you think they have in every warehouse, and how many managers? ;)
True. :) There is definitely a difference in how Amazon scales management for warehouses. Elsewhere, it's "everyone a leader".
My first true corporate experience was with big-four Deloitte. The culture there is "up or out". May sound sketchy to outsiders but it was actually a really supportive environment.
I worked at a company where each manager was given a set of percentages they could give as raises. Something like 15%, 10%, everyone else 5%.
He decided his team was good enough so he submitted the paperwork for 15% for everyone. It worked, he never heard back and everyone got their raise. This went on for years.
Then one day I'm in a meeting with a bunch of management and some small talk comes up about the set raises. My manager notes he doesn't follow the 'guidance' and all the other managers gasp.
For years these guys just did what they thought was expected, didn't even try anything different.
The managers at that company were more drones than anyone else... needless to say eventually all innovation slowed and the company feel into process hell.
At my last company, I found out they'd print any title on your business card and as long as it didn't include Director, VP, or Chief. Those triggered approval from higher up. I chose a different title every time I had cards printed.
Outside of regulatory or compliance requirements, in many cases, "policies" are simply suggestions which can be ignored.
I had a great manager at my last company. Very good people person, would read on his own time to try and improve himself, etc. He had also been in our department the longest - upper management was always coming and going every 2-3 years. I asked him one time why he didn't want to go for one of those higher level positions and would rather stay at this sort of stressful one after a decade. He said he didn't want to deal with all the headaches at that level (more meetings with C-level people). He just wanted to keep his head down, take care of his team, and go home (a 1-2 hr commute each way).
Given the precarity of much existence in the US, and the ability to be fired on a whim, it's no wonder the 'drone' mentality, of not bucking the system, is pretty normal. Suck up the BS until you can retire. I guess at least these days most of us don't have to deal with hot tar.
It's worse (mentally, financially, socially) for the one getting laid off than for the company. Places that are used to high turnover already have systems in place to go through the whole process. In the US, the need to 'go along to get along' is greater since healthcare and employment are so intertwined. I know plenty of people that would move onto other organizations or working for themselves if their families weren't reliant on their employer-provided healthcare. Same with the manager I mentioned in my comment - stay at home wife, two young kids.
Goodhart's Law as generalized by Marilyn Strathern: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
For many reasons, I typically do better with qualitative performance reviews, and I'm usually more critical of myself than my manager. I have first-hand experience with exactly the kind of point I believe you might be trying to make, because I've been lucky enough to be managed by people who are genuinely passionate about managing people (and have therefore used qualitative reviews).
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
I like the quantitative review for one reason -- people need to know if they're a 2 or not. Too many managers soft pedal concerns about perf and then people get fired 6 months later not ever knowing they were at risk.
The problem with this approach is that for any individual who says "I don't deserve a 3 this quarter" there is someone who says "I'm a 4 this quarter or I'll look elsewhere". Managers optimize for the (polite) squeaky wheel and have finite promotions/resources too allocate in a given quarter.
I was surprised by how quickly the author seemed to confuse measurement and goal
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
That pairing stuck out to me as well. I think the article is generally on point, but I would have rewritten the first sentence to say "it's worth mentioning that having a metric for attrition isn't inherently bad." But having a goal for attrition is exactly the problem the article's describing.
I thought they should have discussed why a company might want to incentivize managers to not be under a URA goal. They discuss why having a URA is "normal" and why it might be bad to incentivize managers to meet a certain URA, but not why a company might choose to so anyway.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but in management's eyes, it's your job to make them look good. If you want to be rewarded, make them look good, and if you want to be punished, make them look bad.
That's it. Fight losing self-destructive battles if you feel you have to, but never forget it.
I thought The Sims University modeled it brilliantly, as one could succeed in classes without attending them by hosting study sessions with classmates and becoming a close friend to the instructors.
I strongly disagree with this. I don't entirely agree with Strathern, for that matter. I would argue that (a) you need to calculate metrics that are important to your business, (b) some metrics really are important as targets, and (c) you must communicate those targets to the people whose job it is to help the business meet them.
The problem with "hire to fire" as described here is that it fails those criteria (the meta-metrics, if you will). Knowing your company's attrition/turnover rate is good; communicating that metric, at least to managers, is (I would argue) also good. But using it as a target that your managers must not go under is toxic to work culture and employee morale.
There are zero relevant metrics a company can use that don’t create negative incentives. Maximizing profit, cut R&D.
Business is simply complex, you can always sacrifice an intangible like brand perception to tweak some metric. But, it’s the along term that represents the vast majority of a companies value.
At least assuming the company is likely to survive the next 2 years.
One of the very first companies I worked at was a local exchange carrier, back in the days those were a thing, and there was supposed to be a certain maximum number of days between the time an order was placed for a new line and the time the line was operational. (These were lines like frame relay drops, fractional or full T1s, etc., so fulfilling the order often required coordinating with other providers, colocation facilities, and so on.) But nobody was actually formally measuring this. I created a spreadsheet which actually calculated the metrics by querying a database for recent orders, showing which ones were still open and how long they'd been open for, and what the distributions of placement-to-fulfillment times were, and it turned out we were only hitting our own internal targets about half of the time. They didn't know that. There was a vague sense they weren't hitting all the targets, but there was no sense they were missing half the targets, in some cases by a lot.
Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do.
Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.
You just used circular reasoning so justify a metric.
Anyway, there is a huge difference in collecting data and using a metric as a goal. Process improvement may involve measuring what specifically was causing delays and possibly changing things. Or perhaps using a more complex classification system where anything involving company X will always take an extra N days and everyone needs to know this ahead of time etc etc. The point is you need to make complex tradeoff perhaps company X is worth the delay.
> maximum number of days between the time an order was placed for a new line and the time the line was operational.
Once the employees know this is being measured, they will presume it's also a goal, because why else measure it? Then they will act in ways to reduce the time between order and operational status. Is there any reason to believe that they won't game the measure, pushing orders to "operational" in ways that are detrimental to the business?
In my view, they have to be widely communicated, for two reasons.
1. In a company with middle management, i.e., managers working for managers, you have to reveal the metric / target to them. Or at least, some manager will spill the beans and then it's not a secret any more.
2. Companies imitate one another, directly, or through managers who share a common background. Therefore, it's not hard to guess the metrics of one business by reading about similar businesses.
Thanks to these two channels, it's actually possible that the rank and file workers understand the business better than their managers do, because the workers have a broad range of information at their disposal if they read the business pages or even HN, whereas managers are obligated to embrace the official line. When a new metric is installed, chances are that the workers already understand it, and how to manipulate it.
I do agree with both of these, but then the question becomes “so then what DO we do?”
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
- give employees and managers enough context to understand the business goals and empower them to make intelligent decisions and affect positive change
This type of practice is what makes me not even consider FAANG jobs. I've (tactfully) told their recruiters I'm not interested; you'd have to pay me 500k minimum to even consider having to live on the west coast, dealing with their terrible work life balance, and having to worry about firing on top of everything else. Per this article, you could unknowingly have an expiration date on your employment. From personal contacts at Facebook, they specifically want you to get "needs improvement" on performance reviews to show that you're really pushing yourself; if you're doing well, you're not being pushed hard enough. I'm definitely not masochistic or interested in money/tech enough to work at a place like that.
Having it happen once isn't toxic. The part that creates the terrible culture is that it happens every year.
Imagine trying to build a team and good culture when someone on your team is put into a performance plan/fired every year.
Now add in unreasonable demands from management on delivery dates, churn from people trying to work at a company that doesn't fire one of their coworkers every year, and a lack of new hire support because if you don't bring your new hires up to speed very fast, they're more likely to get fired than you/your friends are. Also, those new hires get paid more than you do if they were brought in at the same level because they're "bar raising" and you aren't.
10% is quite high. It's more like 3% in my company.
And using invalid assumptions, if the probability that you will get PIP'd every year is 10%, assuming it's just a random dart shot, that means the likelihood you'll get PIP'd at some point in the first 4 years is 35%.
i'm surprised to run across so many purported tech professionals who still don't know the difference between options and RSUs, and how the latter are as good as cash
I'm not. Our industry is filled with people who have bought hook, line and sinker into the "I'm passionate about what I do and that's all I need" cult, especially in the Bay Area/startup world. They assume they're well compensated (a few are--maybe a higher fraction than in other industries, even--but most of them aren't) and don't pay attention to that sort of thing much.
At a public company, equity comp is a stock grant. This has a greater likelihood of being valuable than equity in a private company, though of course the value could still go down.
At Amazon in particular they pay you the cash value of your stock for the first two years until it vests and you can start actually cashing it out. They have to since they have a maximum wage of ~$170K (varies a little depending on city).
I don't think so, because I think the most common tenure is just over 2 years. I know a lot of people who leave right after their second year cliff (the vesting isn't even and most of it comes at the end).
Consider the story that we're discussing. If you're hired by someone whose incentive is to fire you to meet a metric, then you're never going to get that equity payment. And they have every incentive to load your offer up with as much equity as they can.
And even if they don't, there are lots of ways to find yourself in a toxic workplace. If you're depending on that vesting schedule, your life can suck as you're trying to wait out an arbitrary deadline.
If you treat vesting as a nice optional bonus that you don't plan on, neither situation will feel bad to you.
Lots do monthly/quarterly vesting. But all have 1 year cliffs. With the idea that you get nothing if you don't last.
I had the wonderful experience of being hired at Google many years ago, and pulled into an SRE role. I was in the roughly half that they do that with that don't work out. And I didn't work out for exactly the reason that I initially expressed doubts about. (I don't task switch that fast - not a problem in a SWE but a major problem for an SRE.) I was let go 5 days before my 1 year cliff.
That is one of the reasons why I, personally, discount equity compensation.
Why not, assuming the company is public? If you can convert to cash as soon as your shares vest (which occurs monthly in most instances) it's as good as cash (with some discounting factor for the uncertainty of the first year pre-vesting).
That's not true. It makes sense to discount pre-ipo equity at 100%, but post-ipo equity is much more predictable.
I personally discount equity at 40%. So you can offer me $300,000 cash or you can offer me $150,000 cash and $250,000 RSUs and I'd consider those equal offers.
For public companies you should value stock grants above their face value, because of the optionality: If the price goes down you can quit and get another job, if it goes up you get a raise. And stocks tend to go up, so 4-year grants have raises baked in, and most companies don't consider these raises (IIRC Amazon and Stripe do), so they still give regular raises and refresher grants.
The discount is to account for risk. Imagine an offer that is 100% stock. If they stock goes down, your comp goes down with it. That is what is being accounted for.
> And stocks tend to go up
Only lately. Stock compensation sucked around 2001 and 2008.
Risk (well, "variance") increases the value of optionality.
Assume that there is a job market with lots of jobs. Each will hire you for your market-rate total compensation, no stock cliffs, no job-seeking costs. Spherical cow. Say also that you can tell the variance on stock compensation, but you can't guess at future performance.
One strategy might be to go to an all-cash job and make your market rate forever. That's a lower-bound on the best expected future earnings. But a better strategy is,
- Join a high-variance company,
- If/when your pay drops below the market, find another high-variance company.
With this strategy your expected earnings are higher than your market rate, even if the expected earnings at every job is the same. And the outperformance scales up with the variance.
Yes, mathematically in a perfect spherical cow world, you are correct.
But I live in the real world. And in the real world, you can't switch jobs instantaneously back and forth, like you can trade stocks. In the real world there may not be a job available at the market rate. In the real world it takes months to find a new job even if there is one, and then it's even harder to actually get market rate.
So in the real world it make more sense to discount stock compensation compared to cash compensation to account for all of these things and the risk you take on by accepting stock based compensation.
A 40% discount on RSUs at a public company is perfectly reasonable: you will have to sell to cover the taxes as soon as they vest, meaning for every 10 shares in your grant, 3-4 will be liquidated before you even see them just to cover the taxes on the vesting. Add a modest discount for the fact that you might leave prior to the next vesting date, and 40% might even be a bit optimistic.
I meant increases in offered/negotiated salary. A marginal dollar of salary gets taxed the same way as a marginal dollar of vesting shares, so discounting one in the offer because of taxes makes sense if you discount the other in the same way.
You shouldn't trade away a dollar's worth of shares for 60 cents more salary just because of taxes.
Equity is public company is as good as cash. You should absolutely count it as part of base compensation. Vesting is every 4 months and risk is minimal. If you want you can even fully deriskify by buying put options (or come up with something synthetic that mirror put options while not breaking your employment agreement).
On the other hand Equity is startup is completely different thing and should be heavily discounted.
That's not the way Amazon vests your stock, unless things have drastically changed recently. They vest in single lump sums for the year, and they have a slowly ramping up vesting schedule.
First year, nothing (but they give you straight money bonus)
Second year, barely anything, but they give you some cash to "offset".
Third year, good bunch of the stock, but still less than half.
Fourth year, all the rest of the stock vests.
Within each year you should get some stock offering, on the same ramping up basis so the idea is after the fourth year, you have consistent RSUs vesting, and they'll probably be split over the year based on whenever Amazon gave you the stock offering.
It's not as good as cash because the value can vary, especially the further out you look. It might go up, but it might go down. Cash is far more stable than that.
But it still should be modeled far above zero, and far closer to cash than pre-ipo options.
You are wrong. Companies like Facebook and Google allow you to vest shares almost immediately (I think they vest quarterly). Unless you think their shares are going to drop precipitously, it’s absolutely okay to count equity these days.
Well for one, they can probably get you pretty close to if not over 500k if you’re senior. I also think Amazon and FB stand out for that kind of mean spirited meat grinder vibe. Netflix doesn’t screw around with any of it and lets you go without the fuss, but my understanding is that you get a lot of signals from your manager and they aren’t about doing weird psychological tricks to push you harder. It’s just a matter of meeting a reasonable productivity bar. Google is very far from this and a nice relaxed place to work.
> Google is very far from this and a nice relaxed place to work.
Google seems like possibly the worst place to work. They have major, thoroughly discussed issues with their review process. They were some of the initiators of ultra grueling interviews, elitist hiring practices…
Google is well known for killing products and you often hear that is a by-product of their review process.
Google offices are infantalized (just like FB) and often filthy (worse than FB).
That’s on top of their well known issues with internal political fighting, sexual harassment from execs and unethical business model.
> "They're expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year."
This sounds like a re-hash of Jack Welch's Vitality Curve [1] where you're expected to fire the bottom 10% every year.
This is a crazy practice and of course the consequence is that managers will find a way to meet the targets they are assigned, however nonsensical these targets might be, for fear of getting the chop themselves. From that perspective "hire to fire" is actually the only logical (if crazy) option to both keep your people and meet your target.
It is a target from the start (which is what makes it crazy to me). That's the purpose of stack ranking in the Vitality Curve, for instance, and it seems to be the same here.
> Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has long been a controversial practice due to its negative effects on employee morale and potential for bias and discrimination.
Lovely.
I have only seen stack ranking from the sidelines. One guy who was on a high performing team didn't get the promo since others had already received theirs so they were 'out of promos'. He kinda had a nervous breakdown as he punched his office door for like 15 minutes while crying about wasting his life and being stupid. I remember him putting in a solid 3+ hours every day after work. I was contractor and got paid for my extra time, there was no promo I was after.
Decimating your workforce is some seriously messed up behavior.
[Managers at Amazon are] expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year. Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA). Basically, it's the number of people you wouldn't be sad to see leave the company.
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
That's not even the only way it defeats the business goal: you're now intentionally paying people that you have no intention of getting a long-term return on, or that you know aren't worth what you're paying them.
To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.
It so strongly defeats the business goals that maybe the source of the reporting (the super high quality publication, Business Insider) might be full of it.
Might be, indeed - but it's definitely not unusual or incredible for a large organization to have misaligned incentives, ignorant executives making some of them up, and then being reluctant to admit they weren't as good of an idea as they thought.
It seems that huge corporations look very much like a socialist centrally-planned state from the inside, gee, I wonder why is that so. Oh, right: because for some reason huge corporations don't seem to have actual competitive markets inside them to co-ordinate the conducted economical activity, gee, I wonder why is that so.
Maybe you can make a deal with the hiring manager. If he'll admit that you're the sacrificial lamb, you'll alleviate his guilt by lining an alternative job up for the date he has to fire someone. Win, win, lose. (Amazon loses.)
Yup. Definately ways of benefiting from this. And usually you get a decent severance so if they fire you after a year, you can basically learn cool stuff on the job, only do a little work, and then get a nice paid vacation afterwards.
You'd hope that the people being hired to be later fired are at least given a chance to prove themselves. There's a world of difference between "We're not sure about this person, so let's hire them and we can always fire them if they're bad" vs "This person is definitely terrible at their job (or obnoxious) and I'm only hiring them so I don't feel bad about definitely firing them later".
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
Indeed - there are extreme limitations of interviews & other evaluations pre-hire. They'll rank some good candidates "below the hire line", and some charismatic bad candidates, who temporarily present well, as hires.
Given that, a policy of "we're going to hire X% more people than we need, but fire fast" could be seen as a generous, progressive, error-correcting process.
It's better than leaving those people who interview poorly always just short of the real, compensated, supervised employment situations where they could prove themselves.
The grounds for judging the practice should be based on whether it's done honestly. Is the practice, and actual attrition-rates/risk-of-short-tenure, explained up-front? Are hires paid for all hours worked? Do those fired receive clear feedback for why they're not continuing?
I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and coach them up - and sometimes, over time, they improve enough that it works out!
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
In some fraction of the cases, I agree. Estimating what the likelihood for any given case is still a difficult challenge, but I think it's always under 75% and generally under 50%.
And as a secondary effect, it lowers team morale when a low performer is consistently draining other team members of their time. And lowered morale leads to lower performance and other issues.
The profession of "management" has a problem similar to one a lot of tech companies have: if you reward the generation of new ideas, you get a huge proliferation of them that aren't necessarily better and make everything more complicated.
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire.
Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy.
As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams.
Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured.
[0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.
> It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Exactly. It's like saying you're passionate about paperwork. Everyone thinks it sucks and we should do less of it.
Lots of people have to pretend to be more passionate than they are, but please pick anything other than business process.
Believe it or not, in the early days we actually were pretty enthusiastic about things like Extreme Programming. It seemed like an improvement over document-heavy processes you’d see a some places, or the complete lack of process you’d see at others.
I still think pair programming is better than code review when feasible.
> the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process
not ALL developers crave this. I've been through companies where process is scoffed at (some developers burn out trying to manage their own stuff, others love it) and companies where everything has a process - eg Pivotal Labs, the extreme example of agile by the book (some developers burn out with all the inflexibility, others love it).
I don't love "agile", but for what it's worth, it's a reasonable starting point to create a sustainable culture where the company can try to 1) remain agile (adjective) as it grows, and 2) keep developers reasonably in control of their work schedule. There's worse alternatives, I guess?
> I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process.
I agree with you, but Oh, the irony!
From the Agile Manifesto:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Sorry, people who make mistakes are not low performers dragging the team down. Learning from mistakes in an open and non-judge mental way is a marker of a healthy team culture.
I agree completely. In my experience, low performers are people who do not learn from their mistakes, and even when given ample support and constructive feedback, do not adjust their behavior or make an earnest effort to improve.
Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.
Stack ranking is basically the "up or out"[0] with the added idiocy that there's not enough space "up".
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even.
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
Management is a difficult topic to discuss online because the average commenter is statistically far more likely to be an IC than a manager.
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems.
But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway.
It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it.
It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political.
Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons.
A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
Two things to look at are (1) are they being paid as a junior? And (2) don't look at their performance at any specific point in time, but look for improvements.
It's also possible for and employee to get stuck in a rut at a job, and nothing can get them out of it except a change of scenery. This is because everyone's expectations of them being a low performer or troublemaker or whatever are already set, and that perception will not change. So it ends up becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, because any small improvements the employee makes don't move the needle on how people perceive them.
Great points. I would also add that you should look at their trajectory and momentum. An underperformer who is improving fast enough that they might catch up in a year is worth stick with. An underperformer who has become comfortable with low expectations is best removed from the company so they have a chance to recalibrate and reset in a new job.
Keep a close eye on how their underperformance is affecting other team members. If the rest of the team has to make up for the person's underperformance or rewrite their code, they could be subtracting rather than adding value to the team. Engineers are rarely islands of productivity.
Consider your headcount. If you can only hire 5 people and 1 of them isn't really contributing, you're giving up a full 20% of your team's potential. Replacing that one person with a performer on par with the other 4 people on the team will instantly boost their performance by 25%. Withholding that kind of advantage from your team isn't good.
While I'm not a manager I can relate to a past position where I was technical lead. I had a person on my team who was the same - friendly, enthusiastic. In conversations he would give you the impression that he's a person who knows what he's talking about. But when it came time to do the work it seemed he was interested in any distraction that would prevent him from programming. I tried to help him focus and spent a lot of time on coaching. Now I wonder if that was a waste of time.
Earlier on in my career I would read stories from tech companies that said something like "if you don't get promoted to a certain level within 2 years then you get fired." Initially I thought that was pretty harsh. Now, I understand where it comes from. If someone hasn't shown progress in 2 years, assuming proper feedback, it's doubtful that they'll ever improve much.
On the other hand, I believe there are places for average engineers. Part of the issue with this person is that they wanted to keep trying to do more complex work even though they struggled with easier tasks and it was a constant struggle to try to balance that.
I think in retrospect, had I been the person's manager, the best option would have been to restrict their work to the easy tasks. If they didn't like it then they could always leave. I now also understand why some people are "managed out". Maybe they can stay in their role but if they don't have the ability to progress then I don't think it's a manager's duty to help them beyond a certain point.
Somebody make a website to hire people with the purpose to fire them (faangcannonfodder.com). If the deal is straight forward I'll take a big paycheck for a year.
Just curious since I'm not too close to that world, how hard is it generally to get fired from say Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or generally other big tech companies?
Speaking for Microsoft in the 2010's: pretty hard. First you get pip'ed and have lots of uncomfortable discussions with your manager. You'll be encouraged to leave on your own. Eventually you'll be told to leave. They want a pretty iron-clad case to reduce the chance that you'll sue, since keeping you on for another year or two while they super-document your shortcomings tends to be cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit.
Depends on the country, really. I work for one of these in the EU country with excellent labor/employment laws and I have it much easier than my US counterparts.
This sadly isn't surprising since it's been happening in one form or another at least since Jack Welsh, and probably earlier. He was probably just the first one to give it a name.
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
As a people manager, I have encountered this issue of managing "to the curve". Regardless of the composition of the team and the fact that they could be all high performers, I have had to make decisions that fit to a curve which senior mgmt is imposing.
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
I didn't read any evidence that this actually happens, and I read the incentives differently. If I was a manager I would feel that this lowers the risk for me to hire a person - if they perform well and it really works out, then great. And if not, then I know they'll just be part of the "unregretted attrition" number that I have to hit. Basically I can just hire a bunch of people and see how they work out, keeping the ones that nail it and allowing the others to go find jobs they are better suited to.
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
Idk if it’s Bezo’s roots in finance, but Amazon seems a brutal workplace for all levels of employment (I don’t know anything about the lives of senior managers). The company outright abuses its blue collar employees, and routinely mistreats its engineering staff. Stories of its toxic practices have been spread for at least a decade now. What’s especially baffling to me, and I admit this is merely rumor, is that they’ll actually adjust your raise schedule to take into account the price of the stock, so it’s hard to imagine it being highly lucrative. Of all the big tech companies, I think Amazon is most likely to unionize.
For what it's worth though... To my knowledge, they give damn good benefits. I don't think there's any other company in the U.S. where the lowest tier laborers get the same medical benefits as their best SWE's.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked into it as much as I should have to make this statement. Just going off what a friend who worked there most recently told me.
Bezos graduated from Princeton in the mid-80s, and while he did do a stint at some networking company (but for Finance), he ended up in finance directly. He was at D.E. Shaw when the web exploded, and he left to start Amazon.
The most successful companies are always brutal in at least two aspects: (1) they are demanding and (2) they do not tolerate mediocrity.
Go to any of the top players in a given industry and it will be the same. That actually makes sense because competition in the marketplace is brutal. You won't succeed (or not for long) if you don't aim high and let people take it easy.
If 2) were true, these top companies wouldn't have regular, public failures, mediocre products outside of their core competencies, and they wouldn't progress primarily through acquisitions (many of which also fail).
Not tolerating mediocrity does not guarantee success or even great, successful products. But tolerating mediocrity is sure to lead to even more mediocre products. Acquisitions are neither here nor there.
People like Bezos, Jobs, Musk are not easy to work with because they are driven and do not tolerate mediocrity (but that still does not guarantee success) and that's why the result stands out.
How else can mediocrity or excellence be measured but by results? There is no other measure that matters in business.
Are we to take the stories of hiring to fire, constant infighting, favoritism, bigotry, and other inefficiencies and derive from that information that these companies are wise and excellent, instead of at least a little incompetent and mediocre, perhaps not overall but at least in part and by design?
Absurd goals defeated by Goodhart's Law seems to be common for large organizations.
It is easy to see the limits of the so called invisible hand of free market, it might be more efficient than state-driven bureaucracy but it is still far from optimal.
Is it even possible to avoid for large organizations?
This article is pretty light on what evidence this is actually happening, or how often.
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
Yeah this article is garbage. I never saw any of this when I worked at Amazon (up to around a year ago). Post-interview panel meetings always focused on the candidate's strengths and weaknesses and their ability to raise the bar. It would have been absurd in those meetings for a manager to advocate hiring a "throwaway" candidate. I can't see it happening at all at Amazon, particularly with the requirement of having a bar raiser on each panel.
Meh. I had a friend go to Amazon. He loves it there, and he's an IC, not a psychopath, just a genuinely nice guy. He doesn't deny the stories we hear, they just don't happen to/near him. And of course, he's done very well there over the last 5 years or so. So it definitely happens.
So, when they say Amazon, what do they mean? Its not just a web development company any more, and these turnover rates should be wildly different in their call centers, distribution chain, last mile delivery, server farms, ops, management, marketing, legal, design, executive suite, retail, robotics R&D, main web developers, blah blah.
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
I don't think having an unregretted attrition rate 'target' is necessarily a bad thing, but *if* you are going to go down this sort of route, then the "hiring manager" and the "firing manager" should be working to competing objectives, and not colluding in this way. The hiring manager could, for example, be incentivised to meet a lower UAR rate than the firing manager, and the decision to fire should be made based on some sort of objective measure which is difficult to game without actually impacting productivity (Maybe a metric which is hard to predict by virtue of being complex, compound and nonobvious -- which sounds like a perfect fit for a neural network of some sort -- of course, this seems all perfectly horrendous and dystopian - neural networks trained to decide who to fire? ... creepy.)
> something seems off about hiring someone just so you can fire them later. It just seems wrong.
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
Amazon has many tech workers on visas, and it can be extremely anxiety inducing around performance review time. Once a manager puts a target on your back, it's a major uphill climb to remove that target. And for someone on a visa you don't just lose your job, you get repatriated back to your home country unless you can quickly get rehired somewhere else. Edit: And not just you, your wife and kids too, even if your kids were born here and it's all they ever knew.
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
Much like tying insurance to employment, tying immigration to employment is an awful system.
It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here, but that requirement should disappear quickly. Make the employer guarantee to pay them for a year, and allow them to stay once that year is up. That would be a humane way to do it.
It's so terrible that immigrants to this country have to live in constant fear of deportation if they don't have a job.
> It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here
For very special jobs of critical need perhaps. For broader economic immigration I’d rather have a visa categories requiring initial (and in some categories periodic subsequent) payment than a job requirement, either for initial entry or conitnued residency.
So instead of requiring a job you want to require the immigrant to pay to stay? That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay and also using it as a shortcut to immigration.
Aren't we confusing 2 different things here? Visas you get through employment - eg H1B - are specifically non immigrant visas. You are not an immigrant when you are in the US with an H1B.
Are they restriction on green cards too? I thought once you got your GC you didn't lose status for being fired.
Can you post evidence of American citizens being repatriated (children born here)? I thought birthright citizenship made this much more challenging, spawning problems such as "anchor babies"...
I am not an expert, but in the US I believe that children may have citizenship by birth, but the parents may still be on a visa for some time. But most parents aren't going to leave their kids behind.
The situation is improved when a green card (permanent residency) is obtained. Then employment is not required to remain in the country.
A citizen must live in the US for long enough, and be old enough, before they are allowed to sponsor their family for residence. There's also no guarantee that their family would actually get their permit even if they pay the thousands of dollars and file the bajillion forms needed etc.
As a manager, your job is to make your team work well for the benefit of the company. You do that by motivating them, by improving their skills, by removing barriers to their success. This idea of targeting your employees is absurd... who benefits? How does the manager benefit? Even if they were being selfish, the way the manager gets moved up is by the perception that the team is succeeding.
Competitiveness is useless in professional engineering environments except as, at best, a cheap and temporary motivator imo. Learning to collaborate effectively is what's important.
> People leave, either because they move on to new opportunities or because they aren't able to perform at a level the company deems acceptable. That happens in every company.
Or it could be that people are treated like a dogs and would be better off not being in that environment regardless of having a plan b.
I don't know if this is somewhat similar to other companies I won't name, but there's a practice of hiring contractors that work for a "contracting company" as a W2, but then works "in the office" at another company. I did this a couple times. One thing I would say is that even though my contract was 6 months, the contacts you get is incredible through doing this. It also offers people a way to get a job at more stable companies without the insane interview process.
Definitely helps open doors for people that would otherwise not have a chance at getting a job at the place.
That all being said, if this is different from what I described, ok.
I have hard time imagining how this "unregretted attrition rate" (URA) works for very specialised position like research scientists. If you expect to lose even 1 of those per year it seem like the interview process could be a bit lighter.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadYou want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
On that note, I wonder how these forces might work to fix ideal team size to align with these flawed incentives.
Most I ever had was 8. When it got larger than that I had people step up to active leadership roles. Eventually they did the same.
In a tech workplace 20 is probably a real handful.
My first true corporate experience was with big-four Deloitte. The culture there is "up or out". May sound sketchy to outsiders but it was actually a really supportive environment.
I already feel very uncomfortable if I'm "the dumbest person in the room". Equally, I don't want to be the smartest.
He decided his team was good enough so he submitted the paperwork for 15% for everyone. It worked, he never heard back and everyone got their raise. This went on for years.
Then one day I'm in a meeting with a bunch of management and some small talk comes up about the set raises. My manager notes he doesn't follow the 'guidance' and all the other managers gasp.
For years these guys just did what they thought was expected, didn't even try anything different.
The managers at that company were more drones than anyone else... needless to say eventually all innovation slowed and the company feel into process hell.
Outside of regulatory or compliance requirements, in many cases, "policies" are simply suggestions which can be ignored.
I had a great manager at my last company. Very good people person, would read on his own time to try and improve himself, etc. He had also been in our department the longest - upper management was always coming and going every 2-3 years. I asked him one time why he didn't want to go for one of those higher level positions and would rather stay at this sort of stressful one after a decade. He said he didn't want to deal with all the headaches at that level (more meetings with C-level people). He just wanted to keep his head down, take care of his team, and go home (a 1-2 hr commute each way).
Given the precarity of much existence in the US, and the ability to be fired on a whim, it's no wonder the 'drone' mentality, of not bucking the system, is pretty normal. Suck up the BS until you can retire. I guess at least these days most of us don't have to deal with hot tar.
It's not a very realistic risk for most people.
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
That's it. Fight losing self-destructive battles if you feel you have to, but never forget it.
Except if you keep that metric unknown to whoever is working on it. The main problem with measures is when they are widely communicated.
The problem with "hire to fire" as described here is that it fails those criteria (the meta-metrics, if you will). Knowing your company's attrition/turnover rate is good; communicating that metric, at least to managers, is (I would argue) also good. But using it as a target that your managers must not go under is toxic to work culture and employee morale.
Business is simply complex, you can always sacrifice an intangible like brand perception to tweak some metric. But, it’s the along term that represents the vast majority of a companies value.
At least assuming the company is likely to survive the next 2 years.
Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do.
Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.
Anyway, there is a huge difference in collecting data and using a metric as a goal. Process improvement may involve measuring what specifically was causing delays and possibly changing things. Or perhaps using a more complex classification system where anything involving company X will always take an extra N days and everyone needs to know this ahead of time etc etc. The point is you need to make complex tradeoff perhaps company X is worth the delay.
Once the employees know this is being measured, they will presume it's also a goal, because why else measure it? Then they will act in ways to reduce the time between order and operational status. Is there any reason to believe that they won't game the measure, pushing orders to "operational" in ways that are detrimental to the business?
1. In a company with middle management, i.e., managers working for managers, you have to reveal the metric / target to them. Or at least, some manager will spill the beans and then it's not a secret any more.
2. Companies imitate one another, directly, or through managers who share a common background. Therefore, it's not hard to guess the metrics of one business by reading about similar businesses.
Thanks to these two channels, it's actually possible that the rank and file workers understand the business better than their managers do, because the workers have a broad range of information at their disposal if they read the business pages or even HN, whereas managers are obligated to embrace the official line. When a new metric is installed, chances are that the workers already understand it, and how to manipulate it.
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
- give employees and managers enough context to understand the business goals and empower them to make intelligent decisions and affect positive change
https://www.viamaven.com/blog/amazon-pip-what-is-it-what-to-...
I read that as "if you hire two teams of 5 people, on average one person on one of them ends up not performing and getting PIP'd.
That seems... not crazy to me?
Imagine trying to build a team and good culture when someone on your team is put into a performance plan/fired every year.
Now add in unreasonable demands from management on delivery dates, churn from people trying to work at a company that doesn't fire one of their coworkers every year, and a lack of new hire support because if you don't bring your new hires up to speed very fast, they're more likely to get fired than you/your friends are. Also, those new hires get paid more than you do if they were brought in at the same level because they're "bar raising" and you aren't.
"About 10% of Amazonians receive a PIP.
This is fairly high; at other companies, 0.5 to 3 percent of employees receive a PIP."
Seems to be 3 - 20x the average. That's high.
And using invalid assumptions, if the probability that you will get PIP'd every year is 10%, assuming it's just a random dart shot, that means the likelihood you'll get PIP'd at some point in the first 4 years is 35%.
However, you might need to pay back part of relocation money, if you leave before two years mark.
And even if they don't, there are lots of ways to find yourself in a toxic workplace. If you're depending on that vesting schedule, your life can suck as you're trying to wait out an arbitrary deadline.
If you treat vesting as a nice optional bonus that you don't plan on, neither situation will feel bad to you.
I had the wonderful experience of being hired at Google many years ago, and pulled into an SRE role. I was in the roughly half that they do that with that don't work out. And I didn't work out for exactly the reason that I initially expressed doubts about. (I don't task switch that fast - not a problem in a SWE but a major problem for an SRE.) I was let go 5 days before my 1 year cliff.
That is one of the reasons why I, personally, discount equity compensation.
Google and Facebook don't anymore. You start vesting right away.
I personally discount equity at 40%. So you can offer me $300,000 cash or you can offer me $150,000 cash and $250,000 RSUs and I'd consider those equal offers.
> And stocks tend to go up
Only lately. Stock compensation sucked around 2001 and 2008.
Assume that there is a job market with lots of jobs. Each will hire you for your market-rate total compensation, no stock cliffs, no job-seeking costs. Spherical cow. Say also that you can tell the variance on stock compensation, but you can't guess at future performance.
One strategy might be to go to an all-cash job and make your market rate forever. That's a lower-bound on the best expected future earnings. But a better strategy is,
- Join a high-variance company,
- If/when your pay drops below the market, find another high-variance company.
With this strategy your expected earnings are higher than your market rate, even if the expected earnings at every job is the same. And the outperformance scales up with the variance.
But I live in the real world. And in the real world, you can't switch jobs instantaneously back and forth, like you can trade stocks. In the real world there may not be a job available at the market rate. In the real world it takes months to find a new job even if there is one, and then it's even harder to actually get market rate.
So in the real world it make more sense to discount stock compensation compared to cash compensation to account for all of these things and the risk you take on by accepting stock based compensation.
You shouldn't trade away a dollar's worth of shares for 60 cents more salary just because of taxes.
On the other hand Equity is startup is completely different thing and should be heavily discounted.
That's not the way Amazon vests your stock, unless things have drastically changed recently. They vest in single lump sums for the year, and they have a slowly ramping up vesting schedule.
First year, nothing (but they give you straight money bonus) Second year, barely anything, but they give you some cash to "offset". Third year, good bunch of the stock, but still less than half. Fourth year, all the rest of the stock vests.
Within each year you should get some stock offering, on the same ramping up basis so the idea is after the fourth year, you have consistent RSUs vesting, and they'll probably be split over the year based on whenever Amazon gave you the stock offering.
But it still should be modeled far above zero, and far closer to cash than pre-ipo options.
For very few companies. Most companies - even tech companies have annual vesting (so 25% every year). And Amazon has 5% vesting after the first year.
Google seems like possibly the worst place to work. They have major, thoroughly discussed issues with their review process. They were some of the initiators of ultra grueling interviews, elitist hiring practices…
Google is well known for killing products and you often hear that is a by-product of their review process.
Google offices are infantalized (just like FB) and often filthy (worse than FB).
That’s on top of their well known issues with internal political fighting, sexual harassment from execs and unethical business model.
This sounds like a re-hash of Jack Welch's Vitality Curve [1] where you're expected to fire the bottom 10% every year.
This is a crazy practice and of course the consequence is that managers will find a way to meet the targets they are assigned, however nonsensical these targets might be, for fear of getting the chop themselves. From that perspective "hire to fire" is actually the only logical (if crazy) option to both keep your people and meet your target.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
Lovely.
I have only seen stack ranking from the sidelines. One guy who was on a high performing team didn't get the promo since others had already received theirs so they were 'out of promos'. He kinda had a nervous breakdown as he punched his office door for like 15 minutes while crying about wasting his life and being stupid. I remember him putting in a solid 3+ hours every day after work. I was contractor and got paid for my extra time, there was no promo I was after.
Decimating your workforce is some seriously messed up behavior.
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
Given that, a policy of "we're going to hire X% more people than we need, but fire fast" could be seen as a generous, progressive, error-correcting process.
It's better than leaving those people who interview poorly always just short of the real, compensated, supervised employment situations where they could prove themselves.
The grounds for judging the practice should be based on whether it's done honestly. Is the practice, and actual attrition-rates/risk-of-short-tenure, explained up-front? Are hires paid for all hours worked? Do those fired receive clear feedback for why they're not continuing?
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer
edit: downvoted for an opinion presented with a neutral tone?
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire.
Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy.
As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams.
Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured.
[0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.
Exactly. It's like saying you're passionate about paperwork. Everyone thinks it sucks and we should do less of it.
Lots of people have to pretend to be more passionate than they are, but please pick anything other than business process.
I still think pair programming is better than code review when feasible.
The problem is when the process gains consciousness and ego and fights for its own limitless expansion.
not ALL developers crave this. I've been through companies where process is scoffed at (some developers burn out trying to manage their own stuff, others love it) and companies where everything has a process - eg Pivotal Labs, the extreme example of agile by the book (some developers burn out with all the inflexibility, others love it).
I don't love "agile", but for what it's worth, it's a reasonable starting point to create a sustainable culture where the company can try to 1) remain agile (adjective) as it grows, and 2) keep developers reasonably in control of their work schedule. There's worse alternatives, I guess?
I agree with you, but Oh, the irony!
From the Agile Manifesto:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
This still holds true for most people that have to fire someone.
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway.
It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it.
It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political.
Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons.
A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
They’re also a junior engineer (less than two years), so I’m still not sure if I should be looking to push them out.
My biggest uncertainty is what is an objective criteria and expectation for a junior engineer.
The fault is mine.
It's also possible for and employee to get stuck in a rut at a job, and nothing can get them out of it except a change of scenery. This is because everyone's expectations of them being a low performer or troublemaker or whatever are already set, and that perception will not change. So it ends up becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, because any small improvements the employee makes don't move the needle on how people perceive them.
Keep a close eye on how their underperformance is affecting other team members. If the rest of the team has to make up for the person's underperformance or rewrite their code, they could be subtracting rather than adding value to the team. Engineers are rarely islands of productivity.
Consider your headcount. If you can only hire 5 people and 1 of them isn't really contributing, you're giving up a full 20% of your team's potential. Replacing that one person with a performer on par with the other 4 people on the team will instantly boost their performance by 25%. Withholding that kind of advantage from your team isn't good.
Earlier on in my career I would read stories from tech companies that said something like "if you don't get promoted to a certain level within 2 years then you get fired." Initially I thought that was pretty harsh. Now, I understand where it comes from. If someone hasn't shown progress in 2 years, assuming proper feedback, it's doubtful that they'll ever improve much.
On the other hand, I believe there are places for average engineers. Part of the issue with this person is that they wanted to keep trying to do more complex work even though they struggled with easier tasks and it was a constant struggle to try to balance that.
I think in retrospect, had I been the person's manager, the best option would have been to restrict their work to the easy tasks. If they didn't like it then they could always leave. I now also understand why some people are "managed out". Maybe they can stay in their role but if they don't have the ability to progress then I don't think it's a manager's duty to help them beyond a certain point.
I saw it first-hand, I wasn't pip'ed myself. :D
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked into it as much as I should have to make this statement. Just going off what a friend who worked there most recently told me.
But really, having good health care shouldn't be tied to having a job. That's a peculiarity of the US that's done long-term damage over decades.
Bezos graduated from Princeton in the mid-80s, and while he did do a stint at some networking company (but for Finance), he ended up in finance directly. He was at D.E. Shaw when the web exploded, and he left to start Amazon.
Go to any of the top players in a given industry and it will be the same. That actually makes sense because competition in the marketplace is brutal. You won't succeed (or not for long) if you don't aim high and let people take it easy.
Not tolerating mediocrity does not guarantee success or even great, successful products. But tolerating mediocrity is sure to lead to even more mediocre products. Acquisitions are neither here nor there.
People like Bezos, Jobs, Musk are not easy to work with because they are driven and do not tolerate mediocrity (but that still does not guarantee success) and that's why the result stands out.
Are we to take the stories of hiring to fire, constant infighting, favoritism, bigotry, and other inefficiencies and derive from that information that these companies are wise and excellent, instead of at least a little incompetent and mediocre, perhaps not overall but at least in part and by design?
It is easy to see the limits of the so called invisible hand of free market, it might be more efficient than state-driven bureaucracy but it is still far from optimal.
Is it even possible to avoid for large organizations?
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here, but that requirement should disappear quickly. Make the employer guarantee to pay them for a year, and allow them to stay once that year is up. That would be a humane way to do it.
It's so terrible that immigrants to this country have to live in constant fear of deportation if they don't have a job.
For very special jobs of critical need perhaps. For broader economic immigration I’d rather have a visa categories requiring initial (and in some categories periodic subsequent) payment than a job requirement, either for initial entry or conitnued residency.
Are they restriction on green cards too? I thought once you got your GC you didn't lose status for being fired.
A child cannot sponsor their parents for immigration benefits until they reach the age of 21.
Anchor babies is a talking point to stir up controversy, and cause fear of immigrants.
The situation is improved when a green card (permanent residency) is obtained. Then employment is not required to remain in the country.
Otherwise they have to do everything in their power to stay in the good graces of their Manager, and skip level for decade(s).
Competitiveness is useless in professional engineering environments except as, at best, a cheap and temporary motivator imo. Learning to collaborate effectively is what's important.
Or it could be that people are treated like a dogs and would be better off not being in that environment regardless of having a plan b.
Good.
And also you're not incentivized to make particularly good work there, as you'll be fired soon.
Great.
/s
Definitely helps open doors for people that would otherwise not have a chance at getting a job at the place.
That all being said, if this is different from what I described, ok.