Corporate Slack instances are probably not a great place to discuss such things. One could in a pinch fire up one of the ssh chat daemons [1] on an EC2 assuming that most of the employees are familiar with using SSH. There is a demo documented in that git repo. People can ssh under a pseudonym rather than using a real name. The daemon uses private keys to track identity so make a new SSH key specific to that server. Not my repo but the maintainer is here on HN.
# append to ~/.ssh/config
# ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "chat" -f ~/.ssh/ssh-chat
Host chat
Hostname some-ec2-ip
Port 22
User some-username
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ssh-chat
# Go's ssh lib is old
HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa
PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa
Another quick, lightweight and simple option is uMurmur but it would require people installing Mumble on their laptop or Mumla on their phone so that's extra friction.
I have no clue why anybody would use work slack for anything more than friendly conversation. The idea of using company-monitored communications to discuss dissatisfaction with your jobs is insane to me
I'm against placing employee-to-employee conversations that aren't work related on work resources: No one can be honest because there's always a risk the company will use it against them.
Meta has/had a secret "ADHD support group" on Workplace, but I would be wondering who's reading it, what people are and aren't saying, and, again, how it could be used against them or taken out of context.
There are no "safe spaces" at work. It's fucking work, where politics and bullshit usually win over merit and personal ethics.
Amazon had an “anonymous” internal Slack channel where you could discuss pay by using a bot to post on your behalf. It was called #pay-equity and there was another one called #pay-equity-discussion.
I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements or take a severance that’s one month severance for each year you worked there + the partial year or “leave Amazon”.
If you fail the PIP you only get 1/3 of the amount.
If you appeal and lose you only get 1/2 of the 1/3.
Who would want to work there after they have already showed their true colors?
Amazon ain’t that serious to work for.
I worked there remotely knowing full well what Amazon was about from day one. It was my 8th job. I made my money, put it on my resume and gladly chose to “Leave Amazon” with a decent severance and had a job within three weeks.
People who choose to try to fight and stay after a PIP is like begging to stay in an abusive relationship.
If you're looking for a serious answer, not everyone has the extreme privilege of being as in demand and finding another job quickly, particularly in this economy. People may also have financial situations where they need to hold on to whatever hope they can of a job because it is less scary than taking the money and then taking the leap.
I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.
I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note.
I had only opened the AWS console two years prior.
When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?
How did you get in without a coding interview? How long was your tenure there, and why were you paid so little compared to new grads? I have a lot of questions sorry.
The position wasn’t a “software development” position. It was for someone who specialized in “application modernization” which means a combination of cloud architecture, enterprise development and building enterprise apps using AWS services and someone with customer facing experience who could lead implementations.
My specialty is I don’t have a specialty. I can talk to and work with developers and teach them just as easily as I can work with the database folks, operations, etc
They assume you can program at the simple level required by enterprise apps. The questions they have are have you demonstrated being able to do at scale and know how to think on a systems level - security, availability, disaster recover, throughput, etc. I had to walk through my previous system design work.
They also want to know whether you can navigate the complexities of large organizations and you should be just as comfortable talking to CxOs or “the business” as developers.
My interview was all behavioral.
I didn’t say I was paid little compared to new grads. I said new grads five years out of school, I was a mid level consultant. Which was fair. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior and the startups and small IT companies I had been an architect with before had about the overall revenue of one “work stream” in a large enterprise implementation.
I was still making 10% less than an equivalent SDE. I was also working remotely.
Now, after leaving, I’m doing what would be considered L6 level work at my current job (without the L6 level compensation).
There is also a clear road for me to get back to Amazon level pay either at my current company, by changing jobs or if I really wanted to deal with the hassle, going out on my own.
Because ProServe is its own job family that has a very different technical bar (and pay band) compared to the software development engineer job family.
What year did you leave? Was it when tech companies were hiring as many employees as possible, or after the industry-wide layoffs that that hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed and fighting for scarce jobs? Were you in the country on a work visa tied to your employer, or were you a U.S. citizen? I agree with your overall sentiment but some people will be in different circumstances.
It was two months ago. The tech industry definitely was not hiring like crazy. But I started laying the ground work for leaving Amazon the day I got hired. It was AWS ProServe - the consulting division.
Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago.
Focus on creating an “unfair advantage”.
1. I got on to a high profile open source project and stayed on it until it became a more official “AWS Solution”. In still high on the list of contributors for both code and the documentation. This actually led directly to my current job. The company I was hired for uses the solution.
2. I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I had an open source portfolio that I could say was being used by real customers. I’ve used two of those projects at my current job (legally - MIT licensed by AWS)
I still have one of the two only public solutions to automate deploying one complicated AWS service. I volunteered to design the solution for the service team when they had the APIs it for it in beta and I worked with the guy that created Terraform support for it.
3. I responded to every recruiter over the last three years and kept in touch with former managers and coworkers. This led to an offer of a full time job that I didn’t accept and a side contract I did accept.
4. I constantly kept my resume up to date and I used the leveling guidelines to word it. I also have a career document.
5. I used the extra money I was making to pay off debt, save and “decontent” my life so if necessary, I could go back to enterprise CRUD compensation without having to hold out for BigTech level compensation. I actually turned down a chance at a job that would have paid more than I was making. I didn’t want the stress.
A former coworker is a director of a well known (non tech) company and he was willing to create a position for me overseeing the entire AWS architecture and their transition effort. I really didn’t need to stress.
I’m building out a much smaller “center of excellence” now and it’s rough enough.
6. I kept my LLC active all three years just in case I needed it to ramp up a solo consulting business. I used it for the side contract I mentioned that I started the day I was left (in addition to the full time job I got two weeks later)
> I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts.
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for another purpose. It will depend on the company and the contracts you signed, right?
Even if you're not in demand, taking a guaranteed higher payout vs risking losing money and time to gamble on a process that is not designed for you to succeed.
If you really want to drag privilege into this, if anything it speaks to your own to think that people in tough circumstances have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.
When you get stopped by the police going home to your own neighborhood in a city where only 4% of the people look like you, it doesn’t matter where you are from…
The world is vast: some people don't have the privilege of their next meal, a roof over their heads, their home even existing tomorrow. Getting stopped by cops in one of the many places where we're a minority doesn't really stack that high up on the scale of it all.
The reality is you probably are privileged, and so am I compared to my parents who grew up on mud floors and lost siblings to easily preventable conditions, and that's why it's pointless to go around Hacker News of all places and throw around the "you're privileged card"... like 99.9% of the people here aren't also just for having the time to be here.
Why are you trying to downplay his experience and tell him stupid platitudes that he already knows? Do you really think he doesn't know that someone somewhere has it worse than he does?
If you jump to "privilege" for someone saying "take the money instead of hoping to ride out a PIP at Amazon", you have in fact forgotten that people have it worse than you.
There's a difference between knowing something and remembering it.
It’s my job to have a job not that job. My “stability” comes from always preparing for my job to be snatched from under me.
By preparation I mean always be networking, keep my reputation spotless, keep my resume updated, keep my skills current with the market and keep my “career document” updated.
My wife has seen how efficient I am with getting a job six times over the 12 years we have been married.
We were both laid off from the job we worked at when the company folded when we were still dating. I had a contract lined up the following Monday. When that contract was unexpectedly terminated, I had an offer four days later.
This time I had a contract lined up a week before my last day and a full time job three weeks later. The only thing special about me is my network
That’s a long story. It was a consulting project that I was only peripherally involved in.
Suffice it to say during the three months I was on “focus” I got perfect feedback from my project managers, my coworkers and a perfect customer satisfaction score from my customers on projects I led - I worked in the AWS consulting division.
Both of the customers reached out to me about working on contract after I left.
I was suppose to be 80% billable and I met those targets all of the time. I refused to take on another project that would have had me juggle two full time projects that would have put my utilization at 140%.
I was going to look for a job earlier. But everyone told me to wait on the PIP and the severance.
I’m 49 years old and my shit tolerance level is much too low to put up with something like that. I knew someone would hire me either as a contractor or full time. My bills are really low (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966).
The full time job I got after leaving was perfect. Not only that, a former CTO offered me a consulting contract the day I found out I had gotten pipped to troubleshoot an AWS implementation.
Who knows? The only way I would gamble on succeeding or getting half my compensation would be to bye time if I were here on status and the minute I lose my job the clock started ticking and I would have to leave the country.
I guess if I were close to my next vesting date I would have tried to hang on.
If the vesting date falls within that period or if you have only been there for 2.5 years or less then hang on. At 3 years you get 2.75 months pay compared to the full 3 months pay.
If this is your first year take the pip plus the appeal for the maximum payout.
> I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements
Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.
Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.
I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.
“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”
I reviewed them all.
At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.
He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.
“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.
HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.
I’ve seen this situation play out, where the PIP was termination with X days notice. Because the manager knew, and employee should have known, the manager didn’t really work with the employee or review their work because why bother, nothing will change (outside of something exceptional happening).
Somewhat similar thing happened on the final review, but without pointing to hard data of the fact. The decision of course remained final, the manager got a light, informal water cooler “hey be more careful of optics” chat, and that was it.
Notably when the former employee tried to go a competitor, former company killed that.
For me, well, the company promised follow up with me, and that never happened. Communication was never their strong point. Another HR person had emailed me to go through standard termination stuff, COBRA, etc. "Attached to this email is a FedEx label to return your company laptop". There wasn't, so I emailed him to say so. Never heard from him again, despite three followup emails. I even forwarded the email chain to the HR person who'd been on the termination call, and they didn't reply either. So I kept the emails and printed copies in case anyone knocked on my door. I still have the laptop. I'll happily return it, as soon as they let me know how to. (I've had suggestions to just send it to their corporate address, but then I don't want to run into it being picked up by someone who has no context, and then the company says "oh, yeah, please send here").
I got a new job, fairly quickly. No-one asked about my leaving there in any depth (the joys of COVID-era business).
As for my manager, I suspect like the other reply - probably not much happened to him, other than to provide at least token optics. It's one thing for it to be a foregone conclusion, but another if somehow the ex-employee turns around and sues for termination/discrimination and it's demonstrable that the company "had it in" for the employee (i.e. setting goals and not even attempting to review efforts and then documenting that they did review).
There were a lot of things in the write up that in hindsight were verifiably false I could have possibly fought against.
I honestly didn’t read the write up or the parts I needed to improve to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the documentation.
I skipped right down to the amount of severance, went online to sign the paperwork and started looking for a job the same day.
Fighting to keep a job that doesn’t want you is like fighting to keep a girlfriend.
I understand that, one of my coworkers who is a good friend who I mentored during his onboarding process is in a constant state of fear and put up with a lot more shit on the project that started the whole thing for me. Others on the project either left AWS, nope’d out of the project or also got fired.
I kept him abreast of the entire process I went through and the warning signs so he could be ready.
Yes it sucks because no matter how much money he saves and how financially prepared he was, he would have to find another full time job quickly.
I knew worst case I could put my virtual shingle out and do independent AWS consulting. I had a dormant LLC already that I could reactivate, I had a network and other consulting companies fall all over themselves to hire former ProServe consultants.
He was just as good in his specialty as I was in mine.
Another guy got sick of the project and got a job at Netflix in the data department.
I fought through a PIP once just because I'm a stubborn idiot. Survived the pip and found a new job shortly after. It's not something I would recommend.
I did fight through a pip once about a decade ago because honestly even then with just a little retrospective, it was obviously my fault. I came into the company like a bull in a china shop and didn’t build relationships and inadvertently stepped on the wrong toes - some team leads that were a decade younger than I was.
It was my second job I had after starting my recovery from “expert beginnerism” where I had been at my second job for nine years.
I knew I had to learn how to place nice with people to get to the next step in my career and I also knew that I could get a job quickly - it was 2014. On top of that there was project I was leading I wanted to finish.
I’m glad I did work through it. It was a great learning experience.
Honestly the focus period at AWS made me step my game up and prepared me for my current architectural leadership position at my current company.
I’ve never had to lead an initiative at this scale before inside a company and they wouldn’t have trusted me to do without AWS on my resume.
Were people succeeding their PIPs? Isn't that a good thing?
Were people discovering that they were in secret pre-PIP (pivot), and then giving up earlier than the company wanted?
Were people taking the severance instead of working themselves to death just to get fired anyway?
Was there mounting evidence that Pivot/PIP at Amazon is quota-based, not performance-based?
Were employees getting wise to how performance is documented, and either documenting their own side, or interfering with the company's documentation efforts, which increases legal risk?
It wasn’t a secret that I was in pre-pip. But here is how it escalated
1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat
2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them
3. I met all of the requirements to get off with flying colors and got perfect customer sat scores from two customers (Professional Services). I led both engagements. First goal accomplished. I lasted through a six month vesting event
4. The manager added on more requirements for me to get out of focus and told me a date to meet them. I met the requirements and the manager kept declining my meeting invites and I thought I was off.
5. Finally when they did have a meeting with me three weeks later after the deadline, the manager cooked up more things that I hadn’t done that wasn’t related to any of my projects and mostly geared toward my refusing not to take on a new project that I knew was going to fail on top of my current project that was going well and that would have had me working 60 hours + a week.
By the time #4 came up, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting feelers out. I was just waiting to be offered a severance. I had something basically already lined up.
I honestly didn’t think about it five minutes after it happened. It was my eighth job out of college and my sixth one since 2008.
Job hunting is more of a nuisance than anything else for me.
I knew that Amazon was going to Amazon eventually going in. It accomplished its purpose. I made a lot more money than I could anywhere else as a CRUD developer who had only opened the AWS console two years prior and with no previous strategic consulting experience.
My resume is the bomb now. I also got the chance to be the third highest contributor to a popular (thousands of downloads and hundreds of stars) open source “AWS Solution” that led directly to my current job and I was able to put every useful piece of code I wrote through AWS’s open source process (GitHub AWS Samples). I’ve already used some of the work at my current job (legally MIT licensed).
I am always ready to look for a job. I’ve kept that mentality since 2008.
There’s a secret (to the employees) period pre-PIP where management is either collecting evidence of your inadequacy or setting you up to fail so they can hit URA quota. You’re absolutely notified your in PIP as you can just take the money and run.
Let me take that back. I knew I was on focus. But thought I was off since I had met all of the criteria and my manager went on radio silence for a month.
I mostly worked with project managers and customers (consulting division) day to day. That’s when my manager was finding things to use against me.
Radio silence is generally ambiguous: either you're doing really well or really badly. xD
Meta is obsessed with "impact", a illusion of precisely-quantifiable innovation and productivity setting up perverse KPIs to never refactor, never invest in employee career development (because "the year of efficiency" and "we're moving to fast"), and never bother with anything other than looking good. And everything diff has to be reviewed by someone on your team, but if your team doesn't include actually seasoned coders, they're going to nit pick because they don't understand the programming language and take their time, slowing you down.
so my success criteria in ProSerbe and metrics were simple - stay 80% billable, keep the customer happy and make sure my projects were done on time, on budget and met requirements.
No matter how hard my manager tries, they couldn’t get me on those metrics. Mind you that my manager is not involved in my day to day work. I worked witg project managers and other consultants.
My previous manager had left and my new manager went hard on me from day one. I had ever had any previous interaction with them. They couldn’t even find anyone to give me bad feedback internally or the customers during the focus periods.
The only thing the manager could do was try to keep adding more work on me until I refused or failed.
Which makes sense. Cool, wise managers would mention the pre-PIP possibility to otherwise good employees informally because surprises are Generally Bad™ for indicating a lack of transparency and mutual understanding between manager-employee. Performance reviews EOY or EOHalf should never be arbitrary or magical surprises, but a stack of accomplishments and positive "thanks" notes for specific assistance.
We're talking about Amazon, the company where managers are literally required to fire a certain number of people and frequently hire new people with the expectation of firing them to meet that quota. So giving someone a chance to turn their performance around would defeat the purpose.
My opinion is this. PIP is needed. URA projections are needed, but need revised and reformed. The question remains..is how should either be implemented. I think URA metrics should be nothing more than a suggestion of what's likely the case. Example?
Say Amazon has 1.5M employees. URA hypothetically set to 6%, Currently, That's 90,000 employees worldwide who would be considered underperformers and should be eliminated. To me, that is absurd.
How I think it should be carried out. Lower URA to 3%, 35,000 total employees. Change URA to "Underperformance Risk". There's a good chance 3% of employees are indeed underperformers. However the question remains..how are we targeting such? Warehouse associate tracking is easy. They make up the majority. Non WHA folks is a bit harder. So we need to focus on their accomplishments, ticket resolution, other verifiable data which can attribute to their performance. I.E.
- How many of their resolved issues needed reopened due to misdiagnosis?
- How many unsuccessful attempts to resolution of an issue? If unsuccessful, are there attempts made to properly escalate and learn from such failed attempt?
Projects that required rework or additional assistance?
Manager direct report attrition?
Thing is, requiring a certain percentage to be let go is absurd. Maintaining a target percentage of employees to identify at risk of underperforming is more ideal IMO. Then figure out a way to identify genuine underperformers, and actually make the attempt to get them to improve. Also, give underperformers a chance a one time chance to relocate, down-level, or find a role which best fits their demonstrated skill set.
We need to eliminate the fact that a Manager can unilaterally request a Focus entry. They can accomplish this by simply ommitting certain accomplishments of affected employees via OLR, therefore making them look less than ideal. Also, Peer feedback is terrible. If they're your peer, chances are they'll be looking to promote. You're competition to them. It's human nature.
We need to emphasize stakeholder and those who are a level higher..their feedback on the performance of an employee. Peer feedback should only be used as a way to Guage whether the Bar is at the right threshold for such level/role.
We are a hypersensitive Data collection organization. There's no reason other than acts of God where we can't accomplish such. Additionally, I am human, and my ideas aren't perfect. That's why I created this group. To show the absurdity and encourage a channel for those involved to express their experiences, concerns or ideas for improvement.
Up to now I was reading this as a US-centric story. You mentioned "worldwide" in your comment so it changes the game.
The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice.
I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.
There are a lot of managers who would never fire someone for what I’ll call “routine underperformance” (to distinguish from harassment, job abandonment, etc.)
If a company thinks some non-trivial percentage of the employee population is likely to be underperforming to the extent they should be fired, they probably should implement a URA target (or “rank and yank” or similar).
I’m with you in disliking such policies, but if you want forced turnover of those ranked low-performing, you have to make it a hard policy, because human managers dislike firing low-performing employees who seem like they’re trying.
How much damage does a routine underperformer cause vs. creating a very toxic corporate culture where routine underperformers learn that it's easier to slow others down and those same managers now hire underperformers on purpose?
That's why I don't like quota-based policies, but never firing underperformers also has its own significant problems, so finding the right balance is important.
So, you are European, and you hire a dev who is clearly not contributing or pulling their weight. Maybe they lied about their experience on their resume. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Just let him coast forever, collecting a paycheck while wasting company resources and dragging the team down?
That fact your reply to a comment about having a structured way to fire someone could be called a "performance improvement plan or PIP for short" is hilarious to me.
It seems you have accepted that PIPs are just a tool to fire someone but still think calling it a PIP is perfectly logical and desirable to the point that you snarkily suggest that this is what it should be called.
I don't know about your situation, but at every company I've ever worked for, firing a report for performance reasons requires the employee to first be placed on a PIP. Call it whatever you want, but in most cases (from both the employee and manager perspective), a PIP is not designed with the intent that the employee should remain at the company.
they do. I worked in a callcenter in austria a few years ago to work on a few soft skills. They may make you sign one. no idea what happens if you don't sign, but nothing was ever enforced on me either if a goal wasn't met.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread[1] - https://github.com/quackduck/devzat
If you want any non-engineers in on your conversation, you absolutely should not assume that.
Meta has/had a secret "ADHD support group" on Workplace, but I would be wondering who's reading it, what people are and aren't saying, and, again, how it could be used against them or taken out of context.
There are no "safe spaces" at work. It's fucking work, where politics and bullshit usually win over merit and personal ethics.
I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements or take a severance that’s one month severance for each year you worked there + the partial year or “leave Amazon”.
If you fail the PIP you only get 1/3 of the amount.
If you appeal and lose you only get 1/2 of the 1/3.
Who would want to work there after they have already showed their true colors?
Amazon ain’t that serious to work for.
I worked there remotely knowing full well what Amazon was about from day one. It was my 8th job. I made my money, put it on my resume and gladly chose to “Leave Amazon” with a decent severance and had a job within three weeks.
People who choose to try to fight and stay after a PIP is like begging to stay in an abusive relationship.
I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.
I had only opened the AWS console two years prior.
When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?
My specialty is I don’t have a specialty. I can talk to and work with developers and teach them just as easily as I can work with the database folks, operations, etc
They assume you can program at the simple level required by enterprise apps. The questions they have are have you demonstrated being able to do at scale and know how to think on a systems level - security, availability, disaster recover, throughput, etc. I had to walk through my previous system design work.
They also want to know whether you can navigate the complexities of large organizations and you should be just as comfortable talking to CxOs or “the business” as developers.
My interview was all behavioral.
I didn’t say I was paid little compared to new grads. I said new grads five years out of school, I was a mid level consultant. Which was fair. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior and the startups and small IT companies I had been an architect with before had about the overall revenue of one “work stream” in a large enterprise implementation.
I was still making 10% less than an equivalent SDE. I was also working remotely.
Now, after leaving, I’m doing what would be considered L6 level work at my current job (without the L6 level compensation).
There is also a clear road for me to get back to Amazon level pay either at my current company, by changing jobs or if I really wanted to deal with the hassle, going out on my own.
Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago.
Focus on creating an “unfair advantage”.
1. I got on to a high profile open source project and stayed on it until it became a more official “AWS Solution”. In still high on the list of contributors for both code and the documentation. This actually led directly to my current job. The company I was hired for uses the solution.
2. I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I had an open source portfolio that I could say was being used by real customers. I’ve used two of those projects at my current job (legally - MIT licensed by AWS)
I still have one of the two only public solutions to automate deploying one complicated AWS service. I volunteered to design the solution for the service team when they had the APIs it for it in beta and I worked with the guy that created Terraform support for it.
3. I responded to every recruiter over the last three years and kept in touch with former managers and coworkers. This led to an offer of a full time job that I didn’t accept and a side contract I did accept.
4. I constantly kept my resume up to date and I used the leveling guidelines to word it. I also have a career document.
5. I used the extra money I was making to pay off debt, save and “decontent” my life so if necessary, I could go back to enterprise CRUD compensation without having to hold out for BigTech level compensation. I actually turned down a chance at a job that would have paid more than I was making. I didn’t want the stress.
A former coworker is a director of a well known (non tech) company and he was willing to create a position for me overseeing the entire AWS architecture and their transition effort. I really didn’t need to stress.
I’m building out a much smaller “center of excellence” now and it’s rough enough.
6. I kept my LLC active all three years just in case I needed it to ramp up a solo consulting business. I used it for the side contract I mentioned that I started the day I was left (in addition to the full time job I got two weeks later)
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for another purpose. It will depend on the company and the contracts you signed, right?
Of course we had to strip out any proprietary information and then put it through the approval process to get it open sourced.
It’s the same at my current company. Anything we create that doesn’t divulge proprietary company information belongs to us and the customer.
If you come to AWS’s own Professional Services division , what are you going to do? Say you’re going to another consulting division that’s better?
I worked on mostly frameworks around AWS that are reusable across implementations and then put any custom business logic as a layer on top of it.
If you really want to drag privilege into this, if anything it speaks to your own to think that people in tough circumstances have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.
The reality is you probably are privileged, and so am I compared to my parents who grew up on mud floors and lost siblings to easily preventable conditions, and that's why it's pointless to go around Hacker News of all places and throw around the "you're privileged card"... like 99.9% of the people here aren't also just for having the time to be here.
There's a difference between knowing something and remembering it.
And you call that "privilege"?
Just to point out, it seems to be fairly common for people in some South East Asian cultures to value job stability over pretty much everything else.
"It's your job as the breadwinner to provide stability for our family" type of thing.
For many of them, there is no way the wife would allow (!) their husband to quit their job when there is any other option on the table.
By preparation I mean always be networking, keep my reputation spotless, keep my resume updated, keep my skills current with the market and keep my “career document” updated.
My wife has seen how efficient I am with getting a job six times over the 12 years we have been married.
We were both laid off from the job we worked at when the company folded when we were still dating. I had a contract lined up the following Monday. When that contract was unexpectedly terminated, I had an offer four days later.
This time I had a contract lined up a week before my last day and a full time job three weeks later. The only thing special about me is my network
Suffice it to say during the three months I was on “focus” I got perfect feedback from my project managers, my coworkers and a perfect customer satisfaction score from my customers on projects I led - I worked in the AWS consulting division.
Both of the customers reached out to me about working on contract after I left.
I was suppose to be 80% billable and I met those targets all of the time. I refused to take on another project that would have had me juggle two full time projects that would have put my utilization at 140%.
I was going to look for a job earlier. But everyone told me to wait on the PIP and the severance.
I’m 49 years old and my shit tolerance level is much too low to put up with something like that. I knew someone would hire me either as a contractor or full time. My bills are really low (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966).
The full time job I got after leaving was perfect. Not only that, a former CTO offered me a consulting contract the day I found out I had gotten pipped to troubleshoot an AWS implementation.
I guess if I were close to my next vesting date I would have tried to hang on.
If this is your first year take the pip plus the appeal for the maximum payout.
Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.
Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.
I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.
“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”
I reviewed them all.
At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.
He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.
“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.
HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.
How did this play out after that for you? Or him, for that matter, if you know.
Somewhat similar thing happened on the final review, but without pointing to hard data of the fact. The decision of course remained final, the manager got a light, informal water cooler “hey be more careful of optics” chat, and that was it.
Notably when the former employee tried to go a competitor, former company killed that.
I got a new job, fairly quickly. No-one asked about my leaving there in any depth (the joys of COVID-era business).
As for my manager, I suspect like the other reply - probably not much happened to him, other than to provide at least token optics. It's one thing for it to be a foregone conclusion, but another if somehow the ex-employee turns around and sues for termination/discrimination and it's demonstrable that the company "had it in" for the employee (i.e. setting goals and not even attempting to review efforts and then documenting that they did review).
I honestly didn’t read the write up or the parts I needed to improve to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the documentation.
I skipped right down to the amount of severance, went online to sign the paperwork and started looking for a job the same day.
Fighting to keep a job that doesn’t want you is like fighting to keep a girlfriend.
I kept him abreast of the entire process I went through and the warning signs so he could be ready.
Yes it sucks because no matter how much money he saves and how financially prepared he was, he would have to find another full time job quickly.
I knew worst case I could put my virtual shingle out and do independent AWS consulting. I had a dormant LLC already that I could reactivate, I had a network and other consulting companies fall all over themselves to hire former ProServe consultants.
He was just as good in his specialty as I was in mine.
Another guy got sick of the project and got a job at Netflix in the data department.
It was my second job I had after starting my recovery from “expert beginnerism” where I had been at my second job for nine years.
I knew I had to learn how to place nice with people to get to the next step in my career and I also knew that I could get a job quickly - it was 2014. On top of that there was project I was leading I wanted to finish.
I’m glad I did work through it. It was a great learning experience.
Honestly the focus period at AWS made me step my game up and prepared me for my current architectural leadership position at my current company.
I’ve never had to lead an initiative at this scale before inside a company and they wouldn’t have trusted me to do without AWS on my resume.
Were people succeeding their PIPs? Isn't that a good thing?
Were people discovering that they were in secret pre-PIP (pivot), and then giving up earlier than the company wanted?
Were people taking the severance instead of working themselves to death just to get fired anyway?
Was there mounting evidence that Pivot/PIP at Amazon is quota-based, not performance-based?
Were employees getting wise to how performance is documented, and either documenting their own side, or interfering with the company's documentation efforts, which increases legal risk?
1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat
2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them
3. I met all of the requirements to get off with flying colors and got perfect customer sat scores from two customers (Professional Services). I led both engagements. First goal accomplished. I lasted through a six month vesting event
4. The manager added on more requirements for me to get out of focus and told me a date to meet them. I met the requirements and the manager kept declining my meeting invites and I thought I was off.
5. Finally when they did have a meeting with me three weeks later after the deadline, the manager cooked up more things that I hadn’t done that wasn’t related to any of my projects and mostly geared toward my refusing not to take on a new project that I knew was going to fail on top of my current project that was going well and that would have had me working 60 hours + a week.
By the time #4 came up, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting feelers out. I was just waiting to be offered a severance. I had something basically already lined up.
Job hunting is more of a nuisance than anything else for me.
I knew that Amazon was going to Amazon eventually going in. It accomplished its purpose. I made a lot more money than I could anywhere else as a CRUD developer who had only opened the AWS console two years prior and with no previous strategic consulting experience.
My resume is the bomb now. I also got the chance to be the third highest contributor to a popular (thousands of downloads and hundreds of stars) open source “AWS Solution” that led directly to my current job and I was able to put every useful piece of code I wrote through AWS’s open source process (GitHub AWS Samples). I’ve already used some of the work at my current job (legally MIT licensed).
I am always ready to look for a job. I’ve kept that mentality since 2008.
Let me take that back. I knew I was on focus. But thought I was off since I had met all of the criteria and my manager went on radio silence for a month.
I mostly worked with project managers and customers (consulting division) day to day. That’s when my manager was finding things to use against me.
Meta is obsessed with "impact", a illusion of precisely-quantifiable innovation and productivity setting up perverse KPIs to never refactor, never invest in employee career development (because "the year of efficiency" and "we're moving to fast"), and never bother with anything other than looking good. And everything diff has to be reviewed by someone on your team, but if your team doesn't include actually seasoned coders, they're going to nit pick because they don't understand the programming language and take their time, slowing you down.
No matter how hard my manager tries, they couldn’t get me on those metrics. Mind you that my manager is not involved in my day to day work. I worked witg project managers and other consultants.
My previous manager had left and my new manager went hard on me from day one. I had ever had any previous interaction with them. They couldn’t even find anyone to give me bad feedback internally or the customers during the focus periods.
The only thing the manager could do was try to keep adding more work on me until I refused or failed.
Wow. Imagine that being legal.
My opinion is this. PIP is needed. URA projections are needed, but need revised and reformed. The question remains..is how should either be implemented. I think URA metrics should be nothing more than a suggestion of what's likely the case. Example?
Say Amazon has 1.5M employees. URA hypothetically set to 6%, Currently, That's 90,000 employees worldwide who would be considered underperformers and should be eliminated. To me, that is absurd.
How I think it should be carried out. Lower URA to 3%, 35,000 total employees. Change URA to "Underperformance Risk". There's a good chance 3% of employees are indeed underperformers. However the question remains..how are we targeting such? Warehouse associate tracking is easy. They make up the majority. Non WHA folks is a bit harder. So we need to focus on their accomplishments, ticket resolution, other verifiable data which can attribute to their performance. I.E.
- How many of their resolved issues needed reopened due to misdiagnosis?
- How many unsuccessful attempts to resolution of an issue? If unsuccessful, are there attempts made to properly escalate and learn from such failed attempt?
Projects that required rework or additional assistance?
Manager direct report attrition?
Thing is, requiring a certain percentage to be let go is absurd. Maintaining a target percentage of employees to identify at risk of underperforming is more ideal IMO. Then figure out a way to identify genuine underperformers, and actually make the attempt to get them to improve. Also, give underperformers a chance a one time chance to relocate, down-level, or find a role which best fits their demonstrated skill set.
We need to eliminate the fact that a Manager can unilaterally request a Focus entry. They can accomplish this by simply ommitting certain accomplishments of affected employees via OLR, therefore making them look less than ideal. Also, Peer feedback is terrible. If they're your peer, chances are they'll be looking to promote. You're competition to them. It's human nature. We need to emphasize stakeholder and those who are a level higher..their feedback on the performance of an employee. Peer feedback should only be used as a way to Guage whether the Bar is at the right threshold for such level/role. We are a hypersensitive Data collection organization. There's no reason other than acts of God where we can't accomplish such. Additionally, I am human, and my ideas aren't perfect. That's why I created this group. To show the absurdity and encourage a channel for those involved to express their experiences, concerns or ideas for improvement.
The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice.
I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.
If a company thinks some non-trivial percentage of the employee population is likely to be underperforming to the extent they should be fired, they probably should implement a URA target (or “rank and yank” or similar).
I’m with you in disliking such policies, but if you want forced turnover of those ranked low-performing, you have to make it a hard policy, because human managers dislike firing low-performing employees who seem like they’re trying.
Neither pin is a good place to be.
It seems you have accepted that PIPs are just a tool to fire someone but still think calling it a PIP is perfectly logical and desirable to the point that you snarkily suggest that this is what it should be called.
Once someone has been employed at a company for two years, they can't be dismissed without going through a fair disciplinary process.
A PIP is a good way to demonstrate that an employee is not performing adequately, even after being given an opportunity to improve.