On average, I would say a senior would get between 3k and 4k euros in RO, at a regular company. It depends a lot on city too. In bucharest salaries should be higher.
Obviously Amazon thinks that mortages can be paid just by flexing their employee badge.
Romania? That’s why companies go there and other distant countries. To pay below market rate with huge press support. I experienced it first hand from Continental and Hella. If I have the same job in Germany, I will get normal salary. If I take job in eastern branch, I will get 1/3 salary. And local companies offered me 1/2. Obviously I stayed in Germany.
Faang salary only exists on the US. Even the richest countries in Europe don't have those salaries for programmers (maybe if you work on finance or some niche subject).
This. For skilled workers, it's still a lot of money if you can't get a job at the other FAANG companies. In the few miserable years you'll be there, you can make a lot of progress towards buying/paying off a house, for instance. If you have a thick skin to not care about a PIP and just shrug off the nonsense, it might be a really good deal.
In the warehouses...well, nobody else is hiring those kinds of headcounts. And few of the people taking those jobs are in any position to be picky.
For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".
But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide).
As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing.
You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?
The narrative on HN is almost always driven by negativity so I wouldn't presume that things posted here are representative of the actual working conditions at corporate, or exclusive to Amazon.
Of, both things can be true you know? I worked there, left for various reason, don't regret my years there and even considered going back. Why? Because most other places, and I have seen quite a few, are similar, Amazon is just up front, hobest and open about it. And, even more important, they follow their own rules, meabing as an emoloyee I can play the game as well since the rules are kind of known. Most other places, there either are no rules, or they are used totally at will by management.
I prefer honesty, even or especially, when cruel, about being stabbed in the back by axe.
I worked there for 8 years (both retail and AWS) and loved it and never experienced a toxic environment. Consider that the anecdotes that are published by the media may not be representative of everyone's experiences.
This completely tracks with regards to some folk I’ve interviewed recently. But then again it’s not an Amazon-specific thing (the process and targets, even if they seem to be a lot more aggressive than what I’ve experienced and talked about with peers in other companies).
I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager.
Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?
Well it seems that PIPs are not actually improvement plans.
An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals.
What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.
PIPs (at least in europe) are a way for company to prove employee was fired because they are incompetent. We tried to help employee X, see the paperwork? But they are not good enough.
Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits.
Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements
I have only heard secondhand of two cases where pip didnt result in being fired (but cant confirm it, could have been a propaganda stories passed on by gullible)
But the point is, would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP? If you give an employee guardrails for success and they flounder anyways, then it seems the employee was not a good fit for the role. It says more about the employee than the process.
> would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP
90%+ of the situations I have witnessed, extreme luck or act of god would be required to achieve the requirements. In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.
I have also had the misfortune to witness one where the employee didnt realise it was all a con to fire them; they got the miracle, 10x'd their teams sales but "failed" some pointless side quest to get coffee for the boss every morning by 6am.
For the most part they looked like they worked out fine - generally it was a personal problem, people not "liking" people. The line manager gave the nudge and wink to be "extra nice" to the meglomaniac in the senior suite and after a few months cooler heads prevail, along with a documented performance.
A lot of actual real world peformance and what people actually do isnt really visible when you are a few layers up (or in a different team). Sooner or later in an organisation large enough someone is going to assume simply because they dont like someone over there, that person does nothing all day long.
If one was particularly skilled you could probably use these sorts of things to undermine upper management that is already on the ropes - but that is an advanced technique.
I would say it depends, if employee was set to be fired - there is nothing that they could do to avoid it, decision was made to downsize team, or they were assholes, had personal clashes with leaders etc.
There are probably cases where pip is used to give a good person who is slipping a kick. That was probably initiated by their manager to motivate them back on track. However, a good manager would have a serious talk with that employee, rather than use formal HR process.
So thats why (I think) pip is mostly used to get rid of people.
If virtually all PIPs result in firing, wouldn't it be trivial to argue that either 1) the company is misusing PIPs as a stealth way to fire people, or 2) the company is completely incompetent when it comes to providing PIPs that actually work.
With most European labour laws, neither option is very good for the company.
Trivial, how? A corpo lawyer will tell judge they agreed with employee on improvement plan to guide and help them prevent firing. They did all they could to help them.
How will you prove that you were fired before pip was put in place?
How will you argue the whole pip system is set to fire people?
(Similarly) It is open secret politicians steal public money, why don't we just lock them up for stealing?
No, because there is actually such a thing as a bad employee. Labor laws are not a get out of jail free card for being bad at your job. Firing people is not actually illegal.
PIPs actually work if they provide evidence that someone actually cannot do the job they were hired to do.
That all the employees put on such PIPs fail would be evidence that they are doing a good job of identifying bad employees to fire, not that they don't actually know how to improve performance.
PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name.
[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.
You what's funny? When this PIP culture hits German labour laws. Then the result is basically pointless bossing, which ultimately results in, for the employer, rather expensive severance packages. Nothing funny about bossing, but funny that employers still want to force their head through a wall, instead of just offering the package they have to pay anyway from the get go.
Large companies just stagnant hiring in one region or another to offset risk. I’ve seen companies hire like crazy in places like the US and India but the same people have been working in the UK/EU for decade(s) without any new hires.
UK/EU companies will do the same and recoup costs by laying off regions like US/India because it’s easier.
You can easily avoid these kinds of companies who are always hiring and firing. I’ve never had to deal with a threat of a PIP.
Companies hire where employees are cheaper, and where labor protections are weaker. All the time. They also are limited to hire in regions that can support their business, e.g. Poland in case of Germany. India wouldn't work for an inhouse team running order management for a German production company, but Poland might. Might because getting such an org off the ground, and running, takes considerable efforts which might not justify whatever salary savings one might have.
That being said, Amazon in Germany is more like a up-or-out place than a hire-and-fire one for white collar folks. And the blue collar personal is pretty much treated like logistics workers at other places, read not really great. Salaries tend to be higher so (accounted for region and other things).
No idea how things are on the ground in the US so, but I guess worse. Which seems to be a general thing so.
From what I understand, PIPs and documentation save money compared to going through a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, the “at will” employment principle would mean that the company would almost certainly win the suit (assuming not-illegal-discrimination), but it would be expensive to go through with the suit. Comparatively, a PIP, lots of documentation, and keeping the employee around for 6 months longer is a cheaper alternative.
TBH, if AI makes a lot of legal action cheaper, this calculus might change. There’s a business product here: an AI mediator that all parties agree to use at the start of employment. Looks at all documentation at time of firing and says: “based on this, employee would average $X out of a civil suit. Company would average $Y to defend. Cut employee a check for func($X, $Y) and by cashing it employee agrees to relinquish rights to further legal action.”
If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?
>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.
Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.
So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?
It is absolutely not the same in Europe. Maybe it depends on the country. In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind. But the idea of taking a company to court for something like this in Germany is laughable.
It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it.
>In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind.
You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates?
Also, the devil is in the details as German culture and language is often designed to cleverly camouflage negative feedback as neutral or positive to avoid lawsuits, so you can definitely have generic cookie cutter rejection messages that legally qualify as "honest" like for example in your Arbeitszeugnis.
How would you legally challenge that if otherwise? Do you sue the company because you feel like their feedback wasn't brutally honest as per your expectations as it was too generic and "nice sounding" and had nothing bad to say about you?
IMHO you choose a bad example as German corporate culture is not as "brutally honest" as you portray it to be, quite the opposite, it's just very good at pretending to be honest.
From my personal experience across several countries, I've noticed the more difficult it is to fire someone and the more anti-discrimination laws exist in that country, then the less honest and more generic your feedback will be, if you get any feedback at all and it's not a generic automated rejection.
I chose the example I have experience with. I don't have experience with other EU countries, so I can't comment on those. I also don't have experience with massive large companies, so maybe this is a problem of scale rather than culture. Although it does seem like smaller American companies have the same problems.
It's not that complicated. In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway. In short, it's not worth it for them, it's that simple.
Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on speed-dial, to change that company's culture on "honest feedback" forever.
It's why we can't have nice things, there will always be someone to abuse the system and take it down with him.
> In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway.
Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.
There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.
You underestimate how lazy some companies are when it comes to non-billable hours/tasks. The question on their end is "why bother, what's in it for us?".
>Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candidate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
That's the problem, it's NOT easy to send feedback that's truthful yet at the same time is 100% iron clad against any potential expressions that might be interpreted as discriminatory. Engineers are not good at formulating such things and their bluntness is a liability.
Which is why engineers are left with the technical part, and the final candidate-feedback communication and rejection is left to the HR who's main job is eliminating employee/candidate liability for the company, so they usually take the route that makes their job easier and send the same generic message to everyone, especially that in many
companies HR is understaffed.
When I interviewed at IBM in Germany in the late 00s I was rejected and got crystal clear feedback on why - and that is a big American company in Germany.
Yes it's true for Europe. (big) companies' HR just ghost you or reject you with the same legally safe cookie cutter template messages. Maybe at very small companies if you only interacted with the hiring manager he might have the time and inclination to give you some personalized feedback but that's very rare.
No, not UK, just Austrian companies in Austria for example. Swedish companies in Sweden. Also German companies in Germany. In Eastern Europe too. Is that enough of a sample size for my opinion on European companies?
Austrian resident here, checking in. I have yet to see this heinous practice in the Austrian job market, but I guess ymmv. Every single time [*] I've asked for feedback on the interview process, I've gotten it - including details for why I was not considered for a position.
Oh, I have asked, and only got ghosted. Even by Austria's biggest telecom company in Vienna too ;)
90% of the time the feedback is "sorry, we can't move forward because we have better candidates in the pipeline" and asking for details leaves you ghosted.
You probably live in a different Austria. Or maybe because I'm a foreigner with dark skin :)
Well, I live in Vienna and have never had an issue with getting good feedback on why I didn't pass an interview - except from Qualcomm, who responded "we have no comment on the interview process, we just didn't feel it was a good fit", which actually just made me feel relieved to have not passed their criteria.
Never been ghosted, either. So I dunno, our subjective experiences differ. I'm also a foreigner, but maybe our experience levels are just different.
What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position, and that can be frustrating at times.
It could also be the cultural differences between companies that are engineering driven first, versus companies that are primary sales/management/consulting driven first and the engineering part is a distant second.
And the likes of QCOM and all these international big-tech pay so much above the low Austrian market rates, that they can afford to treat candidates as disposable commodities as they have virtually unlimited applicants, so it could be a problem of scale besides the culture and liability concerns.
>What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position
But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you? I doubt they straight up told you that. :)
>But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you?
I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.
I'm not saying Austria isn't without its glib bureaucracies and Kafka'esque recruitment nightmares - just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
>I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.
Ouch, that must hurt knowing you're just the reserve, but to be honest I wouldn't hold a grudge over this, I expect most companies in the world do this, as most candidates also do this with companies when interviewing. It's fair game and you hedge your bets.
> just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
I have no idea what it's like in the US, Asia or Oceania, but compared to most of EU, including the UK, I haven't found any extra empathy to candidates or employees in the Austrian private sector, especially that here employment is basically at-will compared to the rest of EU so you're always an easy scapegoat to find yourself unemployed for some failing of an incompetent manager (and Austrian management is really next level Kafkaesque)
Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture.
1. Large numbers
In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.
This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.
2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes
Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.
Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.
Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".
> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.
That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future.
> Also there are processes to be met officially
By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.
Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive.
When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked.
For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities.
1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit.
2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP.
3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.
First of all, I side with you. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I encourage these practices, I talk about them and I fell pray to them many times when applying to other jobs as well.
> That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person.
Not really. It is about network not performance.
What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?
That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out.
Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other.
Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
> By "officially" do you mean legally?
Yes.
But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending.
What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there?
And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide?
Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.
> What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?
Hold on, is this during a layoff? What's this about ratings? Why would you need to kick X% of the workforce? Is the company having money issues? It seems that there are quite a few other things to address before you get to an individual employee's performance.
> Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
The more I read, this is sounding like a company which is trying to fit itself into some kind of management system they read about in a book, rather than taking an existing system and adjusting it to serve their purposes. Why fire someone if there is nothing bad going on and the company has money? And why promote someone if they have not demonstrated to their manager that they are capable of filling a bigger role?
I fully agree. Just want to point out that all of this is because of lawsuits. When companies were more transparent they were sued, so they became less transparent.
On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply.
Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post).
"Can you give an example where you did X"
"Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."
This right here: a "senior manager" explaining in clear language how large organizations of humans simply do not scale. We revert to "statistics" and treat people as numbers, ignore they are human, and create misery at scale, not organizational efficiency, but tyranny.
About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away.
So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.
I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.
I’m not sure I follow - if there is no budget to hire a junior dev, or hiring a junior dev would further lose the company money, why would a company do that?
A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.
> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well.
For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.
This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers
I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness
Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.
If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.
This is random but I was recently rejected for a role from a company I find very interesting - https://www.overstory.com/ - and when I asked, the engineering manager gave me clear, detailed feedback on why (I don't have experience with satellite imagery tools like STAC, I accessed dict members with x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}), and I didn't go in to depth on my takehome assignment.).
I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.
Depending on your perception, x.get is either error recovery (good) or a silent failure (bad). One is not necessarily better than the other; it depends on what you want. In my experience, x[] is usually the better choice because failing fast makes debugging easier.
I hope no one is recommending x.get as a general practice, because that is pretty naive.
If you're a very junior sw engineer reading this, who hasn't done a lot of python, use x.get(). Almost always, so for you, always. This doesn't apply if you're a scientist or mostly writing small scripts, but if you are doing SWE, always use x.get().
Once you've understood python you can use x[] in limited cases. Never in your unit or functional tests. I code using x[], but later on I replace a lot of them with getter (around my second refactoring, when I add type hints and tests) especially in library or code that'll be shared.
For what it's worth, I only use x.get when having a missing key is a normal and expected part of the process. If I need to be able to expect a key to be in the dict then I'll use x[] so I can get a useful exception for debugging. Though really, this should only happen with validated inputs, and as Python adopts more type hinting dealing with this should get easier over time.
I've been around a while and I'm mentoring a junior dev, and one of the things that has come up is to fail as fast and as hard as possible. A silent failure is one of the worst things to have. And this is why I usually won't use .get on data that has presumably already been validated.
But I was already rejected so I haven't been able to explain my logic :-). It's still nice to get their feedback, though.
Funny enough, in Europe, you _should_ be able to get any written notes on you via GDPR.
This seems like splitting hairs. Sure, maybe x.get is better, but would that be a deal breaker? Know you are just giving quick example, but this just struck a cord. Are jobs really so hard to get that employers can be that nit-picky?
If I've learned anything it's that a lot of the hiring process is extremely arbitrary. If someone asks "why do you want to work here?" and you say "money" you might get someone admiring your honesty or you might get someone who wants you to have a personal affinity for the company. And it can be hard to know which.
Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations?
It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case.
If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clue as to the person's ability to perform in a technical role.
It’s a take-home test. I’m saying if the particular test called for dealing with a particular type of input and you didn’t do it, you failed. It’s that simple.
If it didn’t, then it’s a pointless nitpick and shouldn’t ever be brought up as interview feedback.
Fortunately I was in a situation where I'm not too bothered about not getting the job but admittedly it would have been nice to have this chat with them.
I am _very_ familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and would, of course, adapt to house style, but where I am now we set up a nice pipeline in Dagster with a whole lot of boxes for assets, and at the risk of being non-technical I want the box with the bug to be the one that turns red. If I use x[] I get that. If I use x.get the red box could be three modules downstream because of a NoneType Exception.
Learn! You aren't hiring people to learn. They must know everything they will ever need on day 1. (Forget what it says about your company - you only do things that people at other companies have been doing for years...)
I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.
It is completely nit-picky, as others have said, both methods have pluses/minuses, so how does the interviewer know the internal preference of the hiring company? Unless the question was specifically "how would you do this lookup if you have Dirty data". Then maybe missing using a default value is something. But even then, maybe you hit an invalid value, you should fail, or if you are providing defaults then there should be some follow up on, what is a good default, how will defaults be reported out, etc....
> For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates
In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.
I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.
Even without worrying about lawsuit, it isn’t a good use of your time as interviewer to tell the candidate. It’s just like having a long conversation with someone you don’t want to go out with any more.
They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.
I'd rather not work at all than work for that complete disaster of a corporate environment. The corpo speak in Callahan's note at the end is simply infuriating. Don't know how these people can lie and mislead with a straight face and sleep at night.
> But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.
If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.
I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while.
While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number?
> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
No, she isn't necessarily lying but just making it seem as if she would have received $200K over a single vest while it would have likely happened over at least 2 years and 4 vests.
I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.
Well, it seems what the interviewed person is saying is that "Day X I didn't have the money in my bank account. I waited for Day Y, and now I have \"couple hundred thousand dollars\" in my bank account", which sounds like it didn't happen over 2 years and 4 vesting occasions. But maybe it's just worded weird.
You’re just out of touch with how much people can make in the US.
An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.
This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.
I'm very aware with how much people can make per year in the US.
A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.
6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.
Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.
IIRC, truly well performing employees there can get very good stock. Amazon hates giving out cash. For a time, even during interviews, they would brag that even Bezos himself didn't make more than about $160k in base pay annually. Stock, stock, and stock are used for incentivization, and Amazon has indeed had some very good market performance over time.
They had direct reports in HR so you might be on the mark in terms of ladder just more in the HR camp with OP as a senior manager where they combined their bonus and vest payouts? You'd just have to be a bit above Staff to hit 200k with bonus and a single vest.
The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.
A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.
And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.
Maybe it was that the manager was being pressured to PIP a certain percentage of people, and instead pushed back really hard to retain this person because they wanted to retain them instead. Before spending their political capital, they asked the employee if they were committed to the long haul.
In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.
The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.
No, a PIP is about creating a culture of fear, so that management can PIP anybody with no or manufactured reasons, and control workforce with loss of job.
And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.
I was offered a position with near-enough 100k per quarter.
With amazon, a quarter is the financial decision making resolution.
And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.
But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.
(obvious throwaway account) I had a similar experience in Amazon, ngl the thing about "precendent caching" is real. People have to be put on PIP regardless of performance so management set crazy standards that people will fail.
Amazon has a weird vesting schedule (40% in the third and fourth year IIRC) and it has gone up quite a lot over the last few years. It also appears to have yearly vests. This doesn't seem implausible under those conditions.
They used to have a salary cap of $165k until 1.5 years ago, I’m not sure what the cap is now but it’s significantly higher.
I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.
So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.
So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.
After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.
How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
> demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.
I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.
If you instead move laterally and look at other "modern" countries, instead of temporally, it's easy to see how the working class and more is getting exploited in the US.
Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.
I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.
> This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement
I'm guessing you're a US-native then? Where this salary/work obsession seems a lot stronger than around here (South-West Europe).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
You aren't sitting on a beach playing guitar with your friends if you get a tech job in Germany, you're doing the same boring pain-in-the-ass dead-end work either way. Just with less threat of being randomly fired or mistreated, which isn't even particularly intimidating or stressful when you're sitting on an enormous nest egg
Since you avoided the question, I'm guessing I was spot on :)
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
> How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.
We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.
This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.
You're going into a bad, boring place for 8 hours a day. You're pissing away your precious time on earth while lying to yourself that it's a "balance" and you're happy about it.
If this was real, then the people I know at the companies paying Valley money wouldn't be handcuffed to continuing to work late into their lives. And that's not to omit the many, many software professionals throughout the United States for whom a $70K USD salary is actually pretty good due to accidents of geography and credentialism.
As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.
This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.
It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
They're being paid half as much but they're much better off because world-class health care and education are effectively free. And if they have a job it's much harder to fire them and leave them twisting in the wind.
I'm not comparing this against history, this is clearly illegal behavior, yet no legal professionals will touch it because Amazon has just so much money to throw at their legal defense it is not possible to combat their clearly illegal behavior.
There was a brief moment in North America where almost every worker belonged to a union but employers hadn't figured out offshoring yet. The adjustment definitely was hard on American workers, but the fact that it came with a huge benefit to developing country workers is conspicuously overlooked by most of the 'late stage capitalism' narrative.
In many jobs "in earlier times" there were for-cause clauses negotiated into contracts and you could not be fired without management proving that you had done something wrong, even after you had been through a negotiated disciplinary process.
Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.
If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.
To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.
And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.
This reminds me of the big piece years ago talking about employees crying at their desks from the pressure. People joked about it, and to be fair, it wasn't that common.
Reality is, you wanted to find a conference room or the bathroom for that.
Let's not forget that in order to use said documentation legally later, you would potentially run the risk of violating company policy on confidential information disclosure.
i was given the option to take 1 month PIP or take 1 month severance. I took severance but not quite sure why they offered me pip. I am guessing something do with unemployment benefits?
You did the correct thing. The PIP is to cover their butt that you really were a bad employee and you were not wrongfully terminated. The laws vary wildly state-to-state but generally if you're PIP'ed out you can't claim unemployment or wrongful termination.
My dad had a government job where the move was to enforce all contractual obligations rigorously, remove any benefits provided, and give them absolutely 0 work to do.
He had a disagreement with his manager (let's leave it at that, heh), and over the next week, his arrangement to work from a different office (the rest of his team were based in this office too, just his department's office was technically somewhere else) was removed, his flex was removed, he was taken off all projects, and told that using his computer for non-work purposes was a disciplinary offence.
He had a 90 minute each way commute, was required to be clocked in between 9:30 and 4:30 every day (not 9:31, 9:30), required to work 37.5 hours, requests for using TOIL due to commute or other issues were immediately denied, no work to do, and not being allowed to use the computer in his office. The resolution was he found someone in a different department in the city we lived in that had the exact same thing happen to them, and they negotiated a swap with each other and things got better again.
==
Point being, these processes are a combination of ass-covering, parallel construction, and outright abuse. Nobody deserves to be treated like he was (or like people are being treated in these PIP programs), it would be more humane for everyone if we did something different.
Generally yes. Being PIP'ed or otherwise softly managed out is worse than being immediately fired.
Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done.
PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager and maybe the employee. (Depends on whether they are actually even aware they're a bad fit or not, and whether they're well-intentioned or not.)
Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Suddenly (as described in the parent article) they're being hit with complaints they've never heard before. Maybe there's substance, maybe not. It's a major blow to self-esteem and it's a dragged out process. They're not even given the satisfaction of a quick firing where they can be angry and done. It's a long suffering.
And to make the managers do this stuff - it's awful. Having to lay somebody off when a company RIFs people sucks. Having to fire people usually sucks unless they've really earned it. But telling a manager they have to PIP a percentage of their team arbitrarily and participate in this gaslighting process is simply evil.
> Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.
I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.
I went through the process
there. The process gave me months to prepare for another job and by the time the official PIP happened, I was more or less waiting on it to get my severance.
I could have quit anytime during the process and had other opportunities waiting for me. I was offered another job before my 10 days of paid time off elapsed let alone my 3+ months severance and I survived through a vesting event.
At almost 50 years old and Amazon being my 8th job out of now nine, why would I wrap my esteem on my job? It was just my 8th time to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
Late stage? This is SOP for many large companies going back decades. The tech companies are just sort of new to it and gave it a new name. Many companies in the 70s/80s/90s famously had their 10% culling every year. Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no. But is something you should expect from companies. They are not your friend or buddy or partner, no matter what lies they tell you. They are the people who pay you to do work.
In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.
Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.
> Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no.
Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).
And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.
I read through the article expecting this, but... if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?
> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.
> ...
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.
Bingo. Remember, one of the key points of a PIP is to gather documentation. When they sit you down for The Meeting, the 'evidence' is already on record, reducing your leverage should you decide to pursue them legally later for something like wrongful termination. Then, they often dangle a pittance in the form of severance pay if you go ahead and exit right away, of your own free will and volition. This gets even worse if the person is on a H1B.
> if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?
I don't think you get it. The way this stuff is done is just as described - totally blindsiding, and potentially flat-out gaslighting. There's no actual metrics or data until they fabricate a paper trail and force you out.
You don't win these things. Rather, you take your money and go elsewhere. Then turn down the subsequent job offers you get from them, using them only as leverage to juice your pay elsewhere with a competing offer ;-)
But it sounds like he won? He got his $200k and found a new job before any PIP was implemented? Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?
Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?
The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.
How can they be maintaining these completely antithetitical interests, like wjy do they want to arbitrarily fire the person at all if they have already evaluated that person to be worthy of retention? Why is this even on the table in the absence of any failure to meet whatever metrics?
Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
> Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
I assume there are different competing priorities at play that converge in particularly dumb ways sometimes.
Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.
Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.
Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.
Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.
I disagree, this is not some junior manager drinking the company cool aid. They are a middle manager with hundreds of indirect reports - in HR, no less - fully aware of what they're doing and with a metric to hit.
So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
So, good? The employee recognizes that the employer is just screwing around with everyone, seems like a FAFO situation; I hope Amazon has this happen endlessly.
To the point here: I think people think these managers are in a position of real power. They are not. They are cogs in the wheel as are their subordinates. It's entirely possible this manager wasn't even the one doing the direct ranking, sometimes this roles up to levels beyond where the manager can give real input. Someone has to get pipped as the system demands it, it happened to land on the person in the article. The manager is then trying to get them out of it because they believe they don't actually require the pip.
So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).
I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.
> Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?
The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.
The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".
To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.
His manager was likely upset because the guy left before he was put on the PIP and so wouldn't count towards the HR VP's (and by extension his manager's) 6% goal.
Most people are probably going to eventually leave their company anyway. If they can do so more or less on their own terms, that counts as more of a win than a loss.
Given they backfill the first two years with grant value bonuses, this is irrelevant: the first two years just pay straight cash to make up those % to 100. First year is an up front payment, second is monthly payments. If anything that vest schedule retains people for those two years rather than being a way to pay less.
Amazon typically offers cash bonuses during the first 2 years that bring total comp up to a similar amount in the years where 40% of stock vests. They manage towards a target compensation number. The stock vest schedule just changes the mix of cash vs. stock.
The last two 40% chunks vest at 6 month intervals. Amazon’s RSU comp also vests in 6 month intervals (May and November). If you’re in year 3, you could be waiting on a vest that includes signing bonus comp and regular comp RSUs.
If this isn't an open admission that it's such a shitty place to work, that they have to withold your pay to trap you there once you work it out for yourself, I don't know what is.
Places that provide good working environments don't need to trap their employees into staying.
If they did this even once how is that not criminal fraud? Proformance isn’t subjective, if an employee lies and says my proformance is bad that’s a crime.
> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term
That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.
Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.
Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.
The mechanism I'm trying to describe is when employers pay a base in X dollars and stock in Y dollars which takes Z years to mature. AWS sounds like they're being somewhat reasonable about it by giving an employee cash before their options mature, but I have interviewed at places (Envestnet in New York City) where I was offered a base comp which was meh and then options which were gonzo. The offer, if I remember correctly, was $105k/y base and then $100k/y in stock which took three years to vest. I passed on the offer because $105k/y in NYC was cutting it too close for me. They did not have a "cash float" mechanism.
I will probably get some slack for this, but not ever usage of a PIP is necessarily a bad thing..
The example above and large companies in general do seem to use it as a firing tool or at least pretence.
From experience we had one developer on our team who was gradually just showing less and less interest and quality of work was dropping so much so it was effecting the rest of the team.
I wasn't involved but he was put on a PIP that was quite well layed out and measurable. After the process he was better than before. I can't put it down to the PIP only of course, but as he said it was a way for him to focus on what was wrong and get back into being consistent.
Super rare I'm sure, but just thought I'd at least five one good example of its use case.
I work at Amazon and you're right that PIPs are not an issue. But having a certain percentage of people that you HAVE to PIP is.
It simply doesn't make any sense. You can have a team of only high performers and your manager will tell you to fire someone, and if you don't do it it will be you.
The "scheme" as a general HR tool was designed to work like this, was likelky deployed successfully like this. Then someone (I am just going to assume they had a Harvard MBA) realised that it could also be used to save on costly dismissals.
Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.
In what way is it 'shafting' Amazon to leave with stock options you have already earned and are perfectly entitled to? Personally I find it very useful information to know the real implications of Amazon's PIP process, as I'm sure would many other less savvy/experienced employees for whom getting fired despite being perfectly capable must be a very difficult experience.
Pretty much like clockwork when the company I'm at gets large enough to have an HR "department" that does more than process payroll, I'm making calls and doing interviews. It's never worth it. When the headcount gets over Dunbar's number I don't have a place there.
I once had a kind, capable and hard-working boss, who hinted that a few years previously he'd been on a PIP due to being out of his depth in the role, and had managed to claw his way out of it. While I was in his team, he got a, IMHO, well deserved promotion. To my mind, the company basically mistreated him, made him wait years longer than he should to get the promotion. The reason he probably couldn't was lack of formal academic qualifications to job hop with, and possibly risk averse because his wife had walked out and left him with 2 kids. Its seems to me in this case, a bunch of game-playing which helps nobody. Also other people will have noticed how this guy was treated, and responded with the amount of "loyalty" that that employer deserved back.
This has probably already been said, but places that mandate that X% of people need to be put on performance improvement plans are not great. This can force managers (or HR, depends on who decides the PIP) to put otherwise good engineers or staff on PIP when they are perfectly fine employees - they may not be 10x, perfect, and can just be doing what they need to do to do their jobs, but they still aren't doing anything wrong and end up on a PIP because the company is forcing them to put atleast some percentage of people on it each year
I completely agree. Plus, part of Amazon's candidate evaluation is to consider whether they are (or clearly have potential to be) better than 50% of your peers, as part of the hiring bar. Between that and stack-ranking/forced-attrition, even previously high-performing employees can one day find themselves on the chopping block.
And don’t you end up with hire-to-fire practices as a result of this? Hire a lame employee just so they can be the one on the chopping block; preserving your actual valuable team members?
Yeah, but why do that when you can hire someone good, get good work out of them, then toss them on the chopping block, preserving your 'actual' valuable team members?
"Radical Candor" calls it rocks & rock stars. You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks) just as much as you need highly motivated people looking to work up the ladder into leadership positions (rock stars).
> You need steady, reliable people, who are happy excelling in their current position (rocks)
Exactly, there was no winning at the early 2000s Real Madrid full of rock stars (Zidane, the original Ronaldo, Figo, Beckham etc) until a rock like Makelele came around in the midfield. I'm surprised that the business luminaries have stopped seeing this basic fact, maybe it's because of the monopoly/oligopoly positions where they've managed to put themselves in and which makes them impervious to how badly their teams are run.
I've heard so many terrible stories about working at Amazon that I'm not sure I would ever work there, both in the media and from friends who were severely mistreated.
It's a shame, because some of the tech they work on (like S3) is super interesting and high scale, but I do not want to acquire a mental health crisis from work.
I'm morbidly curious, like if I knew I had a solid job waiting for after and didn't have to stress over it going sideways. They'd probably smell my non-seriousness a mile away though and never hire me.
That's just leverage. Nothing non-serious about it. No reason to sacrifice one's life for a corporation when you have better options. They generally don't want people like that, they want people who will sacrifice. People without options.
That's the draw for me. Now that I've adequately licked my wounds from a life where I just never quite had the stability I needed (and got that stability too ofc), I now really want to work for Amazon just to see how hard I can push myself. I've told my wife the current plan is, once she has her degree finished, I'm going to crowbar my way into one of their software engineering departments by any means necessary.
Like what if it turns out you join a team that ranks you more based on politics/caste/luck than any sort of talent or motivation and you just feel trapped in a weird game?
Not really, at least not right now. I know my workplace and a few others are weary of ex-Amazon employees. Usually get picked for interview if there's no one else and gets an extra behavioral round.
For management positions, it better be a internal referral who is willing to vouch for you very highly.
There is an ocean of difference between a workplace located on the West Coast where you have your pick of the litter enough that you can filter out ex-Amazonians, and where I currently am, working as a tech lead on railway software in some city in Finland.
> My manager was super mad and asked me when I was leaving. I said two weeks.
Serious question for Americans as maybe this is cultural: They're an at-will employee, seemed to already have a new job lined up and the company seemed to have burned all goodwill with them, why not resign effective immediately?
That's like a cultural quirk they have over there, where even though it's not stipulated by law, people need to stay at the place they're leaving for two weeks, no matter what, otherwise the optics are really bad, for whatever reason. But it only works one way, if you get fired you usually get fired immediately, no two weeks to find something else.
In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short stick for so long that they don't even know what fair working conditions look like anymore.
I had never thought of it that way, but you're right— firing is immediate but employees always feel the obligation to stick around for two weeks.
It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.
Assuming your last paycheck includes those two weeks, that's (almost certainly, in context) an $X,000 difference in what you walk away with. I could probably stomach hanging around for an extra fortnight even if X was quite small.
Personally, if it's a job I really dislike, I don't mind losing the extra $X,000. I've discovered through the years my mental health is worth a lot more. Once you leave a high-paying job for one that pays less, or even to just take a break and earn nothing, you start thinking about these sorts of little extras as inconsequential at best.
If the next job pays more than the last one, you could say it's a net loss for the employee too, since that's an extra two weeks one could've earned more.
But if neither of those apply, it's probably worth it to hang around and get some extra cash, or just get a couple more weeks of hanging at the job with "graduation goggles" and little work stress, yeah.
Having the end in sight is a huge factor. Two weeks of just more grind in a terrible job? No thank you. Two weeks of counting down the days until freedom? Definite maybe. But yes, NPV of the first couple of weeks of the next job might be important.
yes, showing up and doing nothing and getting paid for it. imo worse deal for the company than the employee but gives company opportunity for project handoffs.
You may have colleagues or reports who you genuinely like and don't want to burn or over-stress by just leaving without warning. That's the way I see it. If I truly despised everyone I worked with I'd consider just leaving immediately if I had to opportunity, otherwise 2 weeks.
Also if you just leave it may be harder to get a decent reference from your colleagues for future jobs.
> I mean, it depends on what you need. If someone quit without notice, I’d still be a referral for them if they were good.
But wouldn't you claim that this is not a very common view to hold about the process of quitting, in the US? I've lost count how many times I've heard managers/executives being pissed off because an employee left without a two week notice, and they treat that happening as some sort of failure, instead of just a normal thing.
Oftentimes companies that lay employees off (i.e. fire them) offer a severance package where the company continues to pay your salary and offer some benefits for a period of time after you no longer work for them. Just like the two-week notice, it is not mandatory where I live in the US. I just wanted to highlight that a company paying severance as a reciprocal perk to the employee giving a two-week notice.
Of course, severance is not universal, but, in my experience in the tech sector, having survived five lay offs at three companies and having been laid off once myself, it has been the case.
Of course you get let go immediately. Who wants a fired employee to linger for 2 weeks? That would be an awkward half month. Otoh, companies usually pay a minimum of 2 weeks salary.
You can, and I have, but it's customary for 2 weeks so there is time for finishing tasks, writing docs, performing knowledge dumps, etc. I've left a toxic job effective immediately. But, if it's an "ok" job that I'm leaving, giving 2 weeks is a good way to keep a positive relationship. I've left just for more money, or to have a shorter commute. In which case, I'd like to keep a positive relationship with those companies in case I ever want to go back. Not giving 2 weeks is a red flag for our HR friends
Also, as an employee, those two weeks are easy-street. Leaving early and long lunches are the norm.
I've put in two weeks notice a couple times. It's polite. It's not loyalty to the company, it's loyalty to my colleagues, and the opportunity to close out a chapter of my life with finality. It lets me say goodbye to people on my team, finish up projects which, for personal pride, I want to leave in a good place, and document things I've done for the people who will pick up my work. I could care less how it affects the company, but to the extent that I care about my own work, I don't want to just abandon it. The reality is that, if other people don't give two weeks notice, I understand, and I'm not mad at them. And sure, the company would not afford their employees the same respect, but then I don't expect them to behave with decency. I know how it works. But, it feels like the right thing to do for me.
The mindset is that you can always find new factory floor operators to push buttons on keyboards and operate ci/cd pipeline interfaces. Software "engineering" is the new factory work. To be automated soon so y'all can be freed to work on important things.
I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".
If you own the company you are still not in control - you have to worry about customers and a larger company throwing a few people at your product and squashing you like a cockroach
This truth got blurred by "solving hard problems" and "rock star developer" mantras. I'm sorry but plumbing APIs and building react interfaces is neither of the two. It's all about churning out features (or parts as they used to be called in old days of manufacturing). Even the agile methodologies used are essentially factory floor practices adapted to operating keyboards. The only way to ever be in control is to own a business.
I’ve been telling people on this forum for years that when Jeff Bezos looks down at them from on high (literally from space at one point), he sees them as barely differentiated units of labor. The talk about passion and innovation quickly struck me as just another part of a system to keep employees from thinking too hard about what the job really entails.
If in a PIP you can actually improve the thing in question, then the PIP is useless and your manager failed to communicate it to you properly.
In all other cases a PIP is not passable. Nobody becomes a significantly better engineer in 2 months if they haven't in their career so far, with the only new factor in the 2 months being "now you have extra pressure and a clock ticking".
I disagree, having been on both sides of PIPs. Not all PIP reasons are about not being a certain level of engineer. Sometimes it's about behaviors or the lack of them. In some cases, the forcing function of a strict timeline with high stakes attached is what people need. Usually not, but sometimes yes. Anyway, it's a tool that's to be used as a last resort, 99% of performance cases should have a much lighter solution before they escalate.
If you told them clearly about the behaviors and you need to start a PIP, I assume you took a few weeks to tell them and waited at least a few more weeks until you started the PIP, and if the behavior kept going for all this time, again, I can't see how the PIP will help anything other than being "this is what we do before we fire someone".
2. Involves a 3rd party (yes, yes, we can argue that HR is not your friend, etc.), which _can_ help with the trust (it's not just you & me anymore, you not knowing how I twist my story of you)
I get all the skepticism. I simply have different experience.
Yes I agree it does does 2 things, but remember my argument was to qualify that in the cases I mentioned I didn't think a PIP was passable. It doesn't mean you don't still have to do it, and yes, I guess in some extreme cases this raising of the stakes could be the thing that finally makes it "click" for the person that this is important. I just have seen enough PIPs and their pass-rates over a few years that I doubt them as a practical tool to actually get people to pass it. If that was the point companies wouldn't come up with a process with such a low pass-rate and would always be working to tweak the PIP process to increase pass-rates. Of course you might have different experience than this and I'll probably also change my mind if I see different outcomes in other contexts later on in life.
I appreciate the context, and I definitely wasn't trying to say you're not right with your experience! We simply seem to have different experiences, I probably got luckier a bit.
Well, you also have the case of very competent engineers underperforming due to stuff happening outside home.
Martial problems, family problems, health problems, depression, addiction, and what not.
Not saying that two months is enough to resolve those problems, but if for whatever reason such engineers are able to finally block those stressors, and bring their A-game to "beat" the PIP, then that should absolutely be a good reason to keep them aboard.
A PIP should not be a delayed 2-month firing process. It should be a legitimate chance for someone to improve.
I'm a manager and have been forced to apply similar PIP process to my team and it is truly horrible when the folks are forcefully put in the lowest performance just to satisfy the projected yearly budget. The 2-3 month improvement process is hogwash and hardly anyone survives it, PIP means they're 90% going to be axed.
I wonder if fired employees could take a class action lawsuit against these types of procedures. If acceptable performance is altered relative to how many people need to be let go, and there is data showing that few survive the PIP (Employers claim that the intended effect is to help the employee improve performance) then surely that's evidence that the so called Performance Improvement Plan is a sham.
There's no grounds for a lawsuit, not in the states. They can legally fire you for nearly any reason or for no reason whatsoever. All PIPs do is help the company fend off claims that the employee was fired for an illegal reason (e.g., for being a member of a protected class, retaliation, etc.)
PIPs would do that if the process was valid, but as pointed out, they are not. So if they defend against a claim of racism, sexism, castism, or ableism, with “but PIP!”, then it helps if we can show that PIPs are bullshit.
> I still wonder about what happened to all the people that went through that process. How did it impact their life? I think it leads to a lot of mental-health issues.
IMO this is a key issue with this system. The company evidently only cares about the employee as long as they're employees, and can dispose them and forget about them, like they'd dispose any other leftover resource.
But evidently said people are still around. If every company adopted a system like this, in theory it'd be great for the economy. It's capitalism, and you're getting rid of the people who sell you the least effective labour in an easily scalable way.
In practice, all these companies are pumping out a lot of stress, and it's thus no surprise the USA is notoriously burdened by mental health issues when compared to other high-income countries [1].
It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?
People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.
Even from this perspective I don't think the employee is in the wrong.
If a job gives you mental strain, especially if it is affecting your performance, IMO the right thing to do is to quit. I'm not surprised the boss was disappointed, but I do think they should've seen it coming.
I've been in situations where a job evidently isn't for me anymore, albeit in a seemingly healthier environment— my boss and I talked openly about the team no longer being a fit for me for weeks if not months prior.
I was evidently not working at my full potential too, and when I told my boss I was quitting, they told me what date I should officially submit my resignation so that I'd still get my latest bonus. It was all very amicable and objective.
If it were some random company, I'd say your scenario is plausible. But with Amazon, I happen to know that everything written in this article is 100% accurate to their real PIP process.
> -person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them
That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.
It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.
In the UK you can be fired for any or no reason, except a specifically illegal reason, until you have 2 years of service. It's like at-will employment but with a notice period.
Given they worked for Amazon for several years, I assume they would no longer fall in that category. At which point some of what they allege happened would probably fall under constructive dismissal.
It's the element in quick sort that you swap around to make sure all elements before pivot are less than it and all elements after are greater than it.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadhttps://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon
Faang salary my arse.
Obviously Amazon thinks that mortages can be paid just by flexing their employee badge.
Of course, this kind of staff turnover is terrible for the company, but they reap what they sow.
For the high-skill stuff...I'd say that social status is a big part of it, especially for the young. "I program computers at Amazon" gets instant recognition from everyone. Vs. "I program computers at {little company that treats its employees well}" gets "who's that?".
But this precise story is unfortunately pretty common in any big company (worldwide).
As soon as the company starts to treat its workforce like a blob of anonymous replaceable "ressources" that you can scale up or down according to your finances, this starts to happen inevitably. Most of the time, they even manage to create enough layers in those process so that most of the people involved think they are not responsible and that they do the right thing.
You want to be able to fire thousands of employees for no reason so you have to find reasons, and all you know about them is some vague impression of their own management / team that is somehow translated into some arbitrary number and then you sort people by that. What could go wrong ?
Here's an alternative view that popped up in my feed yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IVdaysrIS74
I prefer honesty, even or especially, when cruel, about being stabbed in the back by axe.
Some managers can deflect the culture enough for you to feel "loved".
Others can't. They embody the culture. The AWS culture really is that ruthless.
I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager.
Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?
An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals.
What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.
Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits.
Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements
I have only heard secondhand of two cases where pip didnt result in being fired (but cant confirm it, could have been a propaganda stories passed on by gullible)
90%+ of the situations I have witnessed, extreme luck or act of god would be required to achieve the requirements. In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.
I have also had the misfortune to witness one where the employee didnt realise it was all a con to fire them; they got the miracle, 10x'd their teams sales but "failed" some pointless side quest to get coffee for the boss every morning by 6am.
An examples on how those played out? Curious if the line managers then get punished?
A lot of actual real world peformance and what people actually do isnt really visible when you are a few layers up (or in a different team). Sooner or later in an organisation large enough someone is going to assume simply because they dont like someone over there, that person does nothing all day long.
If one was particularly skilled you could probably use these sorts of things to undermine upper management that is already on the ropes - but that is an advanced technique.
There are probably cases where pip is used to give a good person who is slipping a kick. That was probably initiated by their manager to motivate them back on track. However, a good manager would have a serious talk with that employee, rather than use formal HR process.
So thats why (I think) pip is mostly used to get rid of people.
If virtually all PIPs result in firing, wouldn't it be trivial to argue that either 1) the company is misusing PIPs as a stealth way to fire people, or 2) the company is completely incompetent when it comes to providing PIPs that actually work.
With most European labour laws, neither option is very good for the company.
How will you prove that you were fired before pip was put in place?
How will you argue the whole pip system is set to fire people?
(Similarly) It is open secret politicians steal public money, why don't we just lock them up for stealing?
PIPs actually work if they provide evidence that someone actually cannot do the job they were hired to do.
That all the employees put on such PIPs fail would be evidence that they are doing a good job of identifying bad employees to fire, not that they don't actually know how to improve performance.
[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.
UK/EU companies will do the same and recoup costs by laying off regions like US/India because it’s easier.
You can easily avoid these kinds of companies who are always hiring and firing. I’ve never had to deal with a threat of a PIP.
That being said, Amazon in Germany is more like a up-or-out place than a hire-and-fire one for white collar folks. And the blue collar personal is pretty much treated like logistics workers at other places, read not really great. Salaries tend to be higher so (accounted for region and other things).
No idea how things are on the ground in the US so, but I guess worse. Which seems to be a general thing so.
From what I understand, PIPs and documentation save money compared to going through a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, the “at will” employment principle would mean that the company would almost certainly win the suit (assuming not-illegal-discrimination), but it would be expensive to go through with the suit. Comparatively, a PIP, lots of documentation, and keeping the employee around for 6 months longer is a cheaper alternative.
TBH, if AI makes a lot of legal action cheaper, this calculus might change. There’s a business product here: an AI mediator that all parties agree to use at the start of employment. Looks at all documentation at time of firing and says: “based on this, employee would average $X out of a civil suit. Company would average $Y to defend. Cut employee a check for func($X, $Y) and by cashing it employee agrees to relinquish rights to further legal action.”
If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?
>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.
Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.
So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?
It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it.
>In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind.
You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates?
Also, the devil is in the details as German culture and language is often designed to cleverly camouflage negative feedback as neutral or positive to avoid lawsuits, so you can definitely have generic cookie cutter rejection messages that legally qualify as "honest" like for example in your Arbeitszeugnis.
How would you legally challenge that if otherwise? Do you sue the company because you feel like their feedback wasn't brutally honest as per your expectations as it was too generic and "nice sounding" and had nothing bad to say about you?
IMHO you choose a bad example as German corporate culture is not as "brutally honest" as you portray it to be, quite the opposite, it's just very good at pretending to be honest.
From my personal experience across several countries, I've noticed the more difficult it is to fire someone and the more anti-discrimination laws exist in that country, then the less honest and more generic your feedback will be, if you get any feedback at all and it's not a generic automated rejection.
Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on speed-dial, to change that company's culture on "honest feedback" forever.
It's why we can't have nice things, there will always be someone to abuse the system and take it down with him.
Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.
There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.
You underestimate how lazy some companies are when it comes to non-billable hours/tasks. The question on their end is "why bother, what's in it for us?".
>Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candidate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
That's the problem, it's NOT easy to send feedback that's truthful yet at the same time is 100% iron clad against any potential expressions that might be interpreted as discriminatory. Engineers are not good at formulating such things and their bluntness is a liability.
Which is why engineers are left with the technical part, and the final candidate-feedback communication and rejection is left to the HR who's main job is eliminating employee/candidate liability for the company, so they usually take the route that makes their job easier and send the same generic message to everyone, especially that in many companies HR is understaffed.
Frankly I was not a big steam fan, but now I'm close to defend Gabe like Tesla fans defend Musk.
Really great people, if someone from that team read this: kudos.
No, not UK, just Austrian companies in Austria for example. Swedish companies in Sweden. Also German companies in Germany. In Eastern Europe too. Is that enough of a sample size for my opinion on European companies?
Perhaps you just need to ask.
[* - except Qualcomm, I just remembered...]
90% of the time the feedback is "sorry, we can't move forward because we have better candidates in the pipeline" and asking for details leaves you ghosted.
You probably live in a different Austria. Or maybe because I'm a foreigner with dark skin :)
Never been ghosted, either. So I dunno, our subjective experiences differ. I'm also a foreigner, but maybe our experience levels are just different.
What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position, and that can be frustrating at times.
And the likes of QCOM and all these international big-tech pay so much above the low Austrian market rates, that they can afford to treat candidates as disposable commodities as they have virtually unlimited applicants, so it could be a problem of scale besides the culture and liability concerns.
>What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position
But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you? I doubt they straight up told you that. :)
I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.
I'm not saying Austria isn't without its glib bureaucracies and Kafka'esque recruitment nightmares - just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
Ouch, that must hurt knowing you're just the reserve, but to be honest I wouldn't hold a grudge over this, I expect most companies in the world do this, as most candidates also do this with companies when interviewing. It's fair game and you hedge your bets.
> just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..
I have no idea what it's like in the US, Asia or Oceania, but compared to most of EU, including the UK, I haven't found any extra empathy to candidates or employees in the Austrian private sector, especially that here employment is basically at-will compared to the rest of EU so you're always an easy scapegoat to find yourself unemployed for some failing of an incompetent manager (and Austrian management is really next level Kafkaesque)
1. Large numbers
In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.
This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.
2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes
Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.
Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.
Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".
That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future.
> Also there are processes to be met officially
By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.
Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive.
In the end, it's all performance theatre.
For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities.
1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit.
2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP.
3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.
A very specific profile means it is crafted for a certain person.
> That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person.
Not really. It is about network not performance.
What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?
That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out.
Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other.
Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
> By "officially" do you mean legally?
Yes.
But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending.
What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there?
And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide?
Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.
Hold on, is this during a layoff? What's this about ratings? Why would you need to kick X% of the workforce? Is the company having money issues? It seems that there are quite a few other things to address before you get to an individual employee's performance.
> Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.
The more I read, this is sounding like a company which is trying to fit itself into some kind of management system they read about in a book, rather than taking an existing system and adjusting it to serve their purposes. Why fire someone if there is nothing bad going on and the company has money? And why promote someone if they have not demonstrated to their manager that they are capable of filling a bigger role?
Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post).
"Can you give an example where you did X"
"Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."
What a waste of everyone's time.
If that isn't already a Mitchell and Webb skit, it needs to be.
So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.
Internal hiring websites are for show only.
I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.
A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.
For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.
This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers
I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness
Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.
I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.
I hope no one is recommending x.get as a general practice, because that is pretty naive.
If you're a very junior sw engineer reading this, who hasn't done a lot of python, use x.get(). Almost always, so for you, always. This doesn't apply if you're a scientist or mostly writing small scripts, but if you are doing SWE, always use x.get().
Once you've understood python you can use x[] in limited cases. Never in your unit or functional tests. I code using x[], but later on I replace a lot of them with getter (around my second refactoring, when I add type hints and tests) especially in library or code that'll be shared.
Non-python dev here.
But I was already rejected so I haven't been able to explain my logic :-). It's still nice to get their feedback, though.
Funny enough, in Europe, you _should_ be able to get any written notes on you via GDPR.
This seems like splitting hairs. Sure, maybe x.get is better, but would that be a deal breaker? Know you are just giving quick example, but this just struck a cord. Are jobs really so hard to get that employers can be that nit-picky?
If the assignment is dealing with dirty/partial data or implementing APIs with optional fields, [] can be a complete deal breaker.
Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations?
It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case.
If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clue as to the person's ability to perform in a technical role.
It’s a take-home test. I’m saying if the particular test called for dealing with a particular type of input and you didn’t do it, you failed. It’s that simple.
If it didn’t, then it’s a pointless nitpick and shouldn’t ever be brought up as interview feedback.
I am _very_ familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and would, of course, adapt to house style, but where I am now we set up a nice pipeline in Dagster with a whole lot of boxes for assets, and at the risk of being non-technical I want the box with the bug to be the one that turns red. If I use x[] I get that. If I use x.get the red box could be three modules downstream because of a NoneType Exception.
I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.
In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.
I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.
Or a lack of union protection.
They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting
So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.
If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.
While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.
So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.
> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.
An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.
This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.
A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.
6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.
Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.
You ignored what I wrote
The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.
A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.
And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.
If it wasn’t about the equity, why would they be so mad? The point of the PIP is generally to remove the employee.
In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.
The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.
And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.
It's 100% about culture of fear and control.
And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.
But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.
I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.
So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.
Y1: 165K salary, 15K stock (15 RSU), $120K bonus.
Y2: 165K salary, 45K stock (45000/(1001.15) RSU), 90K bonus.
Y3: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(1151.15) RSU)
Y4: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(132.25*1.15) RSU)
So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.
After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.
I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.
Personal protective equipment?
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.
We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.
This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.
As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.
Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?
Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.
If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.
To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.
And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.
Reality is, you wanted to find a conference room or the bathroom for that.
Let's not forget that in order to use said documentation legally later, you would potentially run the risk of violating company policy on confidential information disclosure.
"You or your employer said you were fired.
We decided:
You were fired, but there was no misconduct. You gave your best effort, but you were unable to do your job as expected.
When you are fired but there is no misconduct, you are eligible for benefits."
He had a disagreement with his manager (let's leave it at that, heh), and over the next week, his arrangement to work from a different office (the rest of his team were based in this office too, just his department's office was technically somewhere else) was removed, his flex was removed, he was taken off all projects, and told that using his computer for non-work purposes was a disciplinary offence.
He had a 90 minute each way commute, was required to be clocked in between 9:30 and 4:30 every day (not 9:31, 9:30), required to work 37.5 hours, requests for using TOIL due to commute or other issues were immediately denied, no work to do, and not being allowed to use the computer in his office. The resolution was he found someone in a different department in the city we lived in that had the exact same thing happen to them, and they negotiated a swap with each other and things got better again.
==
Point being, these processes are a combination of ass-covering, parallel construction, and outright abuse. Nobody deserves to be treated like he was (or like people are being treated in these PIP programs), it would be more humane for everyone if we did something different.
Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done.
PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager and maybe the employee. (Depends on whether they are actually even aware they're a bad fit or not, and whether they're well-intentioned or not.)
Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.
Suddenly (as described in the parent article) they're being hit with complaints they've never heard before. Maybe there's substance, maybe not. It's a major blow to self-esteem and it's a dragged out process. They're not even given the satisfaction of a quick firing where they can be angry and done. It's a long suffering.
And to make the managers do this stuff - it's awful. Having to lay somebody off when a company RIFs people sucks. Having to fire people usually sucks unless they've really earned it. But telling a manager they have to PIP a percentage of their team arbitrarily and participate in this gaslighting process is simply evil.
Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.
I could have quit anytime during the process and had other opportunities waiting for me. I was offered another job before my 10 days of paid time off elapsed let alone my 3+ months severance and I survived through a vesting event.
At almost 50 years old and Amazon being my 8th job out of now nine, why would I wrap my esteem on my job? It was just my 8th time to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.
Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.
Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).
And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.
> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.
> ...
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.
It's a machine.
I don't think you get it. The way this stuff is done is just as described - totally blindsiding, and potentially flat-out gaslighting. There's no actual metrics or data until they fabricate a paper trail and force you out.
You don't win these things. Rather, you take your money and go elsewhere. Then turn down the subsequent job offers you get from them, using them only as leverage to juice your pay elsewhere with a competing offer ;-)
Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?
Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.
Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.
Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.
Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.
So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).
I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.
The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.
The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".
To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.
> In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest
which if so it singularly failed at.
Places that provide good working environments don't need to trap their employees into staying.
That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.
Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.
The example above and large companies in general do seem to use it as a firing tool or at least pretence.
From experience we had one developer on our team who was gradually just showing less and less interest and quality of work was dropping so much so it was effecting the rest of the team.
I wasn't involved but he was put on a PIP that was quite well layed out and measurable. After the process he was better than before. I can't put it down to the PIP only of course, but as he said it was a way for him to focus on what was wrong and get back into being consistent.
Super rare I'm sure, but just thought I'd at least five one good example of its use case.
It simply doesn't make any sense. You can have a team of only high performers and your manager will tell you to fire someone, and if you don't do it it will be you.
Redundancies are / have gone the same direction as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619#21732841
Exactly, there was no winning at the early 2000s Real Madrid full of rock stars (Zidane, the original Ronaldo, Figo, Beckham etc) until a rock like Makelele came around in the midfield. I'm surprised that the business luminaries have stopped seeing this basic fact, maybe it's because of the monopoly/oligopoly positions where they've managed to put themselves in and which makes them impervious to how badly their teams are run.
It's a shame, because some of the tech they work on (like S3) is super interesting and high scale, but I do not want to acquire a mental health crisis from work.
Like what if it turns out you join a team that ranks you more based on politics/caste/luck than any sort of talent or motivation and you just feel trapped in a weird game?
Serious question for Americans as maybe this is cultural: They're an at-will employee, seemed to already have a new job lined up and the company seemed to have burned all goodwill with them, why not resign effective immediately?
In my mind, it just looks like employees have been getting the short stick for so long that they don't even know what fair working conditions look like anymore.
It tends to be a weird two weeks too. If you know you're quitting you're usually already preparing for it prior— taking less responsibility, finding who to hand projects to, etc. In my experience at times it's just two uncomfortable weeks of showing up and doing nothing.
Personally, if it's a job I really dislike, I don't mind losing the extra $X,000. I've discovered through the years my mental health is worth a lot more. Once you leave a high-paying job for one that pays less, or even to just take a break and earn nothing, you start thinking about these sorts of little extras as inconsequential at best.
If the next job pays more than the last one, you could say it's a net loss for the employee too, since that's an extra two weeks one could've earned more.
But if neither of those apply, it's probably worth it to hang around and get some extra cash, or just get a couple more weeks of hanging at the job with "graduation goggles" and little work stress, yeah.
Also if you just leave it may be harder to get a decent reference from your colleagues for future jobs.
We could all be laid off at any time.
But wouldn't you claim that this is not a very common view to hold about the process of quitting, in the US? I've lost count how many times I've heard managers/executives being pissed off because an employee left without a two week notice, and they treat that happening as some sort of failure, instead of just a normal thing.
Of course, severance is not universal, but, in my experience in the tech sector, having survived five lay offs at three companies and having been laid off once myself, it has been the case.
Also, as an employee, those two weeks are easy-street. Leaving early and long lunches are the norm.
Oh and I was able to put all of code through the open source process and post it to the AWS Samples public GitHub repo and reuse it.
I worked on ProServe.
I always found interesting how this has always been true, but a lot of people seemed to not notice, behind the high-pay and benefits of past. Software engineering has always been just labour. Relatively scarce labour, but we were never "in control".
In all other cases a PIP is not passable. Nobody becomes a significantly better engineer in 2 months if they haven't in their career so far, with the only new factor in the 2 months being "now you have extra pressure and a clock ticking".
1. Raises the stakes
2. Involves a 3rd party (yes, yes, we can argue that HR is not your friend, etc.), which _can_ help with the trust (it's not just you & me anymore, you not knowing how I twist my story of you)
I get all the skepticism. I simply have different experience.
Martial problems, family problems, health problems, depression, addiction, and what not.
Not saying that two months is enough to resolve those problems, but if for whatever reason such engineers are able to finally block those stressors, and bring their A-game to "beat" the PIP, then that should absolutely be a good reason to keep them aboard.
A PIP should not be a delayed 2-month firing process. It should be a legitimate chance for someone to improve.
IMO this is a key issue with this system. The company evidently only cares about the employee as long as they're employees, and can dispose them and forget about them, like they'd dispose any other leftover resource.
But evidently said people are still around. If every company adopted a system like this, in theory it'd be great for the economy. It's capitalism, and you're getting rid of the people who sell you the least effective labour in an easily scalable way.
In practice, all these companies are pumping out a lot of stress, and it's thus no surprise the USA is notoriously burdened by mental health issues when compared to other high-income countries [1].
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2....
-person is suffering mental health issues due to strain of job.
-persons performance drops rapidly without warning as a result.
-boss takes workload off them without putting them on a pip process, to give them time to work through their issues.
-person quits right after stocks vest which upsets boss who put extra effort into helping them
-person gives interview to justify their behaviour
People often forget that corporations are just a group of individuals at their core. If every one is as shitty as a human being as the person giving the interview, no wonder Amazon is so horrible.
If a job gives you mental strain, especially if it is affecting your performance, IMO the right thing to do is to quit. I'm not surprised the boss was disappointed, but I do think they should've seen it coming.
I've been in situations where a job evidently isn't for me anymore, albeit in a seemingly healthier environment— my boss and I talked openly about the team no longer being a fit for me for weeks if not months prior.
I was evidently not working at my full potential too, and when I told my boss I was quitting, they told me what date I should officially submit my resignation so that I'd still get my latest bonus. It was all very amicable and objective.
That's one reading, but unless we assume that OP is straight up lying in their description of events, the boss was lying to them about whether they were on a PIP or not, and had given them no indication that their performance was flagging until suddenly doing this to them.
It doesn't sound to me like the boss put in extra effort.
https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:...