I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.
In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview.
When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision.
> Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal
How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs.
If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.
> Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs.
Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams.
Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
> How? It's not their choice.
The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them.
Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?
> has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations.
These higher ups tend to have extremely well-tuned bullshit detectors and it would be extremely hard for a manager to sabotage an employee and get them categorized as underperforming.
It would reflect worse on the manager not the employee.
In this context, it refers to the tenure of the Amazonian. Full time employees that are <5 years tenure have a badge with a blue border, those with 5-10 years tenure have an orangeish border, 10-15 have a red border, etc...
Orange/red badges are typically a big deal because it is very rare for people to last at Amazon past even 2-3 years, nevermind 5 years.
"Very rare" is, at best, a huge exaggeration. I can't post numbers, obviously, but from what I can tell based on employee available tools it's at least 25% of corporate employees. It seems rarer than it is for two reasons:
1. The company has grown rapidly, so many/most people seem fairly new. That doesn't mean that people that have been here a long time are leaving (although some obviously are).
2. The tool available to employees shows tenure of all employees, including fulfillment center workers, which are much less likely to be long-term.
People need to get out of these terrible orgs. In mine, I'd estimate >50% get to 5. The average tenure is a lot lower because the org has grown from ~15 to ~70 people in the past 5 years.
You can tell it's bullshit because no one calls them orange badges unless it's their 2nd week on the job. They're yellow badges. Not to be confused with vendor badges, which are also yellow.
I don’t understand how being in an interview loop would tell you whether hire-to-fire is occurring. If a manager wanted to hire someone on their team with the intent of firing them, they would hire someone who passed the ordinary interview process. They wouldn’t attach a note to the candidate’s file saying “we don’t really need to interview this one, we’re just going to fire them.” There would be a normal paper trail and nobody other than the manager would know that about the plan.
But if that last person is good enough to get past the bar raiser, they wouldn’t necessarily be the one getting fired later. It would make more sense to just hire more people than you need in the first place, intending to fire the worst performer later on without necessarily knowing ahead of time who that worst performer is going to be. Which is brutal but has a certain logic to it.
Many teams has higher standard than the company bar though, the company bar is the lowest possible level anyone is allowed to be hired at not some decent average. In theory a bar raiser should ensure the candidate is better than 50% of those in similar roles, but that obviously can't be true after all these years, the bad 50% has all gotten hired via the same process.
The source article actually provides no evidence of "hire-to-fire" practices. It simply states that there is a target URA of 6% and that's it.
The article posted here is pure speculation.
...and having worked for other large companies, I've seen similar metrics being tracked. It doesn't mean any of them are hiring just to fire people.
Frankly, I've noticed a LOT of poorly written anti-Amazon articles around, and I'm not clear if there's some effort to undermine the company. Is Amazon a political organization?
Just about every large company has low performing employees, and just about every large company (at least in the U.S.) has a PIP process that attempts to help redeem employees who are identified to be at risk of flunking out. Some individuals, for better or worse, are just not fit to work in a particular role or at a particular company, and fail the PIP. This system is not unique to Amazon, and it's very common in the industry.
About 15 years ago, I was placed on a PIP for low performance at a large technical employer. I managed to climb out of my hole and shine, but it's a good lesson in humility and responding constructively to feedback.
I was personally told by a former manager who used to work at Amazon that he hired to fire. He hated that the company forced him to fire good people and left.
A guy supposedly tells another guy that some highly weird thing that makes no sense at all is common at their company. This is how we learned about Enron, so sure, let's admit the evidence. But also, this is how 99% of BS spreads across the internet, so whenever possible let's please use more than just anecdotal evidence from an anonymous account. If your friend has a story to tell, please direct them appropriately - we all know that the NYT would love to tear Amazon a new one. But please recognize just how weak your argument sounds as of right now.
It’s undisputed that Amazon has a quota for attrition that managers must meet. The only question is how are they meeting it. Why is it so hard to believe that a manger who likes all of their employees would inflate their headcount request to get someone new to fire? It’s practically a mechanical result of the quota. Of course they wouldn’t go on record about this, it’s wrong and possibly illegal (the manager must have lied when filling out some paperwork). But it would be more surprising if it didn’t occur.
Metrics are quotas at Amazon. There is a literally a training during your onboarding about Amazon's "metrics culture", and how the only reason you track a metric is if you have a corresponding target for that metric, as well as someone responsible for ensuring that the metric reaches that target. Amazon doesn't just track random metrics for the hell of it. Those metrics and targets are used either for or against you during annual performance reviews, and URA/RA targets are one of the most important metrics for manager-track employees. If that isn't a 'quota', then I don't know what would be.
There are a heck of a lot of anecdotes with the same hire to fire claim and I have heard them as well from former Amazon employees. Plenty of them on Blind as well, which verifies company employment.
Sure, fire has not been found, but there is a ton of smoke on this.
Someone literally did that already, but with BI rather than NYT! That’s why we’re talking about this! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this overall thread.
Based on my experience with you elsewhere on this page, I was already wondering if you were a troll or just genuinely confused (on top of being rude and being a name caller). Let me help you out:
You are in a subthread that branched off of this statement:
> I was personally told by a former manager who used to work at Amazon that he hired to fire. He hated that the company forced him to fire good people and left.
So the conversation veered away from the BI article, and we're now focusing on the relevancy of anecdotal evidence that was presented by another HN member. The fact that you needed this explained completes the picture for me with regards to all your other comments.
Who in their right mind would go on record blasting a company worth as much as Amazon? It'll ruin their career. Unless corporations stop being as powerful, whisper networks are all we have.
Except when they don't. Did you miss the Scott Alexander / SlateStarCodex saga recently? It revealed that NYT's policies around revealing people's identity are pretty hit-and-miss.
Scott Alexander was the subject of a story, not an anonymous journalistic source which is what the poster you replied to was referring to when they said the NYT protects their sources.
I am not disputing that the NYT revealed his full name, they absolutely did so that, against his wishes.
Yes, this happens. But the trick is that you have to have the employee on the development list before the termination is keyed in the HR system. The good news, is that the manager is usually responsible for entering the termination (voluntary or involuntary).
In happy cases like this, and in cases where you actually have significant performance problems, URA isn't so bad. The more degenerate situations happen in circumstances like:
* The employee wants to internal transfer. Bad Manager X immediately adds Employee Y to the development list and says "Oh ho ho, you're not able to transfer because of your performance problems." For Bad Manager X, the apparent incentive is high - either the employee stays and you keep the resource or they leave and you get URA credit. Obviously this leads to pretty awful situations, but I saw it happen multiple times. This can also happen when the manager is trying to protect the employee - e.g. add them to DL but not actually fire them. This usually backfires.
* Senior management pushes down URA targets. Hey, you've got a 15 person group? That means you need to pick one person to let go. Satisfied with all of their performance and understaffed to begin with? I don't care. Don't you want to have another great performer like employee Z? You need to make room, so tell me who is the least impressive person on your team. This leads to really sociopathic management behaviors.
All of this would be OK to me, if it was done transparently and more objectively. But Amazon has thrown out all the paper trail and messaged to employees that they aren't being stack ranked, which is complete bullshit.
Pro tip if you're working at Amazon: if you get a PCS with no additional grant and no base increase, you're on the development list. Find another job, or do something amazing.
Never tell your manager about plans to transfer, or even apply, until you've got a verbal offer in hand. Ask the manager for a "soft loop" which is basically an interview done off the books with no paper trail. Once you apply, your manager, hr, and others are notified.
> Pro tip if you're working at Amazon: if you get a PCS with no additional grant and no base increase, you're on the development list. Find another job, or do something amazing.
Allegedly, the only sure-fire way of knowing if you are on Focus/Dev list is if you ask your manager point-blank about it and they have to respond with the truth.
"One crazy trick..." employee<->manager interactions seem so broken to me.
The idea that I would put an employee onto some kind of dev/PIP/watch list and then not tell them about this fact is so fundamentally foreign to me, but I believe it happens (because no one would make up such a thing).
6% is for the incoming CEO, which is probably not representative of managers closer to the line. (If it is then I agree, why even have this policy at all.)
> Frankly, I've noticed a LOT of poorly written anti-Amazon articles around, and I'm not clear if there's some effort to undermine the company. Is Amazon a political organization?
They’re one of the largest corporations in the world; of course they’re a political organization.
The article specifically stated that Amazon managers were hiring unqualified people:
>Instead, Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal.
And as OP is correctly pointing out, that can't happen, because the bar raiser can veto any hire they think is unqualified. Or at least it can't happen without the bar raiser colluding - and since the bar raiser is not the hiring manager (or even from the same part of the organization as the hiring manager) and they are not being evaluated on the UAR, they have no incentive for this.
If, as you suggest, managers were hiring _qualified_ people with the intent of firing them... I guess there's no way to prove that isn't happening but FWIW, I'm also at Amazon and have been part of a bunch of interviews and I've seen no evidence of that.
The sentence you quoted says the manager “wouldn’t, or shouldn’t” hire these candidates. In my understanding, this means they aren’t needed, not that they aren’t qualified. That’s the essence of the “hire to fire” practice - hiring someone not because you need them to do the job, but because you need to meet your firing quota.
For a person to get placed on a team at Amazon, the manager must be making some representation that they need another employee. Amazon isn’t going to waste headcount by giving it to managers who don’t ask for it. This means managers have control over whether hires are joining their team. Therefore a manager can execute the plan of hiring to fire. It doesn’t matter whether they have the power to approve a specific candidate.
This makes sense. If I knew my team was going to lose 6% of it's members, I'd hire 6% more people to compensate for the loss. Even if the goal isn't to fire them that's what ends up happening.
6% is in the noise for software planning. Is there ever a single project where you are confident that 20 people is what you need so you can submit a headcount request for 21 so that you'll have one to drop? I've never seen planning that was able to achieve this level of precision.
Yet soft influence mechanisms exist. Pretending like the “bar raiser” is an infallible human being or has extra skill in detecting talent vs not is a dangerous assumption. This is especially the case when you consider that tech companies have repeatedly stated that the data shows that no one has such an ability and that’s why interview panels are needed in the first place.
Whether or not this actually happens, I don’t know. Do I think that managers (or really anyone else) can use soft skills to exert some influence some of the time? Having participated in many such panels, I think it’s pretty doable despite what many people claim because of the discussion process that happens.
In internal presentations at Google (& FB too? Can’t recall). I think some of this may have published but I’m not too keen to do research at the moment. At the very least it might appear in Laszlo’s book.
You're speaking from a position of how the process is supposed to work, but not from how it actually does work. I think you seriously underestimate how much power an HM can have in the process if they have a little bit of experience.
In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM.
If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that.
This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.
Let's say you're perfectly happy with your team of 9, but you have to fire 10% of people every year.
It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff.
As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.
I work for AWS and the concept of Bar Raisers sits in a weird grey area. There are plenty of decent candidates who pass the bar but we do stack ranking for the year end review. So they can hire at headcount and end up having to fire anyway. If you end up with two hires that are roughly the same the stack rank takes care of it.
Oh, please. Softer version of this practice is well-known in tech industry since 2000s: when company demands perf curve from the manager, managers hire and keep low-performers on the team to satisfy the curve demand. Everyone who worked at Microsoft, Amazon or Walmart has seen this happening. Hire-to-fire is just logical extension of this practice. It doesn’t really matter if it’s internal transfer or new hire.
So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing. In other words, Inc. is perpetrating a lie, along with all the other publishers who jumped on this bandwagon.
That's fine, we all make mistakes. But here's the interesting part: Inc. has a perverse incentive not to be too diligent in their reporting, because if they look too deep underneath the carpet, they could come across the truth that the OP shared. Once you learn how things really work, you can't spread your BS anymore because you can be sued for libel. But if you just pick up someone else's lie and expand on it without bothering to verify the fundamental thesis, you're 100% covered. Inc. was careful to start their reporting with:
1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us
2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place.
Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness.
PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.
It's fine to analyze Inc's reporting with a skeptical eye, but did it strike you at all that you're essentially doing the same thing you're accusing Inc of doing (taking information at face value without digging too deep), but with the parent's comment?
Parent's comment is not fully correct, yet you are taking it at face value and not looking "too deep underneath the carpet", and in some ways are "pick[ing] up someone else's lie and expand[ing] on it without bothering the verify the fundamental thesis".
The fact of the matter is that the Amazon HMs who decide on firing often are the same people who decide on hiring. Amazon may desire for that not to be true, but in practice, it is. And GP's comment doesn't actually provide any evidence against that.
I've added more context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371455, but the gist is that Bar Raisers are supposed to be an independent hiring evaluator, but IME they often just serve as meeting facilitators that will just back up whatever decision the HM makes, which makes the HM the ultimate decider.
I am glad you bring this up. If I am wrong, people can downvote me and my voice will lose visibility (quite literally - the comment will get grayed out and will drop to the bottom of the page). What happens if the reporter is wrong? Assuming they don't spread their lies knowingly, legally they will be in safe territory. And they will still cash in on all the controversy they create with their fake reporting. So my view on this specific topic may or may not be right, but my claim that the journalism landscape is out of balance should stand regardless.
Is that how you would feel if "we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra [upvotes on HN]"?
Saying "my statement may or may not be right, I'll let the general public decide" is lazy and shirking responsibility. If you have reason to believe that your statements are wrong, you should retract those statements or at least put a disclaimer on them. I think that's the bar you would hold Inc to, and you should hold yourself to it as well.
I might have misinterpreted what you actually wanted to ask. If your question is if I stand by my comments, the answer is 100% yes.
The Inc journalist did a lazy job of presenting facts [1], and my suspicion is that this is not by coincidence - as a journalist, you either do a stellar job of researching every last bit of a story, or you do the opposite - close an eye and report as vaguely as possible, mostly citing external sources but somehow making the story sound original so you get some credit as well. Both are safe approaches; the space in between is dangerous - you can't take someone else's shitty reporting and then check if it's true before publishing - that's how you get sued for libel. Fun fact: if you prepend "in my opinion, ..." you're 100% safe from any libel risk.
If we consider additional evidence that came to light through the BI article, I am still aligned with mabbo's view - the Amazon management seems to have taken a conscious step against the hire-to-fire scenario by separating the ownership of hiring and firing.
[1] Note: this topic originally linked to an Inc article
>The Inc journalist did a lazy job of presenting facts
And so are you. As has been pointed out multiple times, the assertions made about BRs and HMs in this thread are flat out incorrect, and yet you are continuing to rely on them and even go as far as to tout them in other comments in other threads as well.
>close an eye and report as vaguely as possible, mostly citing external sources but somehow making the story sound original so you get some credit as well
This is exactly what you are doing throughout this thread by repeating the notion that Amazon "separat[es] the ownership of hiring and firing", which if you were willing to do any amount of research rather than just blindly trusting a random internet comment, you would find just isn't true.
You are holding yourself to a different bar than Inc, which is hypocritical. The point about removing Amazon emotional context here also applies to Inc, because it's clear you personally have a lot of emotional baggage related to journalists. So the question is: would you post these same disparaging comments, and still maintain the same "my statement may be incorrect but I will continue to repeat it anyway" if it was your favorite high school teacher you were disparaging, potentially ruining their career? I would certainly hope not, so I don't see any reason other than arrogance of why you would do so here.
> the assertions made about BRs and HMs in this thread are flat out incorrect
The assertions are that there is a hire to fire practice. Those assertions are based on 1) the evidence of an attrition goal, and 2) anecdotal stories of people who know people. My argument is that 1) is not the same as a hire to fire practice [1], and 2) is hard to verify - there are a lot of people with an axe to grind. What I would love to see is an analysis of people who started their job at Amazon and didn't reach their first 12 months. If that rate is any higher than at FAANG for comparable positions, then we have a smoking gun. How hard would it be to do this? Not very. The lack of this effort is telling. Also, I tend not to subscribe to every conspiracy theory, which admittedly is hard these days. But you should try it, it would calm you down a bit.
> just blindly trusting a random internet comment
Thank you for making so many assumptions about me. You're wrong. It was a slow day today, and I was really intrigued by this concept, so I dug a bit deeper and read a lot of posts on this topic. My takeaway from all this is that this is a bit like a political discussion: some people really passionately hate Amazon's recruiting practices, and some defend it. I certainly wouldn't say that everyone is aligned that BRs and HMs are colluding and that the system is not working as designed.
> You are holding yourself to a different bar than Inc, which is hypocritical
That's a ridiculous statement. Journalists have a code of ethics, whereas the general population doesn't. This is a fact, let's please not debate something as fundamentally verifiable like this. Not everyone can do everyone's job. My job is not to spend my whole day verifying facts of what some journalist published, but it's very much the journalist's job to do that for their pieces. We're not in the same position, nor should we be. Not that this fact matters at all since I stand behind what I said, but you're starting your argument right off the bat with a fundamental inaccuracy.
> you personally have a lot of emotional baggage related to journalists
That would be weird - I worked for many years for the NYT and I think they are a wonderful org. So... your instincts are wrong again. I really hope you don't rely on your instincts for a living.
> would you post these same disparaging comments
Totally nonsensical reasoning once again. My comments are not disparaging, so let's just end that discussion right there.
If anything, let's turn our attention a bit to your interesting HN career. You created an HN account called tyuqfromhere 8 hours ago, which you used exclusively to attack Amazon. And then this new account, tyuqfromthere, was created an hour ago, and... you guessed it, it's used exclusively to attack Amazon. Someone said elsewhere that there's a lot of anti-Amazon propaganda recently, and I sure as hell would love to know who you are and what your real motives are.
To be clear, Amazon can crash and burn for all that I care, but there's one thing I do like about Jeff Bezos - it's his last sentence in his blackmail response letter [2]: "I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out." I doubt we'll ever find out what kind of a creature you are and what you're trying to accomplish with your HN trolling, but it sure as hell would be interesting.
[1] I am not defending the attrition goal strategy, but its presence is not a proof of abuse. I know that if someone presented me with the requirement to let 2 of my 30 member team go within the next 12 months, and I was given 2 new team members to try out, I would definitely give everyone a fair chance. Also, every other manager I've ever worked with would do the same. I find it hard to believe that somehow that all managers at Amazon are suddenly different from anyone I've ever worked with.
You created this account an hour ago, so perhaps you don't have the full context here. Amazon has so much emotional baggage associated with it, that it would be hard to present an argument which is factually accurate but indirectly shows support for Amazon. Therefore, taking the argument out of the Amazon context helps with discussing the accuracy of the underlying facts.
Step off your soap box and RTFA. The linked BI reporting mentions interviews they did with managers (btw you seem to be confusing op-eds and reporting, Mr. Fix-Journalism Startup Idea Guy). Or do your own verification- this practice is discussed frequently on Amazon’s teamblind lounge, for example. Get someone in your network to let you take a peek. Unlike HN (which you just trust intrinsically for some reason), that site requires you verify your employer before posting.
Ouch. Are you always this cranky? Someone suggests a startup idea and you instantly revert to name calling? The linked BI article is gated, and no, I am not going to spend a penny on that POS publication. While I would be generally curious in learning what your gated sources at Amazon have to say, it's ridiculous to be mad at me for not having done that research. If there are interesting patterns that can be extracted out of internal Amazon forums, then I would hope that a journalist would have a go at it and earn their living with rigorous reporting as opposed to skating on the edge of libel boundaries.
And btw, when you call people names, be aware that this often says more about you than the person you're trying to insult. Seems like you have a particular aversion against people with startup ideas, which automatically means that you were never successful with any of your own - people who make startups work for them don't have as much of a chip on their shoulder. That's ok, startups are hard and most people don't win - I have a lot of respect for anyone who even gives it a try. But please use your experience to help other people as opposed to just being bitter about it and putting others down.
Ok so you won’t read the article. Sorry to waste your time by suggesting you do that before proclaiming the reporter (whose reporting you didn’t read) isn’t doing their job.
Startups are great, but their chances of success are higher when the founders know what they’re talking about.
This article originally linked to an Inc. article which I read top to bottom [1]. I also clicked on the link to the BI article and found that it's gated [2]. By the time you arrived at the party, the mods changed the source link from Inc to BI, which I would argue only confirms that the Inc article was total BS and was not deemed a good reference - so much so, that they even chose to link to a gated article, which is obviously not ideal.
It's unfortunate that switching the source made it less clear which author's work I was commenting on, but I think that you'll see that most HN readers who engaged with me agreed that Jason Aten's article was rather weak. Your childish name calling, on the other hand, will always be unwelcome here regardless of circumstances, and please consider changing your approach or just go back to where you were prior to recently creating this HN account.
I commented with a link to the archive.org for the BI article. It aligns with my first hand knowledge and what I’ve read elsewhere. I’m not interested in discussing this meta stuff or what names you’d prefer to be called, sorry. dang can ding me if I broke a rule, but that’s not your job. On HN I believe we’re supposed to discuss the merits of each other’s arguments.
Yeah, its basically news laundering. One paper runs an article on an anonymous source or scientific preprint. They use the proper terminology to describe the level of confidence involved, which may be low.
Then others pick it up by referencing the first news report. They no longer have to be specific, instead its just "news source X reports".
Unless you follow the chain back to the source, you don't see the actual confidence level. Sometimes you don't even get an accurate picture of the original source.
They'll do literal citogenesis sometimes, too, actually. It's happened in court, too. Oh, hey, look the press reported on the thing we leaked to them, that's proof that it must be reliable, judge!
This makes me want to create a tweet tumbling service. Send us a message and we'll send it to someone else, but no one can prove or disprove where it came from.
To borrow your words: your core thesis[0] is fundamentally flawed.
There is no requisite for the person hiring to be the one firing for the person hiring to hire a sacrificial lamb.
A rational actor could easily decide 'Hey, I like my team, if I hire this guy/gal who the firing manager definitely won't like[1] He/she'll be fired before anyone on my team.' Morality aside its the same as serving up a secondary 'bad' idea to your boss to give him/her the illusion of choice, and get him/her to go with the plan you want.
[0]>So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing
I think, and this is just an assumption so I might be wrong, but I think you might have missed the point of the article--which is that sometimes the things you incentivize conflict with what you say are your values. What Insider reported as happening at Amazon is an example of it.
It's not even a news piece, it's an opinion column. You're free to disagree with it. That's totally fair.
I'm not reporting on Amazon's internal hiring practices, I'm applying a lesson to what Insider reported. That's not a cop out - it serves an entirely different purpose. In this case, it's a lesson for managers. If you don't feel like I made that point, ok, but I think the core thesis of your critique is fundamentally flawed.
> find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism
Step one: treat any article that quotes anonymous sources with deep skepticism. The sheer number of retractions and stories that turn out to be blatantly false (especially in the realm of politics) has become absurd in the past few years.
That works great in theory. But look at all the comments here. Hundreds of people posted comments, and thousands read them within a few hours. A few months from now, SEO will ensure that this page will have been visited by a few million people googling "Amazon hire to fire." The majority of comments doesn't start with "hey guys, this is obviously all just fake BS," and instead you see a lot of hatred being pointed at Amazon. And this is just HN, which is going to have smarter people than any other place reporting on this topic. So, no, the suggestion you made is not a workable solution and we need a better one.
I mean, this assumes the BR is always acting in good faith and/or isn't in on the whole thing. Honest question, maybe I've misunderstood, but is it beyond the pale that a HM would ask the BR (or not even have to verbalize since the BR knowns how this game works) to sign off because they want to protect other people on their team (as in hiring someone they know will probably rank low and thus be the person fired)?
1) Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. The fact that they didn't even try is telling. The cost of publishing a lie is exactly 0, and the potential benefit is going viral and making a lot of $$$ with associated advertising impressions and new subscribers.
2) There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people, who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. And again, not one BR, but since this is systemic behavior, it's the majority of BRs across all teams and locations.
>who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other
The culture of Amazon does not see this as immoral, so why would they "tell on" each other? And among those who maybe do see it as immoral, the managers are incentivized and compensated for it, and the non-managers are threatened with PIPs and firing if they disagree with it.
>The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals
BRs do not have any kind of "track record" related to attrition rate. After a BR participates in a hiring loop, that's the end of the story for them. A BR has no incentive to not participate in this so called "conspiracy".
But furthermore, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the BR program works. In practice, the BR is just another interviewer that helps facilitate the debrief, and usually just defaults to echoing whatever hire decision the HM makes. If an HM wanted to hire-to-fire, the "participation" of BRs isn't required at all.
Honest question - do you know all this for fact, or are you assuming this based on the collective evidence, etc? It just feels so anti-Amazon for a function specifically designed to ensure that certain things happen not to have a KPI that they are evaluated against.
> Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate.
Why would any HM even speak to them?
> The fact that they didn't even try is telling.
How do you even know that?
> There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people
This sounds like a gross overestimate.
This is not an organized conspiracy. Individual HM would come to the same conclusion, which is it is to their own benefit to act perversely when it comes to hiring/firing. This isn't even restricted to Amazon. Time and time again, at companies with poorly thought out policies, managers end up doing really shitty things in order to meet goals.
> who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other.
And because it's not an organized conspiracy, how would they tell on each other. It's not like they're gonna go around tell each other that they're doing corrupt things.
And even if they were, that usually ends up creating a code of omerta. You see it all the time in organizations where they do terrible things. These places end up creating a us vs them mentality. Police is one example. Another example is how China runs things. They spread out the bad actions across everyone, making everyone complicit. This makes people less likely to rat each other out because now they're the ones doing it and internally, people justify their own decisions.
> The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives.
This is the only thing I agree with. It is unlikely that a BR would collude. They have no reason to.
> This is the only thing I agree with. It is unlikely that a BR would collude. They have no reason to.
Which is the fundamental argument here. All this talk about how bad orgs behave this or that way is not relevant considering that they were exceptionally thoughtful about how to separate the hiring decisioning from firing decisioning.
I think we can all agree that Amazon does a lot of shitty things, but the concept of introducing a BR deserves praise.
Collusion between BRs and HMs is not the fundamental argument here. That was just speculation by someone else trying to poke holes in the argument that HMs do not hire just to fire. The fundamental argument is that the policies lead to perverse actions by HMs.
> All this talk about how bad orgs behave this or that way is not relevant considering that they were exceptionally thoughtful about how to separate the hiring decisioning from firing decisioning.
As has been discussed in many other comments, the separation of concerns here does not prevent the perverse action of hiring more people with simply so that HMs have more options of who to fire.
We're splitting hairs. I agree with what you're saying, and I think you agree with what I am saying. We're just focusing on a different argument. One thing we completely agree on is this statement:
> so that HMs have more options of who to fire
Totally true, I don't deny that. But that's not the same as hire to fire, in the context of how it's commonly understood and criticized: that the person that was hired will also be the same person who is going to get fired. My point is that while it's unfortunate that someone will get fired, it's not necessarily the same person who was last hired.
Right. People are not using the phrase "hire to fire" uniformly.
One way to interpret that is that you are literally hiring someone just to fire them.
Another way, the way I and some others are using it, is that they're hiring people *so that* they *have* people to fire. As in, they're not necessarily firing the people they hire, but that they need to hire so that they have options when they need to fire.
I don't think the latter is any better than the former because they're still going about hiring with the explicit intention of firing people. Maybe it's not the hire specifically, but when they have that intention, it still creates the same kind of toxic environment.
Thank you for the response, that clears it up a lot more. I think I was misunderstanding exactly what the relationship between the HM and BR is, I was assuming they worked together regularly and were team-specific instead of a shared resource between teams and not tied to the team that was hiring.
Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then...
If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team.
And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).
Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
In my org, we did a lot of hiring (I was in hundreds of interview debriefs) and we saw mostly the same set of ~10 bar raisers for the debriefs, with occasional fill-ins to make scheduling easier.
All this means is that they cannot hire shitty people.
It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.
Wow. The hiring manager doesn't get to make the final decision?
I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose.
Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives.
Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?
Well... I'm not sure that it's exactly like that, at least when I was there.
The bar raiser can say "no" even if the HM says "yes," but I never heard of it going the other way (where hypothetically the HM would say "no" and the bar raiser "overrule" the HM.)
And in hundreds of interviews there, I never experienced a situation in which it was as black and white as the above would make it seem. There were times, of course, when there was a difference of opinion, but it's on the people in the room to debate and convince each other based on logic and data - a bar raiser is not simply going to walk in and put his/her foot down and say "no" to a team that is otherwise saying "yes" without pretty detailed discussion and reasoning.
I would assume that the Bar Raiser can say 'No' when the HM says 'yes', but not vice versa. So the HM would choose their own team. But it would be true that the Bar Raiser can't be held to account, since you will rarely if ever find out that they made a bad call.
The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.
I can only speak for software engineering: Hiring is extremely difficult and time intensive.
I have a ~10% hire rate in over 500 industry interviews conducted. These were at large tech companies so they included 5+ people spending 3+ hours each.
It’s not worth the time to fabricate head count to begin hiring, then fire a qualified person. We assume Amazon is cutthroat and grades on delivery. Imagine doing this sham while doing your normal job.
Managers generally overrule other's opinions by giving promise of personally coaching the new hire to make them meet the bar. In most cases such people are put on coaching plan, and thereafter fired. URA quota is an open secret at Amazon, and some employee appreciate the practice of hire to fire, as it saves their own employment. That in turn ensures that objection to bad hire is non existent.
It's possible for the hiring manager to also be the bar-raiser, especially at senior levels like SDE3 and above. I have personally seen this happen. Having said that, I doubt that specific people are hired to be fired. I would consider it more likely that if a manager needs X people, he would try to keep the team strength at X + delta, so someone can be fired when required.
> When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision.
Either you haven't been part of the panel in a while or you haven't worked for Amazon. BR's responsibility is not to make the sole decision but help the panel achieve consensus. This is very clear in the interview training.
I don't think they meant hiring managers, but rather division or project managers, ones who decide that this division or project needs to hire more people (possibly with attrition goal at mind).
Your interview process is a wreck, anyway. It optimizes for people who spend a month or two grinding leetcode and rehearsing their Leadership Principle stories.
If you think that this effort is demonstrative of their ability to translate needs into working code and then deliver it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I don't think it would be difficult for an experienced hiring manager to identify someone who's well-rehearsed but otherwise incapable and then hire that person specifically in order to fire him later.
I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and coach them up - and sometimes, over time, they improve enough that it works out!
The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.
> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even.
For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.
I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.
Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.
In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.
I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
Management is a difficult topic to discuss online because the average commenter is statistically far more likely to be an IC than a manager.
Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems.
But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway.
It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it.
It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political.
Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons.
A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
While I'm not a manager I can relate to a past position where I was technical lead. I had a person on my team who was the same - friendly, enthusiastic. In conversations he would give you the impression that he's a person who knows what he's talking about. But when it came time to do the work it seemed he was interested in any distraction that would prevent him from programming. I tried to help him focus and spent a lot of time on coaching. Now I wonder if that was a waste of time.
Earlier on in my career I would read stories from tech companies that said something like "if you don't get promoted to a certain level within 2 years then you get fired." Initially I thought that was pretty harsh. Now, I understand where it comes from. If someone hasn't shown progress in 2 years, assuming proper feedback, it's doubtful that they'll ever improve much.
On the other hand, I believe there are places for average engineers. Part of the issue with this person is that they wanted to keep trying to do more complex work even though they struggled with easier tasks and it was a constant struggle to try to balance that.
I think in retrospect, had I been the person's manager, the best option would have been to restrict their work to the easy tasks. If they didn't like it then they could always leave. I now also understand why some people are "managed out". Maybe they can stay in their role but if they don't have the ability to progress then I don't think it's a manager's duty to help them beyond a certain point.
Two things to look at are (1) are they being paid as a junior? And (2) don't look at their performance at any specific point in time, but look for improvements.
It's also possible for and employee to get stuck in a rut at a job, and nothing can get them out of it except a change of scenery. This is because everyone's expectations of them being a low performer or troublemaker or whatever are already set, and that perception will not change. So it ends up becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, because any small improvements the employee makes don't move the needle on how people perceive them.
Great points. I would also add that you should look at their trajectory and momentum. An underperformer who is improving fast enough that they might catch up in a year is worth stick with. An underperformer who has become comfortable with low expectations is best removed from the company so they have a chance to recalibrate and reset in a new job.
Keep a close eye on how their underperformance is affecting other team members. If the rest of the team has to make up for the person's underperformance or rewrite their code, they could be subtracting rather than adding value to the team. Engineers are rarely islands of productivity.
Consider your headcount. If you can only hire 5 people and 1 of them isn't really contributing, you're giving up a full 20% of your team's potential. Replacing that one person with a performer on par with the other 4 people on the team will instantly boost their performance by 25%. Withholding that kind of advantage from your team isn't good.
The profession of "management" has a problem similar to one a lot of tech companies have: if you reward the generation of new ideas, you get a huge proliferation of them that aren't necessarily better and make everything more complicated.
It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove.
I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire.
Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy.
As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams.
Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured.
[0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.
> It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney.
Exactly. It's like saying you're passionate about paperwork. Everyone thinks it sucks and we should do less of it.
Lots of people have to pretend to be more passionate than they are, but please pick anything other than business process.
> the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process
not ALL developers crave this. I've been through companies where process is scoffed at (some developers burn out trying to manage their own stuff, others love it) and companies where everything has a process - eg Pivotal Labs, the extreme example of agile by the book (some developers burn out with all the inflexibility, others love it).
I don't love "agile", but for what it's worth, it's a reasonable starting point to create a sustainable culture where the company can try to 1) remain agile (adjective) as it grows, and 2) keep developers reasonably in control of their work schedule. There's worse alternatives, I guess?
Believe it or not, in the early days we actually were pretty enthusiastic about things like Extreme Programming. It seemed like an improvement over document-heavy processes you’d see a some places, or the complete lack of process you’d see at others.
I still think pair programming is better than code review when feasible.
> I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process.
I agree with you, but Oh, the irony!
From the Agile Manifesto:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
In some fraction of the cases, I agree. Estimating what the likelihood for any given case is still a difficult challenge, but I think it's always under 75% and generally under 50%.
And as a secondary effect, it lowers team morale when a low performer is consistently draining other team members of their time. And lowered morale leads to lower performance and other issues.
Stack ranking is basically the "up or out"[0] with the added idiocy that there's not enough space "up".
That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1])
Sorry, people who make mistakes are not low performers dragging the team down. Learning from mistakes in an open and non-judge mental way is a marker of a healthy team culture.
I agree completely. In my experience, low performers are people who do not learn from their mistakes, and even when given ample support and constructive feedback, do not adjust their behavior or make an earnest effort to improve.
Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.
Amazon has many tech workers on visas, and it can be extremely anxiety inducing around performance review time. Once a manager puts a target on your back, it's a major uphill climb to remove that target. And for someone on a visa you don't just lose your job, you get repatriated back to your home country unless you can quickly get rehired somewhere else. Edit: And not just you, your wife and kids too, even if your kids were born here and it's all they ever knew.
The other side of this perverse incentive is it encourages overwork culture, hyper-competitive work environment, and promotion oriented architecture.
Much like tying insurance to employment, tying immigration to employment is an awful system.
It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here, but that requirement should disappear quickly. Make the employer guarantee to pay them for a year, and allow them to stay once that year is up. That would be a humane way to do it.
It's so terrible that immigrants to this country have to live in constant fear of deportation if they don't have a job.
> It's fine if you want to require someone to have a job to move here
For very special jobs of critical need perhaps. For broader economic immigration I’d rather have a visa categories requiring initial (and in some categories periodic subsequent) payment than a job requirement, either for initial entry or conitnued residency.
So instead of requiring a job you want to require the immigrant to pay to stay? That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay and also using it as a shortcut to immigration.
> So instead of requiring a job you want to require the immigrant to pay to stay?
Mostly, no, for immigrant economic visas I’d prefer “pay to enter”.
For non-immigrant including dual-intent economic visas (e.g., replacing things like H-1b), periodic payment makes sense.
> That's how you end up with only rich people getting to stay
Visa categories gated on high-need, high-education job categories, especially when they also come with prevailing wage requirements, also only allow rich people to come or stay. Allowing payment (which can be subsidized by friends, family, or other supportive community) actually weakens the tie to personal wealth, though it does not (nor does it intend to; this is, after all, a proposed reform of economic visa categories, not family-based, refugee, etc. ones[0]) remove it entirely.
> and also using it as a shortcut to immigration.
I don’t see this as a problem.
[0] though to the extent those are capped, i support allowing otherwise-qualified immigrants to pay to skip (and not take up space in) the queue, through a bidding system where the cost per supernumerary immigrant in a category is higher the more are admitted in a year. It serves the purpose of the limit (mitigating social costs of level of immigration) by an alternate means, and reduces the adverse impact of the limit, not just for the people paying but also for the people not paying. It’s a win-win-win change. (A loss for thr source countries, in many cases, though.)
Aren't we confusing 2 different things here? Visas you get through employment - eg H1B - are specifically non immigrant visas. You are not an immigrant when you are in the US with an H1B.
Are they restriction on green cards too? I thought once you got your GC you didn't lose status for being fired.
As a manager, your job is to make your team work well for the benefit of the company. You do that by motivating them, by improving their skills, by removing barriers to their success. This idea of targeting your employees is absurd... who benefits? How does the manager benefit? Even if they were being selfish, the way the manager gets moved up is by the perception that the team is succeeding.
Competitiveness is useless in professional engineering environments except as, at best, a cheap and temporary motivator imo. Learning to collaborate effectively is what's important.
Can you post evidence of American citizens being repatriated (children born here)? I thought birthright citizenship made this much more challenging, spawning problems such as "anchor babies"...
I am not an expert, but in the US I believe that children may have citizenship by birth, but the parents may still be on a visa for some time. But most parents aren't going to leave their kids behind.
The situation is improved when a green card (permanent residency) is obtained. Then employment is not required to remain in the country.
A citizen must live in the US for long enough, and be old enough, before they are allowed to sponsor their family for residence. There's also no guarantee that their family would actually get their permit even if they pay the thousands of dollars and file the bajillion forms needed etc.
Seems like a classic case of "show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome".
You want managers to have more turnover than seems to naturally happen, they'll respond by hiring under-qualified people they can fire and over-qualified people who will move on. It's really a no-brainier solution that any manager who's team isn't meeting the criteria to check the box can implement in order to check the box.
It's the natural outcome of stack-ranking systems. If managers know that the bottom 10% of their direct reports are going to be shown the door, protect the whole team by hiring people just to rank them in the bottom. If a manager oversees 200 people, is more likely ~20 of them will be bad hires and can be let go, but if a manager only has five direct reports, losing just one, even if that one isn't all the great, means losing 20% of the team.
On that note, I wonder how these forces might work to fix ideal team size to align with these flawed incentives.
There are plenty of teams at Amazon which could be significantly larger than that. How many employees do you think they have in every warehouse, and how many managers? ;)
True. :) There is definitely a difference in how Amazon scales management for warehouses. Elsewhere, it's "everyone a leader".
My first true corporate experience was with big-four Deloitte. The culture there is "up or out". May sound sketchy to outsiders but it was actually a really supportive environment.
I worked at a company where each manager was given a set of percentages they could give as raises. Something like 15%, 10%, everyone else 5%.
He decided his team was good enough so he submitted the paperwork for 15% for everyone. It worked, he never heard back and everyone got their raise. This went on for years.
Then one day I'm in a meeting with a bunch of management and some small talk comes up about the set raises. My manager notes he doesn't follow the 'guidance' and all the other managers gasp.
For years these guys just did what they thought was expected, didn't even try anything different.
The managers at that company were more drones than anyone else... needless to say eventually all innovation slowed and the company feel into process hell.
At my last company, I found out they'd print any title on your business card and as long as it didn't include Director, VP, or Chief. Those triggered approval from higher up. I chose a different title every time I had cards printed.
Outside of regulatory or compliance requirements, in many cases, "policies" are simply suggestions which can be ignored.
I had a great manager at my last company. Very good people person, would read on his own time to try and improve himself, etc. He had also been in our department the longest - upper management was always coming and going every 2-3 years. I asked him one time why he didn't want to go for one of those higher level positions and would rather stay at this sort of stressful one after a decade. He said he didn't want to deal with all the headaches at that level (more meetings with C-level people). He just wanted to keep his head down, take care of his team, and go home (a 1-2 hr commute each way).
Given the precarity of much existence in the US, and the ability to be fired on a whim, it's no wonder the 'drone' mentality, of not bucking the system, is pretty normal. Suck up the BS until you can retire. I guess at least these days most of us don't have to deal with hot tar.
It's worse (mentally, financially, socially) for the one getting laid off than for the company. Places that are used to high turnover already have systems in place to go through the whole process. In the US, the need to 'go along to get along' is greater since healthcare and employment are so intertwined. I know plenty of people that would move onto other organizations or working for themselves if their families weren't reliant on their employer-provided healthcare. Same with the manager I mentioned in my comment - stay at home wife, two young kids.
I didn't read any evidence that this actually happens, and I read the incentives differently. If I was a manager I would feel that this lowers the risk for me to hire a person - if they perform well and it really works out, then great. And if not, then I know they'll just be part of the "unregretted attrition" number that I have to hit. Basically I can just hire a bunch of people and see how they work out, keeping the ones that nail it and allowing the others to go find jobs they are better suited to.
In a world where firing or laying off people is stigmatized or penalized, I have to be much more sure of the people I hire, which isn't so great since so often you don't/can't really know until you see someone in action.
I don’t know anyone at Amazon who would hire someone they were sure they’d fire. I’ve never heard of it. It’d honestly even be sort of difficult, given the hiring process and the involvement of a bar raiser (veto vote) on the hiring committee who is not on the team.
Now, might you take some additional risks, considering URA? Sure. But I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. You want hiring managers to sometimes hire higher risk/reward candidates, otherwise you get a whole bunch of identical low risk hires.
This article is an overblown bit of hearsay. Also, new hires aren’t even eligible to be PIP’d out of the gate, so you’d have to set it up quite a bit in advance.
Source: was an Amazon hiring manager for several years.
I would imagine this is more geared toward warehouse employees. Anecdotal but a friend who works for AMZN (warehouse), who during his first 6 months thought it was pretty good gig has soured on the company. They have some metric (time off task) where bathroom breaks and things like that can easily get you fired. A simple bout of diarrhea that causes you to spend some extra time in the bathroom is enough to warrant termination. He says that it is basically modern day slavery and people are worked like machines. There are two people he recognizes that are still there after a year, everyone else has left. It would be interesting to learn what the turn over rate is for AMZN (warehouse work). Probably quite high I would imagine. One interesting thing he did say is there is still a huge want to Unionize at their level and it's going to happen sooner or later.
This needs to be upvoted a bit more. The article is clickbait, and most comments in this thread reflect how effective it is at it.
The hiring process for corp employees makes the practice the article is claiming very, very, very hard to do.
There's bar raiser, there are 2-3 additional interviewers, and the hiring manager. The initial voting process is blind. The HM would need to be very very good at convincing the BR+others in order to hire a candidate that they don't want (this is assuming no one wants the candidate).
Plus, there are a bunch of other incentives countering you to hire someone that you don't want - it costs money, it eats up your allocated headcount, and it's going to take a while for you to onboard the new hire, which is going to eat up your team's bandwidth.
This article is pretty light on what evidence this is actually happening, or how often.
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
Yeah this article is garbage. I never saw any of this when I worked at Amazon (up to around a year ago). Post-interview panel meetings always focused on the candidate's strengths and weaknesses and their ability to raise the bar. It would have been absurd in those meetings for a manager to advocate hiring a "throwaway" candidate. I can't see it happening at all at Amazon, particularly with the requirement of having a bar raiser on each panel.
Idk if it’s Bezo’s roots in finance, but Amazon seems a brutal workplace for all levels of employment (I don’t know anything about the lives of senior managers). The company outright abuses its blue collar employees, and routinely mistreats its engineering staff. Stories of its toxic practices have been spread for at least a decade now. What’s especially baffling to me, and I admit this is merely rumor, is that they’ll actually adjust your raise schedule to take into account the price of the stock, so it’s hard to imagine it being highly lucrative. Of all the big tech companies, I think Amazon is most likely to unionize.
For what it's worth though... To my knowledge, they give damn good benefits. I don't think there's any other company in the U.S. where the lowest tier laborers get the same medical benefits as their best SWE's.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked into it as much as I should have to make this statement. Just going off what a friend who worked there most recently told me.
Bezos graduated from Princeton in the mid-80s, and while he did do a stint at some networking company (but for Finance), he ended up in finance directly. He was at D.E. Shaw when the web exploded, and he left to start Amazon.
The most successful companies are always brutal in at least two aspects: (1) they are demanding and (2) they do not tolerate mediocrity.
Go to any of the top players in a given industry and it will be the same. That actually makes sense because competition in the marketplace is brutal. You won't succeed (or not for long) if you don't aim high and let people take it easy.
If 2) were true, these top companies wouldn't have regular, public failures, mediocre products outside of their core competencies, and they wouldn't progress primarily through acquisitions (many of which also fail).
Not tolerating mediocrity does not guarantee success or even great, successful products. But tolerating mediocrity is sure to lead to even more mediocre products. Acquisitions are neither here nor there.
People like Bezos, Jobs, Musk are not easy to work with because they are driven and do not tolerate mediocrity (but that still does not guarantee success) and that's why the result stands out.
How else can mediocrity or excellence be measured but by results? There is no other measure that matters in business.
Are we to take the stories of hiring to fire, constant infighting, favoritism, bigotry, and other inefficiencies and derive from that information that these companies are wise and excellent, instead of at least a little incompetent and mediocre, perhaps not overall but at least in part and by design?
Goodhart's Law as generalized by Marilyn Strathern: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
For many reasons, I typically do better with qualitative performance reviews, and I'm usually more critical of myself than my manager. I have first-hand experience with exactly the kind of point I believe you might be trying to make, because I've been lucky enough to be managed by people who are genuinely passionate about managing people (and have therefore used qualitative reviews).
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
The problem with this approach is that for any individual who says "I don't deserve a 3 this quarter" there is someone who says "I'm a 4 this quarter or I'll look elsewhere". Managers optimize for the (polite) squeaky wheel and have finite promotions/resources too allocate in a given quarter.
I like the quantitative review for one reason -- people need to know if they're a 2 or not. Too many managers soft pedal concerns about perf and then people get fired 6 months later not ever knowing they were at risk.
I thought The Sims University modeled it brilliantly, as one could succeed in classes without attending them by hosting study sessions with classmates and becoming a close friend to the instructors.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but in management's eyes, it's your job to make them look good. If you want to be rewarded, make them look good, and if you want to be punished, make them look bad.
That's it. Fight losing self-destructive battles if you feel you have to, but never forget it.
I do agree with both of these, but then the question becomes “so then what DO we do?”
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
- give employees and managers enough context to understand the business goals and empower them to make intelligent decisions and affect positive change
I was surprised by how quickly the author seemed to confuse measurement and goal
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
That pairing stuck out to me as well. I think the article is generally on point, but I would have rewritten the first sentence to say "it's worth mentioning that having a metric for attrition isn't inherently bad." But having a goal for attrition is exactly the problem the article's describing.
I thought they should have discussed why a company might want to incentivize managers to not be under a URA goal. They discuss why having a URA is "normal" and why it might be bad to incentivize managers to meet a certain URA, but not why a company might choose to so anyway.
I strongly disagree with this. I don't entirely agree with Strathern, for that matter. I would argue that (a) you need to calculate metrics that are important to your business, (b) some metrics really are important as targets, and (c) you must communicate those targets to the people whose job it is to help the business meet them.
The problem with "hire to fire" as described here is that it fails those criteria (the meta-metrics, if you will). Knowing your company's attrition/turnover rate is good; communicating that metric, at least to managers, is (I would argue) also good. But using it as a target that your managers must not go under is toxic to work culture and employee morale.
There are zero relevant metrics a company can use that don’t create negative incentives. Maximizing profit, cut R&D.
Business is simply complex, you can always sacrifice an intangible like brand perception to tweak some metric. But, it’s the along term that represents the vast majority of a companies value.
At least assuming the company is likely to survive the next 2 years.
One of the very first companies I worked at was a local exchange carrier, back in the days those were a thing, and there was supposed to be a certain maximum number of days between the time an order was placed for a new line and the time the line was operational. (These were lines like frame relay drops, fractional or full T1s, etc., so fulfilling the order often required coordinating with other providers, colocation facilities, and so on.) But nobody was actually formally measuring this. I created a spreadsheet which actually calculated the metrics by querying a database for recent orders, showing which ones were still open and how long they'd been open for, and what the distributions of placement-to-fulfillment times were, and it turned out we were only hitting our own internal targets about half of the time. They didn't know that. There was a vague sense they weren't hitting all the targets, but there was no sense they were missing half the targets, in some cases by a lot.
Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do.
Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.
You just used circular reasoning so justify a metric.
Anyway, there is a huge difference in collecting data and using a metric as a goal. Process improvement may involve measuring what specifically was causing delays and possibly changing things. Or perhaps using a more complex classification system where anything involving company X will always take an extra N days and everyone needs to know this ahead of time etc etc. The point is you need to make complex tradeoff perhaps company X is worth the delay.
> maximum number of days between the time an order was placed for a new line and the time the line was operational.
Once the employees know this is being measured, they will presume it's also a goal, because why else measure it? Then they will act in ways to reduce the time between order and operational status. Is there any reason to believe that they won't game the measure, pushing orders to "operational" in ways that are detrimental to the business?
In my view, they have to be widely communicated, for two reasons.
1. In a company with middle management, i.e., managers working for managers, you have to reveal the metric / target to them. Or at least, some manager will spill the beans and then it's not a secret any more.
2. Companies imitate one another, directly, or through managers who share a common background. Therefore, it's not hard to guess the metrics of one business by reading about similar businesses.
Thanks to these two channels, it's actually possible that the rank and file workers understand the business better than their managers do, because the workers have a broad range of information at their disposal if they read the business pages or even HN, whereas managers are obligated to embrace the official line. When a new metric is installed, chances are that the workers already understand it, and how to manipulate it.
This sadly isn't surprising since it's been happening in one form or another at least since Jack Welsh, and probably earlier. He was probably just the first one to give it a name.
It's never been any secret at places I've worked that there's a team bonus "budget" - if you give one of your reports a higher bonus, that money comes out of the pocket(s) of your other reports.
It all results in the same behavior - you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than everyone else on your team. A smart engineer knows how to find that team.
As a people manager, I have encountered this issue of managing "to the curve". Regardless of the composition of the team and the fact that they could be all high performers, I have had to make decisions that fit to a curve which senior mgmt is imposing.
As for Jack Welsh, he was on record that his methods were really for organizations in trouble to rectify their issues in the short term. Unfortunately many companies run with it as their standard practice.
I was at the receiving end of this. Not at Amazon but at another similar Silicon Valley tech company. When I was hired I thought it was a great opportunity and moved my family to SV. First day I go in, I realized that just about couple of months before my hire date about half the team was laid off.
A few months in there were lots of red flags —
1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code)
2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on.
About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do.
I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again.
I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.
You'd hope that the people being hired to be later fired are at least given a chance to prove themselves. There's a world of difference between "We're not sure about this person, so let's hire them and we can always fire them if they're bad" vs "This person is definitely terrible at their job (or obnoxious) and I'm only hiring them so I don't feel bad about definitely firing them later".
The first one is actually commendable - the interview process isn't completely effective and sometimes either lack of experience or confidence can exclude otherwise capable people who might excel.
Indeed - there are extreme limitations of interviews & other evaluations pre-hire. They'll rank some good candidates "below the hire line", and some charismatic bad candidates, who temporarily present well, as hires.
Given that, a policy of "we're going to hire X% more people than we need, but fire fast" could be seen as a generous, progressive, error-correcting process.
It's better than leaving those people who interview poorly always just short of the real, compensated, supervised employment situations where they could prove themselves.
The grounds for judging the practice should be based on whether it's done honestly. Is the practice, and actual attrition-rates/risk-of-short-tenure, explained up-front? Are hires paid for all hours worked? Do those fired receive clear feedback for why they're not continuing?
Here are some unintentional consequence of this policy,
- Due to the URA targets managers have to keep getting rid of people. If everyone on a team gets a "A+" grade, they have to get rid of the person getting "A-". Many times the "A-" person had a difficult period in their personal lives such as a medical emergency, depression, anxiety, pandemic induced anxiety, birth of a child, death of a family member.
- This has a detrimental impact on team morale.
- The people who stay long enough realize that its every person for themselves.
- So code isn't written with maintainability or customers in mind, its written with promotion and impact metrics in mind. As long as one can hit those metrics targets, it doesn't matter what was compromised in the process. Ask anyone at amazon about the internal tooling.
- Tech debt, and bugs are the problem of the person who's on-call, they can write Correction of Error document if things go terribly wrong.
- There are metrics for the number of comments / revisions on a code review, if someone receives too many comments, or has too many revisions on their code review, then its counted against them. On the other hand senior engineers have figured out that putting out nitpick comments, and getting a junior engineer to go through multiple revisions results in the senior engineer having a better chance at being at top of the stack rank during OLR season. Too many isn't a clearly defined metric, its arbitrarily applied based on the manager's judgement.
- PMs get the same treatment on their documents; nitpicks, frivolous comments, spending hours and hours fine tuning every single word in a document.
- In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, and has to operate in fear of being put on their manager/skip-level's hit-list, people are merely working towards their ultimate goal of staying long enough to see their vesting schedule complete, or their Permanent Residency approved.
The UK made it very easy this year. They created a concept of "deemed employee". Basically a worker is an employee for all intents and purposes except that they don't have any worker's rights.
It's currently being adopted mainly in the IT sector that requires flexible work force.
The main problem is that the worker needs an intermediary to be hired through - currently it must be a worker's own company and then a fee payer that collects tax on the worker's behalf. This all can be automated though and probably it will take a year to be implemented and streamlined.
Currently this system is being exploited by the so called mini umbrellas - instead of worker having its own company, they are hired by someone else's company set up specifically for the engagement, except that they likely pay wrong tax and pocket the worker's money through various fees.
It's crazy, but it looks like this is some sort of an incentive for big companies to come here after Brexit.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57021128 (these mini umbrellas are nothing new, but this year they got more power, so it will only get worse and MPs decided to ignore all proposals to fix this)
[Managers at Amazon are] expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year. Managers are even evaluated using this metric, known as "unregretted attrition rate" (URA). Basically, it's the number of people you wouldn't be sad to see leave the company.
Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal. That completely defeats the point since--if the metric is based on sound business principles--there are people keeping their job who shouldn't, at the expense of the sacrificial lamb.
That's not even the only way it defeats the business goal: you're now intentionally paying people that you have no intention of getting a long-term return on, or that you know aren't worth what you're paying them.
To say nothing of the damage it artificially does to a person's self esteem and future career prospects with an obvious PIP-like tenure at Amazon on their resume.
It so strongly defeats the business goals that maybe the source of the reporting (the super high quality publication, Business Insider) might be full of it.
Might be, indeed - but it's definitely not unusual or incredible for a large organization to have misaligned incentives, ignorant executives making some of them up, and then being reluctant to admit they weren't as good of an idea as they thought.
It seems that huge corporations look very much like a socialist centrally-planned state from the inside, gee, I wonder why is that so. Oh, right: because for some reason huge corporations don't seem to have actual competitive markets inside them to co-ordinate the conducted economical activity, gee, I wonder why is that so.
The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate".
Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process.
So, when they say Amazon, what do they mean? Its not just a web development company any more, and these turnover rates should be wildly different in their call centers, distribution chain, last mile delivery, server farms, ops, management, marketing, legal, design, executive suite, retail, robotics R&D, main web developers, blah blah.
One commented said this is why they won't work at Amazon, but if the practice is limited to, say, call centers and elsewhere is mostly ignored ... I cant imagine the principle roboticist at Amazon is hiring anyone who wouldn't help their output.
> something seems off about hiring someone just so you can fire them later. It just seems wrong.
It's not just morally wrong, it's fraud. You promise someone a job and then take it away. They will have rejected other jobs, and so now they have an even longer time to get a new job. In the mean time they have a mortgage, kids, extended family, medical bills, etc to pay. And what if they moved for the job? You've just knowingly defrauded them out of a salary, and fucked with their career history, making it harder for them to get hired somewhere else. How are they going to explain it to a future employer? "They never wanted me to work there to begin with"? That sounds great...
But they know that the clickbait they wrote will generate clicks, views, and discussions, so they've done their job, that's all they care about. There's not even any facts in the article, they're just supposedly summarizing what someone else wrote in another article, which I can't view because of a paywall. The text I do have access to, the linked article, doesn't contain a single verifiable fact.
Maybe you can make a deal with the hiring manager. If he'll admit that you're the sacrificial lamb, you'll alleviate his guilt by lining an alternative job up for the date he has to fire someone. Win, win, lose. (Amazon loses.)
Yup. Definately ways of benefiting from this. And usually you get a decent severance so if they fire you after a year, you can basically learn cool stuff on the job, only do a little work, and then get a nice paid vacation afterwards.
I really like Netflix's metaphor that they are like a sports team. You don't stack rank your team and fire the bottom 15% of your team every year, especially when the team members work well together.
Nope. The management, at least to the director level, does not even discuss this. The company's culture stack makes it clear that it's okay for someone to be content and just to do her job. Stack ranking damages team trust, promotes unnecessary in-fight, and incentivized teams to focus on short-term goals.
To quote some director's words: if you want to compete, compete with our competitors instead of your coworkers.
I don't think having an unregretted attrition rate 'target' is necessarily a bad thing, but *if* you are going to go down this sort of route, then the "hiring manager" and the "firing manager" should be working to competing objectives, and not colluding in this way. The hiring manager could, for example, be incentivised to meet a lower UAR rate than the firing manager, and the decision to fire should be made based on some sort of objective measure which is difficult to game without actually impacting productivity (Maybe a metric which is hard to predict by virtue of being complex, compound and nonobvious -- which sounds like a perfect fit for a neural network of some sort -- of course, this seems all perfectly horrendous and dystopian - neural networks trained to decide who to fire? ... creepy.)
> People leave, either because they move on to new opportunities or because they aren't able to perform at a level the company deems acceptable. That happens in every company.
Or it could be that people are treated like a dogs and would be better off not being in that environment regardless of having a plan b.
> "They're expected to lose, either voluntarily or through termination, a specific number of employees every year. If you don't, you're expected to make up for it the following year."
This sounds like a re-hash of Jack Welch's Vitality Curve [1] where you're expected to fire the bottom 10% every year.
This is a crazy practice and of course the consequence is that managers will find a way to meet the targets they are assigned, however nonsensical these targets might be, for fear of getting the chop themselves. From that perspective "hire to fire" is actually the only logical (if crazy) option to both keep your people and meet your target.
> Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has long been a controversial practice due to its negative effects on employee morale and potential for bias and discrimination.
Lovely.
I have only seen stack ranking from the sidelines. One guy who was on a high performing team didn't get the promo since others had already received theirs so they were 'out of promos'. He kinda had a nervous breakdown as he punched his office door for like 15 minutes while crying about wasting his life and being stupid. I remember him putting in a solid 3+ hours every day after work. I was contractor and got paid for my extra time, there was no promo I was after.
Decimating your workforce is some seriously messed up behavior.
It is a target from the start (which is what makes it crazy to me). That's the purpose of stack ranking in the Vitality Curve, for instance, and it seems to be the same here.
Absurd goals defeated by Goodhart's Law seems to be common for large organizations.
It is easy to see the limits of the so called invisible hand of free market, it might be more efficient than state-driven bureaucracy but it is still far from optimal.
Is it even possible to avoid for large organizations?
Meh. I had a friend go to Amazon. He loves it there, and he's an IC, not a psychopath, just a genuinely nice guy. He doesn't deny the stories we hear, they just don't happen to/near him. And of course, he's done very well there over the last 5 years or so. So it definitely happens.
I'd take the article with a grain of salt, too, like many others replying to this thread. Even with a grain of salt, the topic sounds like stack ranking being re-packaged: There is a metric to let go of a certain percentage of employees per quarter or year.
When I worked for a US company in Canada, the upper management was open the fact that stack ranking was used. They said the bottom 2% should be gone every year. There would be a quarter every once a while that looks pretty "bleak". Then the office was allocated with "less" budget. At this point the managers picked a few people across different departments to fire. In a larger office, it's not a difficult task. The ones who regularly stole stationary for personal use, conduct side business during regular business hours or has outdated behaviours were picked. At the beginning of the next quarter, the job postings for those openings went up to the company's career page.
From the grapevine, over half of those people who were let go in this situation had difficulties finding comparable employment. The percentage sounds like a backdoor to get rid of the people who got hired because of some false positives. For that particular site of the company, these people would be let go even without stack ranking formally stated explicitly.
Just curious since I'm not too close to that world, how hard is it generally to get fired from say Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or generally other big tech companies?
Speaking for Microsoft in the 2010's: pretty hard. First you get pip'ed and have lots of uncomfortable discussions with your manager. You'll be encouraged to leave on your own. Eventually you'll be told to leave. They want a pretty iron-clad case to reduce the chance that you'll sue, since keeping you on for another year or two while they super-document your shortcomings tends to be cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit.
Depends on the country, really. I work for one of these in the EU country with excellent labor/employment laws and I have it much easier than my US counterparts.
I know we're supposed to reflect on how this is some commentary on today's society and whatnot, but I can't help but think about how you'd go about fixing this perverse incentive.
Let's assume that 95% of hires are "good" and 5% are "bad." Let's say a manager hires 3 people a year, and currently oversees 100 people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the point of URA is to make sure managers fire the portion of that 5% who don't quit voluntarily. If the voluntary portion is 2%, then we'd expect the manager to fire 3%, or 3 people in our example year.
If 100% of those fired were of the 3 that were most recently hired, then obviously there's a problem. We'd expect each of new hires to only have a 5% chance of being "bad." The thing to do is to track what percent of the manager's hires within, say, the last year were part of that URA. If it passes some threshold, then either the manager is doing a poor job of hiring or they're trying to game the system.
Seems weird. Amazon has this whole bar raiser concept which means that there's a few folks who ensure that new hires basically exceed the standard. It should be the sort of program that filters out this type of hiring.
Separately, I think companies in general are doing performance management all wrong anyway. We focus on individuals; not on teams and we ask the wrong questions.
This seems very strange. Amazon has a serious hiring process. Hiring managers cannot just hire people as they wish. There's a bar raiser and all interviewers provide their feedback. The bar raiser's job is to prevent hiring someone who didn't perform well in the interviewers. Internal transfers are different, the hiring manager has all the freedom.
What an insane measure, how do people think this is normal?
I can imagine having a staff retention ratio whereby you need to keep it above a certain level (an indirect measure of staff happiness and thereby retaining expertise, know-how). But to think that you should be constantly firing people in a growing business is perverse.
I was involved in some hiring decisions at Amazon many years ago. When I asked people, including my director, why we didn't do post mortems for when someone was fired for underperformance(and see where the interview process failed to pick up on that info, if it was available), all I got were strange looks.
This type of practice is what makes me not even consider FAANG jobs. I've (tactfully) told their recruiters I'm not interested; you'd have to pay me 500k minimum to even consider having to live on the west coast, dealing with their terrible work life balance, and having to worry about firing on top of everything else. Per this article, you could unknowingly have an expiration date on your employment. From personal contacts at Facebook, they specifically want you to get "needs improvement" on performance reviews to show that you're really pushing yourself; if you're doing well, you're not being pushed hard enough. I'm definitely not masochistic or interested in money/tech enough to work at a place like that.
Well for one, they can probably get you pretty close to if not over 500k if you’re senior. I also think Amazon and FB stand out for that kind of mean spirited meat grinder vibe. Netflix doesn’t screw around with any of it and lets you go without the fuss, but my understanding is that you get a lot of signals from your manager and they aren’t about doing weird psychological tricks to push you harder. It’s just a matter of meeting a reasonable productivity bar. Google is very far from this and a nice relaxed place to work.
> Google is very far from this and a nice relaxed place to work.
Google seems like possibly the worst place to work. They have major, thoroughly discussed issues with their review process. They were some of the initiators of ultra grueling interviews, elitist hiring practices…
Google is well known for killing products and you often hear that is a by-product of their review process.
Google offices are infantalized (just like FB) and often filthy (worse than FB).
That’s on top of their well known issues with internal political fighting, sexual harassment from execs and unethical business model.
At a public company, equity comp is a stock grant. This has a greater likelihood of being valuable than equity in a private company, though of course the value could still go down.
Equity is public company is as good as cash. You should absolutely count it as part of base compensation. Vesting is every 4 months and risk is minimal. If you want you can even fully deriskify by buying put options (or come up with something synthetic that mirror put options while not breaking your employment agreement).
On the other hand Equity is startup is completely different thing and should be heavily discounted.
That's not the way Amazon vests your stock, unless things have drastically changed recently. They vest in single lump sums for the year, and they have a slowly ramping up vesting schedule.
First year, nothing (but they give you straight money bonus)
Second year, barely anything, but they give you some cash to "offset".
Third year, good bunch of the stock, but still less than half.
Fourth year, all the rest of the stock vests.
Within each year you should get some stock offering, on the same ramping up basis so the idea is after the fourth year, you have consistent RSUs vesting, and they'll probably be split over the year based on whenever Amazon gave you the stock offering.
It's not as good as cash because the value can vary, especially the further out you look. It might go up, but it might go down. Cash is far more stable than that.
But it still should be modeled far above zero, and far closer to cash than pre-ipo options.
Consider the story that we're discussing. If you're hired by someone whose incentive is to fire you to meet a metric, then you're never going to get that equity payment. And they have every incentive to load your offer up with as much equity as they can.
And even if they don't, there are lots of ways to find yourself in a toxic workplace. If you're depending on that vesting schedule, your life can suck as you're trying to wait out an arbitrary deadline.
If you treat vesting as a nice optional bonus that you don't plan on, neither situation will feel bad to you.
Lots do monthly/quarterly vesting. But all have 1 year cliffs. With the idea that you get nothing if you don't last.
I had the wonderful experience of being hired at Google many years ago, and pulled into an SRE role. I was in the roughly half that they do that with that don't work out. And I didn't work out for exactly the reason that I initially expressed doubts about. (I don't task switch that fast - not a problem in a SWE but a major problem for an SRE.) I was let go 5 days before my 1 year cliff.
That is one of the reasons why I, personally, discount equity compensation.
At Amazon in particular they pay you the cash value of your stock for the first two years until it vests and you can start actually cashing it out. They have to since they have a maximum wage of ~$170K (varies a little depending on city).
I don't think so, because I think the most common tenure is just over 2 years. I know a lot of people who leave right after their second year cliff (the vesting isn't even and most of it comes at the end).
That's not true. It makes sense to discount pre-ipo equity at 100%, but post-ipo equity is much more predictable.
I personally discount equity at 40%. So you can offer me $300,000 cash or you can offer me $150,000 cash and $250,000 RSUs and I'd consider those equal offers.
For public companies you should value stock grants above their face value, because of the optionality: If the price goes down you can quit and get another job, if it goes up you get a raise. And stocks tend to go up, so 4-year grants have raises baked in, and most companies don't consider these raises (IIRC Amazon and Stripe do), so they still give regular raises and refresher grants.
The discount is to account for risk. Imagine an offer that is 100% stock. If they stock goes down, your comp goes down with it. That is what is being accounted for.
> And stocks tend to go up
Only lately. Stock compensation sucked around 2001 and 2008.
Risk (well, "variance") increases the value of optionality.
Assume that there is a job market with lots of jobs. Each will hire you for your market-rate total compensation, no stock cliffs, no job-seeking costs. Spherical cow. Say also that you can tell the variance on stock compensation, but you can't guess at future performance.
One strategy might be to go to an all-cash job and make your market rate forever. That's a lower-bound on the best expected future earnings. But a better strategy is,
- Join a high-variance company,
- If/when your pay drops below the market, find another high-variance company.
With this strategy your expected earnings are higher than your market rate, even if the expected earnings at every job is the same. And the outperformance scales up with the variance.
Yes, mathematically in a perfect spherical cow world, you are correct.
But I live in the real world. And in the real world, you can't switch jobs instantaneously back and forth, like you can trade stocks. In the real world there may not be a job available at the market rate. In the real world it takes months to find a new job even if there is one, and then it's even harder to actually get market rate.
So in the real world it make more sense to discount stock compensation compared to cash compensation to account for all of these things and the risk you take on by accepting stock based compensation.
A 40% discount on RSUs at a public company is perfectly reasonable: you will have to sell to cover the taxes as soon as they vest, meaning for every 10 shares in your grant, 3-4 will be liquidated before you even see them just to cover the taxes on the vesting. Add a modest discount for the fact that you might leave prior to the next vesting date, and 40% might even be a bit optimistic.
I meant increases in offered/negotiated salary. A marginal dollar of salary gets taxed the same way as a marginal dollar of vesting shares, so discounting one in the offer because of taxes makes sense if you discount the other in the same way.
You shouldn't trade away a dollar's worth of shares for 60 cents more salary just because of taxes.
Why not, assuming the company is public? If you can convert to cash as soon as your shares vest (which occurs monthly in most instances) it's as good as cash (with some discounting factor for the uncertainty of the first year pre-vesting).
i'm surprised to run across so many purported tech professionals who still don't know the difference between options and RSUs, and how the latter are as good as cash
I'm not. Our industry is filled with people who have bought hook, line and sinker into the "I'm passionate about what I do and that's all I need" cult, especially in the Bay Area/startup world. They assume they're well compensated (a few are--maybe a higher fraction than in other industries, even--but most of them aren't) and don't pay attention to that sort of thing much.
You are wrong. Companies like Facebook and Google allow you to vest shares almost immediately (I think they vest quarterly). Unless you think their shares are going to drop precipitously, it’s absolutely okay to count equity these days.
Having it happen once isn't toxic. The part that creates the terrible culture is that it happens every year.
Imagine trying to build a team and good culture when someone on your team is put into a performance plan/fired every year.
Now add in unreasonable demands from management on delivery dates, churn from people trying to work at a company that doesn't fire one of their coworkers every year, and a lack of new hire support because if you don't bring your new hires up to speed very fast, they're more likely to get fired than you/your friends are. Also, those new hires get paid more than you do if they were brought in at the same level because they're "bar raising" and you aren't.
10% is quite high. It's more like 3% in my company.
And using invalid assumptions, if the probability that you will get PIP'd every year is 10%, assuming it's just a random dart shot, that means the likelihood you'll get PIP'd at some point in the first 4 years is 35%.
I don't know if this is somewhat similar to other companies I won't name, but there's a practice of hiring contractors that work for a "contracting company" as a W2, but then works "in the office" at another company. I did this a couple times. One thing I would say is that even though my contract was 6 months, the contacts you get is incredible through doing this. It also offers people a way to get a job at more stable companies without the insane interview process.
Definitely helps open doors for people that would otherwise not have a chance at getting a job at the place.
That all being said, if this is different from what I described, ok.
Bottom line is that you can be very selective in hiring and then very slow to fire, or you can be very accepting in hiring and very fast to fire. Amazon has a reputation of being a company that is relatively easy to get into and thus it will always be a company that is quick to let people go.
Now that doesn't mean you need official targets of firing X% each year, you can implement "fast to fire" badly, but even the best possible implementation of "fast to fire" is going to be more unpleasant for employees than those in a slow-to-hire, slow-to-fire company.
If it's a measure, _shrug_, I see it as fairly inevitable in a big enterprise. Some people will leave for good, bad, and miscellaneous reasons. 6% turnover at a big enterprise seems pretty low IMHO.
If it's a target - wtf? Actively forcing out satisfactory staff to hit an arbitrary number is a bizarre way to operate.
I know the media loves to suggest Amazon has horrible work practices, but seeing as one explanation of this number is sensible enough and the other is batshit crazy, I choose to assume they're applying it in the sensible way.
Somebody make a website to hire people with the purpose to fire them (faangcannonfodder.com). If the deal is straight forward I'll take a big paycheck for a year.
Not so much as hire-to-fire from my limited experience. When they hire you, they want you to succeed. However, the pressure to deliver is there and it is real, good is many ways.
And firing typically is totally unrelated to hiring. Firing decisions are for typical bottom X%, or product not doing good and actions need to be taken. It is easy to say that leaders do it to save their ass, but there is more to it and almost in every organization.
I have hard time imagining how this "unregretted attrition rate" (URA) works for very specialised position like research scientists. If you expect to lose even 1 of those per year it seem like the interview process could be a bit lighter.
It’s all fun when you are growing. It becomes hunger games contest when you are shrinking and you end up putting at the bottom people that previously were your average employee.
these comments are full of (presumably) tech workers explaining it's probably only happening to the warehouse workers, and thus ok
do yall understand that things like this are directly causative of the great frustration and antagonism against "techies" nationally and particularly in every city that has been changed by this industry?
it is understood by everyone else that tech workers bear some responsibility for this culture and these behaviors, but tech workers themselves seem to deny it or not believe it.
> directly causative of the great frustration and antagonism against "techies" nationally and particularly in every city that has been changed by this industry?
I'm not familiar with any examples of this, does anyone have references?
A good example is housing market in San Francisco. The tech boom caused many poorer individuals to lose housing because of the costs going up. People with full time jobs no longer were able to afford housing.
