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.
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.
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
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.
[2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146...
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.
Startups are great, but their chances of success are higher when the founders know what they’re talking about.
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.
[1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-unregretted-at...
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.
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
[1]For personal or professional reasons.
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.
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.
No startup needed, just some (un)common sense.
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.