There’s a mandate to PIP and the manager wants to protect their productive employees so they hire someone and set them up to fail.

I don’t think you’re going to get any clean documentation on this process - it’s simply a result of a system that stack ranks and mandates firing.

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.

Citation needed.

Leaked internal memo shows that if an org doesn’t meet the target this year, they have to make it up next year.

Sure, fire has not been found, but there is a ton of smoke on this.

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.

I am not disputing that the NYT revealed his full name, they absolutely did so that, against his wishes.

"Oh @sokoloff quit? He was OK but let's mark him as non-regrettable so we can hit our target. Where do you want to get lunch?"

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.

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.

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).

They’re one of the largest corporations in the world; of course they’re a political organization.