At Amazon you still hire good people you just mark them poorly because you don't want to break up your team.

I get that Amazon is known for their cold, calculated workforce, but it really takes a special kind of person to execute a, "hire someone just to fire them no matter how they do" plan over the course of like, an entire year, and honestly it's not even in that manager's best interest if the new person is actually pretty good.

Are we really suggesting that's the norm at Amazon? Maybe, but wow.

No, you don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378836

The link you pointed to mentions how hire managers are looking to hiring as many good people as possible. Of course they are if so many people are being fired.

It says that managers who don't perform well will be out. And that was the reason given for why this practice doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff. Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It is setup to be toxic.

> Of course they are if so many people are being fired.

You don't seem to understand. Amazon grows by 15-30% every single year.

We're constantly hiring, even if there is no attrition. We also have a high bar. The ~ ratio is 20 phone screens to 4 onsites to 1 hire. That's a lot of work to get a butt in a seat.

> Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff.

Only if you presume that every single team has to identify that X% of people for the URA target. They don't. Period. Full Stop. It's a lie.

> Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk

The #1 thing that gets asked about individuals during yearly operational reviews is "what did they deliver"? We try to identify individual contributions but individuals can't ship. Teams ship.

You can still have bad hires. It happens rarely that the bar raising process outright fails, but it still happens, since the data you get out of an interview is very limited. For example, we had a team member that not only was doing a bad job on his own stuff, he was a drain on morale and resources for the whole team, since he constantly complained about everything, he never tried to learn anything, he posted big commit dumps every few months - hundreds of commits at once - and the code quality on those was abysmal. Luckily we got rid of him pretty fast, but not fast enough.

Most bar raisers are limp noodles that will just do whatever the hiring manager says. It's trivially easy to hire a mediocre person with full intent to fire them, and a bar raiser would likely be none-the-wiser nor would they stop it.