People at amazon love to discuss the flywheel effect[1]. The flywheel here is the culture of fear that keeps employees on their toes. Bezos believes that employees are inherently lazy[2], and it seems like fear is tool the S-team have chosen to solve the problem of lazy employees.
This has a lot of unintended consequences[3], but the executives with the power to change this don't care as long as they keep getting rewarded with a higher stock price, and fresh college grads who are willing to sacrifice themselves at the altar.
[1]https://feedvisor.com/resources/amazon-trends/amazon-flywhee...
[2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...
I guess if workers are considered expendable than that's a positive. Corporations need to be more accountable to their workers welfare and not solely stockholder's welfare.
there's no incentive for doing so. As far as the owner of the company is concerned, ensuring there s a pay-cheque is the end of the company's responsibility.
AWS has a reputation of being a difficult place to work, even more so than Amazon's other divisions.
So no, I don't think anything will change.
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/he-l...
Pointing out that someone has it shittier is typically an excuse for shittyness.
That said, Amazon’s culture is closer to the norm than most startups so in the short term things are unlikely to change much. At least until some new management fad becomes popular or they run into a significant issue.
How much political scrip such an organization generates given esoteric economic measures should not outweigh real world impact
FOCUS is a "button" managers can push to fire employees. Once you push the button, the employee is on track for termination and all of the CYA for-cause documentation happens automatically.
From my reading of the article it sounds like the part where the manager is to "... tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve." is completely optional and in fact requires that the manager take the initiative to actually do this. I could be wrong about this, but why would these instructions be in a FAQ if they were baked in to actual procedures?
To me it seems like FOCUS is a dark pattern meant to encourage managers to implement stack ranking. It also seems like a tool that could be abused to make arbitrary firings seem like they are for legitimate cause.
At a high level, Amazon orgs have Unregretted Attrition (URA) targets/quotas for orgs. Not every manager needs to hit the exact target but under a certain level of middle management they do. Because of this built-in churn they need to have a pipeline of low performers - because once the current set of URA targets get managed out or leave you will need to still hit that quota next quarter/half/year/whatever. So maybe your quota is 5% but you have another 5-10% extra in earlier stages of your pipeline so you can sacrifice them later.
In the later stages when you’re actively getting managed out they put you on a formal PIP. In theory it’s possible to “get out” of it but because of the quotas it’s pretty much a lost cause. So on Blind the most common suggestion for people on PIP is to do the absolute bare minimum and start interviewing elsewhere, expecting to fail the PIP.
I imagine the reason Amazon doesn’t want people to know about Focus/Dev plans is that once you know you’re in the earlier stages of the pipeline, you may come to a similar conclusion. Basically if a target is painted on your back and you know there’s a high probability you’re going to get managed in the next 6 months, it’s better to do the bare minimum at work and focus as much as possible on getting a new job. But from Amazon’s perspective that’s a lot of lost work/time/money, and they’re not even sure yet that they want to get rid of those people. And further, if employees don’t know about the performance plan there is less chance they will deliberately sandbag and may actually improve their ranking enough to move off the early stage pipeline.
In my opinion the root of all this disfunction is the quota system. If managers were not forced to manage out so many people and being on a “low performance plan” at any stage were seen as an actual opportunity to identify issues and improve performance, there would be much less incentive to sandbag by doing the bare minimum, and also much less need for secrecy about the process.
But this is Amazon, I am sure they have thought deeply about this. My guess is that they have done the math on many alternatives and this is the least-worst. For example by managing out so many people they can be less selective in hiring which may be better overall (eg an overall acceptance rate of 20% with 10% of those being false positives fills more roles than an overall acceptance rate of 10% with a 0% false positive rate). Of course managing people out also has a cost in creating an unpleasant/toxic work environment that itself increases churn, which they may or may not account for. Keep in mind due to their vesting models, a good performer burning out and quitting after 2 years is actually good for their bottom line. As long as they continue to fill roles I doubt they will be incentivized to change this model.
There were posts on the blind app regarding how amazon has been having trouble hiring experienced folks. I am also seeing increased linkedin posts from Amazon SDMs in my network, all advertising positions they have open on their team.
> maybe their plan is to hire more people fresh out of college and bring them up internally
In addition to new grads, amazon also depends on L1 visa imports from India and other countries. And maybe H1 hires here. Its not easy to switch jobs on visa besides you need to stay at a company for 2-3 years to get green card, so it works out in Amazon's favor. My guess is they are feeling the pinch now because Covid is bad in India, and India to US travel is stopped, So visa pipeline has dried out significantly.
But taken as a whole I cannot help but conclude that the program is meant to instil a culture of fear (and by extension toxicity). Considering the following:
* A manager may or may not have made vague statements to indicate you are on this list. Since the manager is explicitly instructed not to talk about the list itself, it is up to the employee to triangulate from a manager's statements their standing relative to performance. This means that employees can never really be sure about their status with respect to this list and so must constantly be on their toes (especially regarding statements from their managers).
* If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the logic in preventing them from switching teams internally? Perhaps a culture change or a product change would tip the scales for them to increase performance. Maybe there is a culture clash with the org or with the direct manager. I don't see any downside in maintaining the FOCUS status but allowing the employee to explore options to improve their productivity internally.
* If a person is borderline under-performing, what is the rationale behind blacklisting them from ever becoming rehired at the company? This the most egregious offence to me regarding the entire program - that Amazon is hanging a sword of damocles over all their employees heads, implicitly threatening them with blacklisting them as one of the largest tech employers in the industry. This list, again, being entirely secretive and Amazon explicitly instructing managers not to talk about with employees.
From my understanding, you can work at Amazon several years, be on a FOCUS/devlist for a huge amount of that time - and never even know. When you leave, you are automatically marked as URA and ineligible to rejoin the company.
This all adds up to me as a program specifically designed to be vaguely threatening and fear inducing.
If we assume an ideal world where managers are all great communicators and can handle performance management with skill and would never misuse the program for any reason - I can maybe squint and suspend my disbelief enough to see how this program can effectively work.
But you would have to be breathlessly naive to assume that's how the program would practically work in the real world with actual managers (and the state of middle/upper management in tech companies at large).
Any management/leadership team who is OK with rolling such a program out at scale given the above is not a team I would want to work with in any capacity, and IMO it just speaks to the dehumanizing nature of the culture they are aiming to create. It is inconceivable that upper management at Amazon doesn't realize these effects of the program.
Like you say, they have probably thought about it deeply, and just don't care. The metrics are working for them, so it continues. I personally am not going to lose sleep over it, I will simply refuse to work there. I hope employees who do work there know that there are other technology companies who actually consider these negative effects on their own employees and actually have empathy towards creating a place where people genuinely want to work - because for other companies, the equation regarding optimizing business metrics lands a bit differently when it comes to their own employees. If you can pass the bar at Amazon you can pass the bar at other places. Don't sell yourself short thinking this is normal or OK.
Also my experience tells me that all these mega corps have very similar culture.
An employee can perform terrible for many reasons one cannot control. For example, intro team communication.
In order to avoid future lawsuit, Amazon has to set up an independent project without any external dependency for the person under PIP and document all the progress. So that the person being PIP cannot sue his employer inthe future.
As in many or most aspects of social activities like work, objective reality effectively does not exist. Only the consensus reality matters.
If management thinks you're doing a bad job, it's not needed to make it known to the entire team - but you should know.
Otherwise it’s just marking them for future termination without telling them, which seems like a waste of everyone’s time.
I did not say they should never tell the employee. I think sometimes it's unnecessary.
Giving the employee a chance to rebut any performance problem assumptions would be an important part of this, and would also require they know.
In my 15+ years doing so, I’ve never heard or seen a situation in a reasonable organization where someone gets on a list like this (intentionally, as compared to their manager screwing up by not having a conversation with them before it is clearly a huge problem to everyone else) without knowing they are going to get on a list like this if they don’t improve.
I have heard it at many places that are flogging employees or using scare tactics to get every cent worth of value they can put or people before they burn out and get thrown on the rubbish bin.
The only "positive" here is that it can affect the individual's moral to know you are not meeting expectations - but that has to be communicated regardless. If it's understood it has to be communicated and there is a list specifically including the individual, it's up to the company to manage that communication in a supportive manner.
And the consequences of this secretive list are a culture of fear and uncertainty and doubt. Especially with the harsh consequences such as - if you leave while on this secretive list (which you cannot even know you are on) - you are ineligible for rehire.
The solution is not to maintain a secretive list of employees who have performance issues - it is to be fully transparent about those performance issues and destigmatize being included in this nebulous secretive list in the first place - through a culture of support and shared success.
Honestly it boggles my mind how Amazon managers accept this status quo at the scale that Amazon operates. It is so on it's face a recipe for having a toxic culture which breeds stress, doubt, and only serves to reinforce poor performance outcomes.
Out of all the things I've heard about Amazon culture for its software organization - this single thing (secretive lists of employees with performance issues with "never rehire" consequences that employees can't even understand they are on) symbolizes for me all the reasons I would avoid them as an employer. There is no way to have this process without creating a toxic culture.