Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear...
Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.
Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.
Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.
So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.
Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.
I worked somewhere that did weird personality tests as part of the recruiting process.
I talked to my manager later and he basically explained it as - yeah, it predicts nothing. No one ever gets denied because of it.. but its something for HR to wave at you if a hire doesn't work out and say "see it was right here in the personality test".
Just a thought.
This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!
Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.
My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.
But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”
"Sun Tzu then set the women a simple drill and made sure they understood what to do. However, when he started ordering them to perform the drill, the women burst out in laughter. He tried again with the same result. Sun Tzu claimed that this failure of the troops to obey was the fault of the commanders. So, despite the warlord’s pleas, he ordered the two concubines beheaded as an example for the rest of the company. Thereafter, the women did not utter a single sound and performed the drill exactly as commanded."
This is a depiction of Amazon. However, a "simple drill" is not high speed software engineering.
End result being snakes, backstabbers, and sociopaths rise to the top of the chains. Engineering is a collaborative effort so it speaks to the culture of AMZN how they incentivize this nonsense.
I agree. I’d hate to work at any org that does this as a rule.
To play devils advocate however, I’m sure many of us have been in a situation where a co-worker was coasting, or doing the minimal amount of work, while spending energy to look busy.
I’m thinking this cynical outlook could have contributed to this practice being implemented in large organizations.
An illustration of why these performance evaluation systems are always going to produce statistically irrelevant results was the Red Bead experiment[0] designed by the late, great W. Edwards Deming.
Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR.
This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.
In my experience at the VP level you have many highly skilled reports who are gunning for your job. Once you get the VP job then there may be many more enticing opportunities at other companies with just tough competition in the current position.
The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.
See also how people had to get a "certificate of civism" lest them be considered suspect by default: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_civism
Of course teams of employees with emotions and institutional knowledge are a bit more complex than a hand of cards, but that has never stopped bad management strategies.
source: recently left Amazon as SDM
What it is good for in my view is making managers look and feel tough and establishing a culture of fear that is so necessary for hierarchical power structures. Power/status hierarchies are a common trait for most primates. So my shorthand for this sort of it-doesn't-make-sense situation is, "Primates gonna prime."
Not defending, just explaining.
This is where your cards analogy falls through, in a deck of cards, you know that there are better cards you don't have in your hand, you know exactly what your Jack is worth in absolute terms.
At Amazon, you can have a Royal Flush, and because of stack ranking decide to discard your 10, and if you know your poker, that makes you go from the best hand to one of the worse.
The issue is you wouldn't know your 10 at Amazon was a great engineer and a key asset to your team, and that all replacement candidates are going to be worse, except now you've lost precious time, ramp up, and moral, as well as a great employee.
For a smaller company, it might make sense as you're building a core team and might need to go through a few people before you find a set of good ones, but where Amazon is now, at its size, over time, it has lost engineers that in industry wide averages were above it, and it has created a reputation that hurts it from attracting them back or other engineer's above the industry's average.
Due to this, Amazon is becoming a second pick. Good engineers will pick Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and even sometimes Facebook (due to their higher comp) over Amazon. And since all these companies hiring process are the same, it's common that someone who can pass the Amazon interview can pass one of those other ones as well. In fact, almost 70% of everyone I've seen be released from a PIP went to work at one of the other big tech companies.
The other big problem is that the stack ranking works like American reality TV competitions. It doesn't matter if you've excelled year over year, if you have one bad year, where for whatever reason you get identified as a low performer, you'll get PIPed. In my experience that's often contextual, a new manager or you look like a bad performer because the business and leadership couldn't figure out good projects for you to work on and own that year, or they themselves couldn't get their act together and you're a scape goat. Other people on your team might have performed better simply out of luck of having been assigned better projects.
Amazon used to get away with simply finding the best talent, but in my experience there, that's now backfiring, and instead of growing the best talent, their quest to find it is turning into a system that recruits more and more mediocre talent as time goes on.
Amazon doesn't pay top dollar for engineers, and the delta between Amazon and other companies is growing every year. (The compensation ends up being competitive when you take into account stock growth, but the new hire offers are not attractive.) And it's a very results-driven, stressful work environment. The effect of that is that people who get better offers go elsewhere, both new hires and existing employees. Those who are left either don't feel like interviewing or interviewed but didn't like their other options.
Yes comp could help to attract better talent, that's what Facebook is doing. But of the about 150 interviews I've conducted for Amazon, 90% of almost all candidates always ask me: "So is it really as bad as they say working here? With how they treat you?"
I think that's a pretty good indicator that the reputation is just tarnished, and I wouldn't be surprised that that's having a sizable effect on the decrease of talent.
The other thing is, yes maybe some real bad apples leave from a PIP, but the whole culture around it, the stress, the feeling everyone has that they constantly have to fight for trust and respect, that is also a cause for a lot of the really good engineers and high performer to leave as well, of their own, no PIP involved, but it's the same root cause for why they leave.
I see so many good ones, ranking high every year, and after 3 to 5 years say: Well I had enough of this BS, too much hassle always playing the game. If anything, that's the biggest issue.
Every time an AMZ recruiter tries to poach me from my current job, I consider replying back with links to the NYT article, the URA article, and various anecdotes from friends that worked there. Ending with a question of 'Why in god's name would I work for your company?!'
There are elements of the culture I miss. The focus on writing was great. Shipping things quickly that impact a lot of people is nice. It made up for a lot of the deficiencies, and it isn't universal (cough Google). Amazon tends to make the right tradeoffs with tech choices to enable this, not always, but most of the time.
I enjoyed working with principal and senior engineers at Amazon. I didn't meet a single PE that I didn't thoroughly respect and enjoy talking with. I miss the internal PE talks, and I wish they'd make them public.
Compensation is deeply personal, but once I broke 400k, I really didn't care too much one way or another, and Amazon's total compensation was never significantly less than competitors. It was about the work, impact, and people.
But this makes sense _in a game with a fixed hand size_. But a company's staff should grow over time. So shouldn't one have an ROI-based criteria where you want each team member to help grow generate meaningfully more revenue than they cost to employ. If my "lowest" performing team members still make meaningfully more money than they cost to employ, they still increase my ability to hire more.
This acknowledges that the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy leaves out factors -- which is true.
My point is, even if there were no emotions or institutional knowledge, even if I had a "staff" of AI agents or robots whose "knowledge" could be fluidly copy-pasted, the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy is poor, because a robot that makes money is worth keeping even if there are better robots out there. An army of low-but-positive ROI robots can help me buy a high ROI robot.
Maybe you hired a 7 of clubs, but given time they can gain institutional knowledge and improve their skillset to become a Jack of Spades.
I'm happy there are companies that set attrition metrics as a KPI, it makes it easier for me to hire and build out a technical team for my company.
Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out.
By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.
Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.
In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.
Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..
Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.
That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning.
People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd.
The jockeying will result in disruption of team development.
People will sabotage their coworkers.
Trust disappears.
Paranoia grows.
Blame deflected.
Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it.
Bandaids rather than solutions will result.
YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE.
What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people.
And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit.
Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them.
THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT.
Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.
Amazon management practices will breed sociopathy at the root worker level.
I agree that is kind of the average-stage evolution of an enterprisey company. Amazon is worse.
The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV.
Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.
How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what?
Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output.
The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.
Where do we get one of those?
The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem.
There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and a large population the measure will be Gaussian distributed on that population, and the larger the population the closer to a Gaussian distribution. An example is supposed to be the size of the largest eigenvalue in a principle components decomposition. Uh, that largest eigenvalue was long called IQ (intelligence quotient). Nothing intelligent about it. Nonsense. 100% total crackpot nonsense. Brain-dead, cult nonsense.
"Low performers" in need of a "performance improvement program" (PIP)? Start with the managers who believe in a Gaussian distribution. Then move to the managers who believe that the "bottom 20%" are always low performers.
A lot is known about how to be a good manager, and the Gaussian probability density distribution is not part of that.
I've seen a lot of bad managers. A pattern is that they are tyrants, have lots of rules and measures, are big on formality over reality, dot i's and cross t's with great reliability, and have everyone with their nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel and trying to work in that position. But the organization is stagnant, is not changing or keeping up with the market or technology. So, after a few years like that, it becomes obvious to everyone, customers, BoD, stockholders, employees, even nearly all of the managers that the organization is about ready to die, and often that's what happens, e.g., by firing 50% of the people and going downhill from there.
Once I saw a failing organization where nearly all the managers except at the lowest level were part of a tight clique, cult enforcing failure. Finally the BoD installed a new CEO and fairly soon 80+% of the clique, cult were given "PIPs" and demoted out of management or retired.
But there is also good evidence that even such a sick organization does not have to die and, instead, just needs some good management, starting at the CEO level. In particular, with a good CEO, suddenly, wonder of wonders, 90+% of the employees can be seen as great performers.
So, net, as bad as the situation can be, it is fair to say that Darwin is on the case with improvement on the way!
At one time Amazon was a small mail-order book and record shop run by Bezos from a small office. At least looking from 10,000 feet up, Bezos was a good manager, and, thus, I doubt that he was playing with the Gaussian distribution, firing his bottom 20%, stack ranking, etc. Instead he knew all the employees and the work of each. Sooooo, it sounds like now Bezos should leave outer space, return to Amazon, and fix the destructive nonsense that is ruining the company.
HAHAHA well said.
Height cannot be Gaussian if only because height is never negative but every Gaussian density is positive for all real numbers, including negative real numbers.
"interactions of many genes that are measureable"
The interactions of many is commonly used to justify a Gaussian assumption, but there is no such theorem. The main theorem to get a Gaussian density is the central limit theorem which usually assumes an infinite sequence of independent identically distributed random variables (plus some), i.e., i.i.d. The i.i.d. is asking a LOT!!! Asking so much that in practice it is essentially unrealistic.
What people often mean by Gaussian is just a central peak, some symmetry, and long tails, but an actual Gaussian distribution has a lot more, e.g., sufficient statistics (as in a classic paper by Halmos and Savage, with a derivation in M. Loeve's two volumes, from Springer, Probability) which, as I recall, E. Dynkin showed are quite sensitive to deviations from actual Gaussian.
Gaussian is important in a lot of derivations -- a LOT is known. But in practice Gaussian has some utility but only as an approximation where don't need to be very careful about accuracy.
Sounds fine.
If you treat heights as some i.i.d.s, then can use the central limit theorem to argue that in the limit for large samples (we get convergence in distribution) the probability density distribution of the sum of heights expressed as a z-score (mean 0, standard deviation 1) has Gaussian probability density distribution.
But that does not mean that the probability density distribution of heights is Gaussian. Indeed, if include both males and females, then for the density likely get two peaks instead of just one. If also include children, then get a left tail longer than the right one.
So, net, we cannot expect that heights are Gaussian. And we will have a tough time finding a large population that is Gaussian. z-scores in the limit for large samples Gaussian -- sure, can get that. A large population Gaussian, not much chance.
1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.
I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd
For a company that's vaunted for it's long-view philosophy, it's a terribly short-sighted policy.
(Somehow stack ranking logic never gets applied that way.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h...
I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.
All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!
All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.
His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"
The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.
High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems.
Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable?
I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system.
However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.
This is just one (very depersonalized) approach to not keeping 'dead weight' around, or optimizing staff to always be on an upwards trend. It's like an evolutionary algorithm; trim off the worst performers and the remainder will evolve to higher levels. In theory.
In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you.
Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.
Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)
The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.
Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?
If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.
PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.
In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.
In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.
And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.
I don't think performance reviews should have a part in firings, and the metrics they use to rank/rate people are generally worthless, but it's actually nice to get feedback from time to time on how you're doing. I've had managers who I never heard from at all and that's not ideal.
If a company is thinking they have to fire someone for performance reasons it's way easier for them to have documentation showing what has been going on and that they'd given the employee time to improve. It's better for the employee too to understand what the expectations are they're not meeting and to have a chance to explain what the causes are. I think most people would prefer that over being told out of the blue that they've been sucking at their job and escorted out the building.
It really depends. I have never felt this way about a performance review. I like being informed about whether my manager and I both agree on what my job is. As an added bonus, the day after a good review is when you are least worried about losing your job and your livelihood. Honestly it seems like your beef is with the lack of social safety nets and not with performance reviews themselves.
It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time.
> How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job?
Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.
I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.
It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave.
In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful.
Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.
Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP.
The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said something that pissed off a Director, I'm sure we can think of many more possibilities.
I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org.
This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve.
This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.
Explanation: Jack Welch wrote a book called 'Winning' in which he describes a system for rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% on a regular basis to foster a performance culture. From Wikipedia [1]:
> Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.
I've never seen a manager face any sort of criticism. They just lead with impunity. Often they are promoted for miserably failed projects because they took a risk, and in large tech companies with big cash cushions, risks are worth it.
In my experience most of the time managers just maintain status quo. Run standup, do 1:1s, hire, and pass on orders from above. They keep their jobs forever.
Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.
Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers.
Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager
> I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.
Is n't OP's manager actually did that?
I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.
You can call it lazy, that doesn’t make it any less of the goal or KPI Amazon created.
No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.
That's funny, because from the other things you said:
There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year.
As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team.
It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.
It might very well be a "both" situation rather than an either/or. But focusing on/scapegoating this manager's behavior, to me, is the wrong takeaway.
Then by definition, it is the directives of senior management that are at fault.
Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively and how to minimize bias. Verbally, it's all about numbers and probability. The organization wants X number of people to leave this year, to do that they want Y number of people in performance improvement plans.
There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn't exist, Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.
As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. Behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time advocating for my team and trying to poke holes in the performance ratings of other teams. It was exhausting. There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not. I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.