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.”
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.