Suffice it to say during the three months I was on “focus” I got perfect feedback from my project managers, my coworkers and a perfect customer satisfaction score from my customers on projects I led - I worked in the AWS consulting division.
Both of the customers reached out to me about working on contract after I left.
I was suppose to be 80% billable and I met those targets all of the time. I refused to take on another project that would have had me juggle two full time projects that would have put my utilization at 140%.
I was going to look for a job earlier. But everyone told me to wait on the PIP and the severance.
I’m 49 years old and my shit tolerance level is much too low to put up with something like that. I knew someone would hire me either as a contractor or full time. My bills are really low (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966).
The full time job I got after leaving was perfect. Not only that, a former CTO offered me a consulting contract the day I found out I had gotten pipped to troubleshoot an AWS implementation.
I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.
I had only opened the AWS console two years prior.
When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $10K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?
My specialty is I don’t have a specialty. I can talk to and work with developers and teach them just as easily as I can work with the database folks, operations, etc
They assume you can program at the simple level required by enterprise apps. The questions they have are have you demonstrated being able to do at scale and know how to think on a systems level - security, availability, disaster recover, throughput, etc. I had to walk through my previous system design work.
They also want to know whether you can navigate the complexities of large organizations and you should be just as comfortable talking to CxOs or “the business” as developers.
My interview was all behavioral.
I didn’t say I was paid little compared to new grads. I said new grads five years out of school, I was a mid level consultant. Which was fair. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior and the startups and small IT companies I had been an architect with before had about the overall revenue of one “work stream” in a large enterprise implementation.
I was still making 10% less than an equivalent SDE. I was also working remotely.
Now, after leaving, I’m doing what would be considered L6 level work at my current job (without the L6 level compensation).
There is also a clear road for me to get back to Amazon level pay either at my current company, by changing jobs or if I really wanted to deal with the hassle, going out on my own.
The industry is always hiring. It was hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago.
Focus on creating an “unfair advantage”.
1. I got on to a high profile open source project and stayed on it until it became a more official “AWS Solution”. In still high on the list of contributors for both code and the documentation. This actually led directly to my current job. The company I was hired for uses the solution.
2. I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I had an open source portfolio that I could say was being used by real customers. I’ve used two of those projects at my current job (legally - MIT licensed by AWS)
I still have one of the two only public solutions to automate deploying one complicated AWS service. I volunteered to design the solution for the service team when they had the APIs it for it in beta and I worked with the guy that created Terraform support for it.
3. I responded to every recruiter over the last three years and kept in touch with former managers and coworkers. This led to an offer of a full time job that I didn’t accept and a side contract I did accept.
4. I constantly kept my resume up to date and I used the leveling guidelines to word it. I also have a career document.
5. I used the extra money I was making to pay off debt, save and “decontent” my life so if necessary, I could go back to enterprise CRUD compensation without having to hold out for BigTech level compensation. I actually turned down a chance at a job that would have paid more than I was making. I didn’t want the stress.
A former coworker is a director of a well known (non tech) company and he was willing to create a position for me overseeing the entire AWS architecture and their transition effort.
6. I kept my LLC active all three years just in case I needed it to ramp up a solo consulting business. I used it for the side contract I mentioned that I started the day I was left (in addition to the full time job I got two weeks later)
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for another purpose. It will depend on the company and the contracts you signed, right?
Of course we had to strip out any proprietary information and then put it through the approval process to get it open sourced.
It’s the same at my current company. Anything we create that doesn’t divulge proprietary company information belongs to us and the customer.
If you come to AWS’s own Professional Services division , what are you going to do? Say you’re going to another consulting division that’s better?
I worked on mostly frameworks around AWS that are reusable across implementations and then put any custom business logic as a layer on top of it.
If you really want to drag privilege into this, if anything it speaks to your own to think that people in tough circumstances have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.
The reality is you probably are privileged, and so am I compared to my parents who grew up on mud floors and lost siblings to easily preventable conditions, and that's why it's pointless to go around Hacker News of all places and throw around the "you're privileged card"... like 99.9% of the people here aren't also just for having the time to be here.
There's a difference between knowing something and remembering it.
And you call that "privilege"?
Just to point out, it seems to be fairly common for people in some South East Asian cultures to value job stability over pretty much everything else.
"It's your job as the breadwinner to provide stability for our family" type of thing.
For many of them, there is no way the wife would allow (!) their husband to quit their job when there is any other option on the table.
By preparation I mean always be networking, keep my reputation spotless, keep my resume updated, keep my skills current with the market and keep my “career document” updated.
My wife has seen how efficient I am with getting a job six times over the 12 years we have been married.
We were both laid off from the job we worked at when the company folded when we were still dating. I had a contract lined up the following Monday. When that contract was unexpectedly terminated, I had an offer four days later.
This time I had a contract lined up a week before my last day and a full time job three weeks later. The only thing special about me is my network
I guess if I were close to my next vesting date I would have tried to hang on.
If this is your first year take the pip plus the appeal for the maximum payout.
Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.
Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.
I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.
“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”
I reviewed them all.
At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.
He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.
“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.
HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.
How did this play out after that for you? Or him, for that matter, if you know.
Somewhat similar thing happened on the final review, but without pointing to hard data of the fact. The decision of course remained final, the manager got a light, informal water cooler “hey be more careful of optics” chat, and that was it.
Notably when the former employee tried to go a competitor, former company killed that.
I got a new job, fairly quickly. No-one asked about my leaving there in any depth (the joys of COVID-era business).
As for my manager, I suspect like the other reply - probably not much happened to him, other than to provide at least token optics. It's one thing for it to be a foregone conclusion, but another if somehow the ex-employee turns around and sues for termination/discrimination and it's demonstrable that the company "had it in" for the employee (i.e. setting goals and not even attempting to review efforts and then documenting that they did review).
I honestly didn’t read the write up or the parts I needed to improve to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the documentation.
I skipped right down to the amount of severance, went online to sign the paperwork and started looking for a job the same day.
Fighting to keep a job that doesn’t want you is like fighting to keep a girlfriend.
I kept him abreast of the entire process I went through and the warning signs so he could be ready.
Yes it sucks because no matter how much money he saves and how financially prepared he was, he would have to find another full time job quickly.
I knew worst case I could put my virtual shingle out and do independent AWS consulting. I had a dormant LLC already that I could reactivate, I had a network and other consulting companies fall all over themselves to hire former ProServe consultants.
He was just as good in his specialty as I was in mine.
Another guy got sick of the project and got a job at Netflix in the data department.
It was my second job I had after starting my recovery from “expert beginnerism” where I had been at my second job for nine years.
I knew I had to learn how to place nice with people to get to the next step in my career and I also knew that I could get a job quickly - it was 2014. On top of that there was project I was leading I wanted to finish.
I’m glad I did work through it. It was a great learning experience.
Honestly the focus period at AWS made me step my game up and prepared me for my current architectural leadership position at my current company.
I’ve never had to lead an initiative at this scale before inside a company and they wouldn’t have trusted me to do without AWS on my resume.
I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements or take a severance that’s one month severance for each year you worked there + the partial year or “leave Amazon”.
If you fail the PIP you only get 1/3 of the amount.
If you appeal and lose you only get 1/2 of the 1/3.
Who would want to work there after they have already showed their true colors?
Amazon ain’t that serious to work for.
I worked there remotely knowing full well what Amazon was about from day one. It was my 8th job. I made my money, put it on my resume and gladly chose to “Leave Amazon” with a decent severance and had a job within three weeks.
People who choose to try to fight and stay after a PIP is like begging to stay in an abusive relationship.