Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/work and the technology shifted. My disability isn't suited to the new working style/process (or lack of). However, I do excellent work outside of my regular day to day responsibilities, like my secondary role as an ASC. My manager even said that I'd I could just speed up my regular work I would easily get the highest rating and a promotion. Hearing him say that really sucks because I unable to just speed up with my disability in the given work environment. The company/managers have made no effort in helping me find a role that works better with my skills or is impacted less by my disability. It seems there may not be any of the traditional roles/teams left. So now I fill midlevel roles and move team to team trying to find somewhere that I fit in. If I can find a place I fit in like before, then I would easily excel.
Another example was a dev on another team that I worked with a few years ago was sloppy, slow, and just all around seemed like a poor performer - and even our tech lead and manager talked poorly about him. He was even considerably slower than me. About 3 years after that he's now the head of data and analytics for our international operations.
Wall St firms I have worked at typically try to find different roles for people before marking them as at risk of a layoff. Not sure FAANG behaves the same, but from all these PIP discussions it seems not.
They encouraged those laid off to apply for open roles. But of course it read to employees as a monumental “fuck you.”
Some industries coach the employee into a different role, or help them exit more openly.
Explains the cyclical visits from Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
Having been past the PIP/Pivot process, certainly I don't want to return.
Like some weird inverse of the "You can't fire me, I quit!" trope.
[0] P.S.: Even if the employee left for a more prestigious role in another company, the social-circles in the old company aren't forced to acknowledge that the same way as if it were an internal move: HR will just say "they left to pursue other opportunities", and that permits the assumption that that the worker--their incompetence discovered--has fallen into ignominious chronic unemployment.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/best-and-wor...
In reality, our unemployment insurance is a scam of how pathetic it pays. Again, it's another example of how the middle class gets squeezed both ends, and little care expended on the actual problems.
I can see why republicans get elected - they lower taxes on my bracket so I keep more money in hand. But that's because the very policies that should help everyone don't help everyone cause of shitty means testing.
Now , when I got fired from shitty food service job, unemployment was close to in parity with what I made, so it was useful then. (I just want it useful for everyone, not just low paid.)
I can't change jobs now due to home life responsibilities and having specialized in dead tech.
I have picked up responsibilities. In the past I've filled the role of a senior dev for a year and a tech lead for another. I volunteered to be an ASC. I volunteered for all sorts of other responsibilities.
Perhaps the world doesn't work in the way that you think. It's not possible for everyone to successfully job hop, especially with a disability and home responsibilities. Just picking up responsibilities doesn't mean you'll get rewarded.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to attack, or otherwise offend you. I was attempting to say that one can look for an opportunity to work in an environment where one can feel appreciated. I'd employ a person with such experience as long as they'd know some basics. What's TLS, how does it work, roughly. What's DNS. TCP vs UDP. At least understanding of what problems are solved (or created, if you are in that camp) by Kubernetes. Docker basics. Read open source code.
Those are interesting subjects. I'm sure there is a ton of hypothetical past problems one could attempt to modernize and have fun while doing so.
It's just a free opinion of someone on the internet!
Then don’t do that?
I’ve been working professionally for 27 years and have been aggressive about keeping pace with technology. I saw what happened first hand when I didn’t between around 2002-2008 and I said it would never happen again.
For reference: I didn’t know “cloud” from a hole in the wall at 44 years old and I got my first and hopefully last job in BigTech at 46 working at AWS in the ProServe department (where I got PIPed see my top level comment)
It is completely irresponsible for anyone in tech especially with a family to not always keep themselves employable and depend on the whims of thier current employer to support their families addiction to food, clothing and shelter.
And how does a disability preclude you from getting a remote job?
And if you “can’t job hop”, would you not look for another job if you got laid off or fired or would you just give up and be on the street - homeless and hungry?
> Just picking up responsibilities doesn't mean you'll get rewarded.
I’m always rewarded for picking up additional responsibilities - if not by the current company by the next. It’s what allows me to aggressively job hop with a family and not be stuck with dead technologies on my resume.
Not everyone's life is as easy as you make your's out to be.
If you don’t make time now to upskill, what do you think is going to happen if/when you don’t have a choice but to look for a job and be stuck with in your words “dead tech”.
The difference is that if I lost this job I would then have time during the day to look for jobs or study when I would have been working.
I don't really care what will happen. My area is shitty for tech work, my wife won't move, and I'm ill suited to remote work. I'm just coasting now. There's no point in upskilling until I would know what skills the other company would want because there are so many different things they could wanting the tech changes so fast.
That’s why you do volunteer for opportunities where you can up skill on the job and while you are still employed you find another job where you can get in based on what you know and then transition
Lol so I'm in a catch 22 and your precious advice does not apply.
"That’s why you do volunteer for opportunities where you can up skill on the job"
That's not how my org works.
After a point it just becomes part of the landscape, a pervasive culture of not recognizing what good leadership looks like, and people filtering out of the industry because they're over it.
They can't discriminate against you for this.
The old model of working was that you supported 1 main app and maybe a smaller 1 or 2 that were related. These were usually in 1 stack and well documented. The new model is that teams are typical supporting 6-10 apps in multiple stacks. I'm slow when switching between apps and stacks, and without consistent exposure to a single app/stack, I won't get faster.
It's funny though - they talk a big game and even hire in Auticon contractors, but then refuse to do anything for existing employees. I assume a least some of those contractors have similar difficulties as me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423
The risk/reward isn’t worth it unless you’re close to a vesting period.
That energy can be better spent looking for a new job. My granddad use to tell me to never chase after old money or old girlfriends.
fat is fat. muscle is muscle. one does not convert into another. it can be broken down into energy to be used but ultimately each cell starts from scratch.
Burn fat = PIP bottom 6%
Grown new muscle = Hire new workers
The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.
However, on the bright side, it is kind of nice that FAANG attracts the type of people who actually think this sort of constant stack ranking arena fighting is okay. Think about it: if they really hated it, they'd leave. Obviously the pay is a huge motivator, but if it was as distasteful as it was to many others, they wouldn't hang around.
But understand, I am not asserting that FAANG companies are places nobody wants to work. I'm asserting that they are places I am not willing to work at. It's because I would be utterly miserable in that sort of working environment, and there is no amount of compensation that could make that tolerable to me.
I very much made two decisions this year after being Amazoned that prioritized my stress level over money.
1. Deciding not to put my shingle up and go independent. I have the network, the credentials and the knowledge to make more than I was making at Amazon going that route
2. Turning down a position that was going to be created for me by a former coworjer now director to be responsible for the cloud migration and infrastructure for a $7 billion public non tech company that would have also paid more in cash than my total comp at Amazon.
No, I never struck it rich in tech, I was a journeymen CRUD developer/architect when I got hired with two years of AWS experience and above average soft skills.
That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for them regardless of the talent of those individual people.
Ex: "Are you willing to spend your free time becoming the General's #1 personal servant? No? Sorry, there's no place for you in the infantry."
If one goes by job description Amazon is acting strictly within those parameters. And that race to the bottom is not really hunger games.
On the other hand if one goes by unsaid rules of games, everyone including management, HR, employee know FAANG salary is multiple times of equivalent IT workers. And perhaps 95% of FAANG employees are not really developing new algorithms, hauling terabytes of data on their shoulders or being the force of good whatever that means. Just keep doing made-up work and wait until reach x million dollars goal. After that leave quietly or loudly by writing a nasty blog post lambasting management.
So mostly people understand they have to keep up the facade because talking about what's really happening will make it rather awkward for everyone.
Maybe their executives should stick to peeing in bottles.
The engineers I know who work at those places wouldn't agree. But how true that is depends a lot on what sorts of things tend to bother you.
if FAANGs can get away with treating their employees like dog s*t then there must be vast over supply of talent.
Not according to everyone I know working at a FAANG company. This is mythology. You're at a FAANG because you did the LeetCode grind and passed the interview.
FAANG employees are no different from you and I in the aggregate. That's not a dig, that's just statistics.
I guess, if the discipline is corruption. My company doesn't feel the need to tell me how to avoid discussing sensible topics with my teammates on group chat.
Yeah, because technical merit isn't the only way you get ranked in the stack. For instance, would you say no to an ethically questionable order if you're on a PIP?
In tech, good luck. It's all vibes.
This, exactly. The world is full of lies, lies people honestly believe.
For example, have you seen a situation when parents feed a child, and try to get the kid to eat a bit more even when the child is full? What do they tell the kid - eat some more, it's good for you. Why do they really do it?
Because kids get hungry more often than adults, it's annoying / sometimes not possible / practical to stop to feed them as often. So we lie to them.
The coal miners' solution was to get a bunch of guns and/or gasoline, and either pump bullets in the bosses' house, or to torch it with gasoline. Usually both.
That was responded to by bringing in the Pinkertons (private military), along with the US military. These got horrifically bloody.
And it got to a point, that by the 1920's, the USA had a strong representation of US Communist Party. 1927 really cemented that they were right in the long run. However, FDR sold the Communists out with "labor reforms" that paled in comparison to what the Communists wanted.
Now, FDR's reforms lasted until the late 60's and 70's. Capital was able to get enough property and money, that they ended up *buying* the governmental reforms one politician at a time.
Well, perhaps heads will have to roll again, to reset Capital. They're not going to willingly cede property/money/power. And this time, they bought government. And it's obvious that the NLRB and the DoL is going to do diddly. But whatever it is, I hope it's peaceful. But knowing labor history through the ages and US specifically, it will be anything but.
Seriously? 30% of the population believes whateber chatgt-bot tells them is true on twitter
> Stop waiting on government regulators for action
I think the key is that there is likely to be violence. Look at how clinate protesters are treated.
How does that relate to capital and jobs? Unlike physical mining and physical manufacturing, capital is not a gating feature of bits and bytes tech startups.
We saw violent destruction during covid lockdowns by BLM. What did that accomplish?
Does 'tech' just mean software to you? like what about 95% of the economy, you need capital even for ebikes
> We saw violent destruction during covid lockdowns by BLM. What did that accomplish?
I am not spokesperson for BLM, and not from US.
But UK had similar riots when the Government made a pledge not to raise univeristy fees, and in the first 3 months they raised them, and then killed a student at a protest. So protests turned into riots.
Iam not sure whats new here, we knew for thousands of years - You fuck around and piss off like a million people, eventually you are gonna find out.
The WFH thing is the only maybe, but you see how companies don't want that? It is much more about control than performance, as is usually the case with Capital.
I've worked on many high-performing teams where you couldn't find 6%, or 1-in-18 of people who shouldn't be there.
However, I've never worked for an entire fast growing company where I couldn't readily pick out 1-in-18 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone knew it.
Hiring is far from perfect and these companies are growing quickly. Combined with turnover, you're bringing in a large number of new developers every year. Some people are really good at Leetcode and interviewing, but don't actually like to do work at jobs, for example.
IMO, the problem comes when these arbitrary thresholds are applied at low levels like individual teams. If you take a group of 18 people and declare that 1 of them must be fired every year no matter what, it's terrible. On the other hand, if you were to look at a large department of 1000 people and went through everyone's performance closely, I don't think it would be hard to identify 60 people who weren't working out.
The other problem is that some people have become really good at gaming this system. Every time I've worked at a company that does arbitrary culling of employees, there was always a contingent of old timers who had mastered the system years ago and never found themselves up for consideration to PIP. Either they were friends with management, had some arcane knowledge that they refused to let anyone else access, or they were really good at buttering up their manager come performance review time. I can think of one guy who was always fighting with everyone and refusing to do work, but would become the sweetest, most helpful hero a couple times a year when some high profile issue came up. He'd work 16 hour days for a couple weeks, emergent triumphantly with some solution, then disappear again for another 6 months. Untouchable, yet clearly the lowest net performer on the team.
Most tech companies I've worked for in the past years have had about 30-40% new people every year through a combination of natural turnover and growth.
You're right that if a company never grows and nobody ever leaves yet they still try to isolate 6% to fire every year, that's a bad practice.
However, nobody gets hiring perfectly right. When you're hiring hundreds of people every year into a department, you're going to get a couple people who don't work out.
I think people on HN get nervous around these discussions because they imagine companies as static collections of individuals, but at a high growth company you actually have a lot of new people coming through all the time.
It's also bad when companies never fire anyone. If you just let everyone stay until they quit, you accumulate a lot of people who aren't working out while their high performing coworkers get frustrated and leave. I've seen this situation too and it's not good.
If your hiring quality is uniform, there’s only about a 5.6% chance the new guy gets fired next year. Instead they’ll go after someone else. For an average tenure of 3 years that’s closer to 1/6 chance of ending up on a PIP. Higher if they hand out extra PIPs in order to hit the quota.
It is often clear that some teams are about 50% underperform while others are close to 0%.
FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to:
Underperforming: ~12%
Meeting or Exceeding: ~80%
Better than exceeding: ~8%
All that said, every company and even org within a company have their own goals, targets, processes, and flows, and my experience was pre-COVID, so I'm also sure that any needle movement has been in the direction of harsher evaluations.
I’d imagine the scale to be: 1. Not Meeting Expectations 2. Meeting Expectations 3. Exceeding expectations
A lot of north american modern management theory seems to think that praising your employees is the best way to get them to perform. By telling someone who's good but not great a "You got exceed expectations!!" they'll feel like they are valued.
It's actually the opposite. The ratings themselves are associated with multipliers for your annual bonus and stock grants. IIRC, the full spectrum of ratings and multipliers was:
Meets None (0.0) -> Meets Some (0.5) -> Meets Most (0.85) -> Meets (1.0) -> Exceeds (1.25) -> Greatly Exceeds (2.0) -> and Redefines (3.0)
Ignoring the company multiplier, which was always a value slightly greater than 1.0 when I was there (that may not be true now), for a Senior Engineer (L5) with a $175k salary, 15% bonus target, and annual stock grant of $110k vesting over 4 years , the value of the rating to them at each exceeds level would be:
Exceeds: ~$12k / year
Greatly Exceeds: ~$53k / year
Redefines: ~$107k / year
Of course we are talking about companies that are paying too much in the first place, so maybe they’ll be forgiven for trying to bring the slope down a bit.
Long term, it has been a disaster in every company. Because eventually you run out of fat, and then what you describe as "far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone" becomes "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat.
In short, stack ranking makes some sense if you have a fat organization, not unlike restricting calories to lose fat when working out. But once you've lost fat, continuing to restrict your calories results in losing more muscle than fat.
There's a great long-form article on this called "Microsoft's Lost Decade."
GE was run into the ground by his tenure.
Because why should they have to listen to anyone who hasn't gotten as good performance reviews as them? Obviously, they care more and those other slackers just couldn't cut it.
I heard some of the cyber warfare units are proposing to bring in people in as high as O5. No way that causes any related problems...
The other part of the problem is yes, there are times when the military has every right to expect folks to endure hardship. I mean, the whole point is to send folks into combat if needed, and combat sucks. Being in the field or underway for months at a time sucks, but they're necessary. But because of this, it's easy to slip into "just suck it up" as a response to a whole bunch of hardship, stupidity, or inefficiency that isn't necessary.
The reserves have their own breed of stupidity revolving around reserve center staff enforcing Kafkaesque bureaucratic "readiness" requirements on the drilling reservists. At some point, taking 1/4 of your weekends off to come in and be told you're delinquent on something you turned in three times already, or having to flail to complete some late-breaking tasker gets old. I loved supporting my gaining active duty commands. I retired because I got sick of the hoops I had to jump through to keep doing it.
Cyber is having to bring folks in at a high level to get the experience base they desperately need. This isn't totally unusual though. Surgeons have come in at that level when the military has needed their expertise. And in WWII, FDR brought in an automotive executive as a general officer to supervise wartime production.
Funny thing about the surgeon part. I know a surgeon who served and had a unique specialty with aerospace occupational preventative medicine. They didn't fight too hard to keep them other than offering a promotion. Even at O6, they could have been making 3x the money if they were a civilian. Bringing people in at a higher rank isn't going fix the pay issue and isn't necessarily going to place them in the right level of authority. They need to make some changes to how that's managed to ensure the right people are at the right levels. I'm sure there are career guys who would not be happy to have someone with limited experience come in over their rank and pay if they're doing the same job.
Tries is the key word there. Most of the time it's not even close unless you're a family practicioner or other lower paid specialty. On the other hand, there is a retirement program (although that's based on base pay and not as great for roles like this) and they don't need mal-practice. At least to me, it seems the biggest way they get docs is to pay for their med school if they commit to 8-12 years or whatever it is for them now.
"To bring an O-5 cyber person in, they would be expected to have enough experience as a cybersecurity professional to rate that rank."
I mean, that makes sense in a general sense, but doesn't really make sense the way it works now. There are plenty of people with experience that if they were external would come in at a higher rank than they are now. I'm not sure how you would design a good system for an industry where people jump companies every 2-3 years, are expecting high pay (at least O5 with 10 years), are used to rapid promotions, and are used to lots of perks. I mean, you could have someone with 5 years of internal experience with a great record be something like O3 and have someone external be called a senior analyst/dev or lead in 3-5 years and come in as an O5 with basically no difference in duties or performance.
Although I'm not sure how you would even measure performance in that role. The industry doesn't have clue how to measure it - just look at the article or all the stuff about interviews and leetcode. The military might set some more objective standards, but they're not going to remotely apply to external candidates.
I don't know, I guess in general I would imagine the best thing for stability, readiness, and even morale, would be to train and promote from within while focusing on retention. It sounds like they're already providing bonuses for all levels and saying they're focusing on retention, but clearly they have other issues. I doubt bringing people in at a higher rank will fix that.
Direct pay, benefits, promotion velocity, source of commission were all extensively tracked and modeled. The problem at that point was that you can claim you want a 600 ship navy, but if you don’t have enough surface warfare officers with the right number of years (or dentists or chaplains or JAG lawyers) it’s not going to work.
On the other hand despite our multimillion dollar contract to work on this software, I have no idea if BUPERS actually used it.
I guess it's not all that much different than what we see in some areas of civilian industry. The lower paying companies know they can't compete on salary so they start implementing what I call "naturally capped" benefits. Stuff like parental leave, fertility help, etc. Stuff that, while excellent to have, either effects a small minority or where people only get to claim it an average of 2.5 times in their life (eg costs the employer less than higher pay). It's something recruiters can use in their pitch to distract from pay.
It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.
It's all about gaming the system here.
I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume.
Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is.
On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA".
I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary.
I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure.
That's the case with leetcode problems.
It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.
> prolific open source contributors...struggling to get a job
The market selects the best, if it's best at lying, who are we to tell the invisible hand that it's wrong? /s
I've seen environments where a certain amount of manipulating the truth is expected. Individuals eventually figure out what's expected of them.
You know it's not the truth, they know it's not the truth, and you know they know.
Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those who made it through were absolutely qualified and great to work with. There certainly wasn't 30% to cull. In my opinion there wasn't even enough people to fill the percentage quota that need to be given ratings lower than satisfactory - before the layoffs. After them, the fact that they're still enforcing these quotas on teams is absurd cruelty that kills morale.
I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.
You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.
I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.
Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work.
Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon.
It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation.
I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.
Generally a mix of people who exhausted other paths to higher compensation by their mid 30s - mid 40s (senior management track / trader track) and this was the next big thing.
We're they from a top tier IB, top tier HF or Prop trading company?
Or from lower tier IB/HF/Trading company or worse one of the 1000's of fintechs.
Source: I worked at AWS ProServe for a little over 3 years and saw how hard it was to detangle BigEnterprise from Microsoft
Google already seems like an also-ran, and did you even know that Oracle has a cloud offering too?
>time and motivation to grind
>pass an interview
Let's be honest, what more are we looking for?
The assumption is that though interview processes are acknowledged as imperfect, they're largely considered to measure something like productivity or worker value.
Under that assumption, then it should be exceedingly difficult to "cheat" the interviews such that a person could do great at an interview, and be of low "worker value". Not impossible, but difficult. And I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but if we were to do a survey here on HN, the most likely consensus on how difficult that is would be something like "it's actually more difficult to fake it in the interview than to just be good enough at what you say you're good at".
Imagine if you were one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but to be "hired on" to the Olympic team they decided to interview you for it. Sure, they'd probably ask in the interview what your latest 100M times were, stuff like that, but after the interview they'd all talk privately about whether or not you were a good "culture fit", and whether your smile was sincere or fake, whether you were too nervous or smooth and a "real go-getter". In such an environment, the Olympic team might well have 30% of its members that could be safely culled. The only jobs interviewing is even a good process for are those jobs where the actual work itself resembles interviewing... sales positions, PR, being the "public face" of an organization (news anchors, I dunno). The reason we use interviewing for technology jobs is because that's what the big bosses know works for their jobs, a CEO is the public face of the organization.
I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people.
So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.
Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).
To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.
Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?
No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go.
Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.
Think - Google Bard vs Search vs Ads vs Youtube vs their 27 different chat/video apps vs .. etc.
The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.
Again, I think you are confusing layoffs, which are a reduction in headcount for a department/team, with attrition, where the people themselves are let go but the headcount remains so you can hire to replace them.
With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.
I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.
There's no contradiction. No interview process can avoid low performers. There will always be unmotivated people, people who are difficult to work with and so on...
But yes, this isn't cool, but at least, people working there have very high compensation and know it's a competitive environment.
Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff.
Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.
It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.
No interview process is perfect. Companies, no matter how 'high the entry barrier' make mistakes when hiring. This is how they've decided to correct it.
You mean ... Leetcode?
I would categorize it as an artificial high barrier to entry that is based on how much you study and a bit of luck. If anything, it is designed to make employees believe they are top-tier.
Of all the FAANG, I almost admire Amazon for chewing up & disposing of their white collar work force the same way they do their blue collar.
The other guys are all pretty bad to work for at the bottom non-SWE tiers, but have cushy SWE adult daycare office environments. At least Amazon treats all their employees as disposable?
I love that description
There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.
I completed them. All of them.
My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).
I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...
What really ground my gears?
"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."
I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."
And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.
I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.
Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
About this point he turned his camera off.
Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.
He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.
HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest 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).
Whereas a terrible manager is worth their weight in radioactive drum of sludge. They will poison products, projects, AND people.
It's my belief that only when management IS the labor, will this be settled (worker cooperatives). Unions are only a band-aid to what amounts to arterial spray and broken bones.
For insult on injury, they declined severance "as we do not offer severance for performance-related termination", after acknowledging that my manager had done nothing to assess my performance in the PIP (I suppose their claim will be that the performance issues led to the PIP).
Focus on yourself. Your greatest power is not in arguing with a boss who doesn't like you. You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch. Start interviewing and work for another company and find someone who does like working with you. Maybe even go work for yourself.
Even when working for yourself, this actually still holds. When it's miserable working with a client, don't "PROVE" to them they are idiots. Do you really want to keep working with someone you've had to do this with? Again, move on.
I've had this happen a few times where the previous boss / client remembers me fondly - and I don't hate them either at the end of it.
In this case, if they had fought unemployment, there was factual and objective evidence against their case. "On review, his work output was unsatisfactory". "According to Google, you never reviewed said work output."
> You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch.
This pissed me off - I could easily have switched teams, even per my manager. Until he announced that I was now on a PIP. No manager is going to approve a transfer to their team, then.
Like I said, I had no expectations that any of this would change anything with respect to my termination. I'd moved on, and wouldn't want to keep being there.
But worst case scenario: "The employee's plan said that they could do X, Y and Z. You stated that they were terminated because they didn't do X, Y and Z." "Yes." "How did you determine that?" "By reviewing those things." "But it can be demonstrated that you conducted no such review."
In my state, that would mean they'd have to demonstrate that I was actually fired for misconduct, not performance, to make me ineligible for benefits.
Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.
So if your stock grants & stock price performance after the third year weren't "just so" you could see your TC slip because the salary subsidy went away.
> underperformers lying about to cull
is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.
Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?
Because this ignores reality. Especially at FAANG companies, growth is expected and the majority of compensation is stock. If you stop growing, and stop having a profit, your stock tanks, and future compensation - as well as compensation from years prior that is still in the form of company stock - becomes worth much less. You can't hire people who are as good because you're "in decline." Your products falter because talent leaves and you can't find new talent. Even if all the above is imagined (it's not) you now have real impacts in terms of declining application quality and shrinking user bases.
Do you have a retirement plan that contains stock or get any options/stock grants as part of your compensation? Those shares are your ownership stake in corporations and your retirement quite directly depends on those shares increasing in price faster than inflation.
Interview process doesn’t test for everyday laziness. A lot of very smart people who easily solve leetcode are just coasting at their jobs.
Since when did being "humane" contribute to profit?
>Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance
The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance. The company doesn't care what ex-employees think.
Better than a pervasive dread amongst the whole workforce.
<<The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance.
Lol. No. They make them think about whether they can jump ship. edit: Basically, only ones without any options stay.
1. Carefully review and test 500 models.
2. Buy what seems to be the best 55.
3. Rank what you have, and return the worst 10 out of 55.
4. Repeat careful reviewing of other possible models.
5. Buy another 10 microwave ovens.
6. GOTO step three.
I thought that constantly hiring and firing was common practice. It also puts e.oyees under stress. Maybe it started at GE?
I do not like it, but I can see the sociopathic boss' point of view.
There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually.
So really it's overhiring BS that is then getting taken out on employees. Given that, I think as has been pointed out by another commenter - the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance, generally. Seems better than year round psychological torture of being at risk of a PIP, and then if being put on one knowing the most likely outcome is being fired. So you feel dragged through the mud and then having doubly failed (put on PIP & failed the PIP).
I knew a guy who moved from Wall St to Amazon and described the performance management / compensation system to be pretty rough and had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff.