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Through some backchanneling with a manager I had been friends with before he joined Amazon, I found out I had been placed on the devlist the same week my friends left the team. No performance issues were ever discussed with me, and at that point in my career I'm very confident I didn't have any. I am pretty sure management of my team guessed (correctly) that I would try to leave once my friends were gone, and worried the entire team would implode with additional departures, and all institutional knowledge of a shitty old perl/mason/codigo codebase that needed to be maintained would implode with it. So I am pretty sure they placed me on the devlist purely as a mechanism to make it difficult for me to leave (I would have needed to get the director / L8 level manager of the team I was attempting to join to override the devlist block. this pretty much never happens unless you have a relationship with that person, and I didn't).
I was never able to get a manager in my org to have an open conversation with me about that, despite lots of effort. Lots of hemming and hawing and a few canceled meetings. I was eventually told I was taken off the devlist, but when I again tried to transfer a year later, found out I was still on it. I'm not sure if it was a case of "forgot to take you off" or "lied" and will never know, but that happened to me circa ~2018.
Edit: Unrelated to your question, but I also suspect having been on one of those lists once and escaped makes you a target to get put on again. No manager backchanneling confirmed that for me, it's just an educated guess. My performance suffered for a couple months at the start of the pandemic for obvious reasons, and I was placed on the devlist again (now called "Focus") around late April / early May 2020. I was never told this, nobody ever said the word "Focus", nor was I given any performance coaching. I was only able to infer it because my manager told me "I don't think you should try to change teams right now", and at that point in my Amazon career I knew what that really meant. I started job hunting immediately, kicked my feet up for a while, and took the severance the moment I was finally pip'd. Worked out extremely well for me actually, but a less experienced employee who might not connect the dots between "don't try to change teams ;)" and "your performance is considered below the bar" would have been blindsided.
Retail on its own has been profitable for several years now, and its margins are improving. Some of those numbers are public and some are not, but even with just the public numbers it is easy enough to infer the above. What's more, Amazon retail would be pretty wildly profitable, relative to the typical margins of retail, if Amazon stopped dumping billions of dollars every quarter into continuous expansion of its logistics capabilities. They're able to dump those billions while still pulling a slight profit. In general though, they optimize for free cash flow, not profit.
Source: worked there until recently
Really? The only differences are the race and sex of the individuals? The white men you mentioned held the same job role, had the same history with the company, attempted to publish the exact same paper, were asked to retract it in the exact same way, sent the exact same angry reactionary email to a large group in their capacity as a manager, and threatened to resign if the exact same conditions were not met in the exact same way? There is simply no way this is true, and it is telling to me that you overlook all of that.
We appear to be living in different realities. The "deep body of scholarship" you refer to is highly disputed, generally hard to replicate, falsify, or use predictively, and not anywhere near being the hard scientific fact you are attempting to anoint it as. I don't much care about the opinions of a couple of individuals with unknown biases and ideologies; I consider their thoughts largely irrelevant. The facts and details of their stories are not however, so if you have them I would appreciate it if you could share.
Why would I think it would depend entirely on details and circumstances...? Why on earth wouldn't it!? The main systemic sexism I remember google being accused of recently was actually underpaying all their male employees [0]
You seem to "know" that sexism and racism are responsible for this, but it seems to me you've started with that conclusion and worked backward. If you are correct, the details of the individual stories should support your view. So I ask again, are those details available?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
The phrasing of your comment strongly implies you think her race or gender was a factor, which I think is a very odd conclusion to jump to if you don't have detailed information about all of the above. Do you?
> You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, men are required by their society to go to work, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.
So I reject your assertion that this is a relation of oppression, unless you are conceding that both members of the relation are equally oppressed (in which case, I would argue that nobody is).
Are you willing to give more details?
I was shocked at the end of your story that it was Amazon you were talking about, but I'm assuming this story happened at least a few years ago. I know of one friend who was put on a PIP around 2013 or 2014 - he is still with the company, has been trusted to be the technical lead for several large and important projects, and the only thing standing between him and a promotion to L6 is laziness in preparing the paperwork.
Amazon seems to have changed the process to what they call the "pivot program" - when previously you would have been put on a PIP (and given severance if you accepted it and failed it), you are now given the choice of
1) take severance
2) appeal (you will almost certainly lose, I don't have data for this but have heard about many of these appeals and exactly zero have gone in favor of the employee)
3) do the PIP, and if you fail it you are fired with no severance
Given that you are now offered severance as an alternative to a PIP and don't get a penny if you fail it, being put in the pivot program is unambiguously a pink slip. Sad to be reminded that Amazon used to be good at this, I don't think they are anymore