LE 4 years in a row, lessons learned.

#Amazon, #PIP, #Devlist

A little over 4 years ago, I joined Amazon. My skill set was a mixed bag, with solid depth in a number of areas (beyond what most folks at my level had), but gaps in areas that turned out to be core to the first team I joined. My hiring manager assured me there would be time to learn on the job (though he said this without full awareness of my deficits), so I joined.

As it turned out, the other folks hired all had between 4-10 years of experience with one or both of the core languages used by our team, while I had only dabbled in them. I worked hard to catch up, and my colleagues provided some helpful CR feedback, but much of it was also adversarial in nature (e.g. demanding significant refactors on throw away code just so they could be seen as "insisting on the highest standards"). Folks on that team worked hard. 40 hours a week during the honey moon phase (when the team was just starting up), but between 60-80 hours per week soon after. I made significant progress in closing the gap, but didn't have an opportunity to leverage the unique skills I possessed that my colleagues did not. As a consequence, I got an LE rating my first year. It progressed to a PIP, which I passed. Passing however required competing heavily with aggressive teammates to get key features pushed to production, making it a phyrric victory.

I was given an LE rating again the 2nd year because of the mixed feedback my colleagues provided and because they were still more productive on our technology stack in some of the core ways. I passed the devlist projects soon after however, and began to hit my stride, ultimately leading an effort to launching a highly successful experiment for Amazon. My manager supported a non-LE rating in my 3rd year, however, a new Director was assigned above us and he decided I should have another LE rating because "I needed to be on Devlist for the first part of the year". He acknowledged it was a chicken and egg conundrum, and wrote a letter to HR asking that I not be put on devlist for a 3rd time because my performance was solid since removal from the 2nd devlist. Unfortunately, I would spend the next year and a half on devlist before finally requesting to be moved to PIVOT so that I could collect a severance and leave.

The last year and a half was the was the worst (though most lucrative) time of my career. I spent it with a new manager, lets call her Kali (as in Kali the destroyer), as my previous manager left Amazon. Soon after comp conversations happened in Spring 2019, she became openly hostile, and made attempts to convince me, and my colleagues, that my 3 previous LE ratings meant I wasn't up to the task of working at amazon; and assigned me to projects that were obviously going nowhere. In each case, I worked to demonstrate the assigned projects were either duplicative of other existing efforts or premature optimizations, and simultaneously worked on new projects that had relevance to the teams core goals. I documented everything and got HR involved. I succeeded on project after project for the next year and half, not significantly missing any deadlines, while I observed my teamates frequently missing deadlines by weeks to months.

6 months into working for her, things got temporarily better as i was put beneath one of her subordinate managers and received excellent feedback--which she would describe as promo-doc feedback to him. He and I worked great together for a few months, and he planned to remove me from the dev list (Focus as it is now called), however, he delayed doing so because Kali wanted to use me to meet her quota of LE ratings for 2019, with the understanding that I wouldn't have to repeat being in Focus because I would be removed right after the Focus auto enrollment occurs in April for LEs. Unfortunately, Kali and my new manager's relationship went sideways and she pushed him out of the company, and resumed targeting me. Specifically, she held a roadmap progress check with me and my collaborators in which she coerced one of ICs present to send out fallacious meeting minutes that heaped blame on me for delays in the project. I corrected the record immediately and provided documentation to the attendees and HR disproving the allegations and further showing that my work was only a few days behind schedule while my collaborators (who were working upstream of me) were many weeks delayed.

Despite completing the project successfully, I was asked to do another 3 month Focus project using mostly new technology. I went along with it initially until I hit my 4th year vest, but soon after I lost motivation and requested to be put in PIVOT to get a severance.

Having been in devilst / Focus for 2.5 years in total, I learned a lot about the system.
1. Its not enough to perform at a high level to get out. Your manager has to like you and be willing to fight for you (at some else's expense). If your manager doesn't like you, there's a good chance the best you can hope for is a stalemated war of attrition, in which you work 1.5 to 2x as hard as your colleagues just to avoid going over the edge to PIVOT.
2. HR and upper management talk a big game about ethical integrity, but I never saw a manager get penalized for fabrication or coercion, even when I presented them with definitive evidence.
3. With each additional LE you receive, it becomes increasingly difficult to convince anyone you should be removed from the performance management system. By the end, I was expected to perform essentially at an L6 level (I was an L5) just to meet expectations.
4. No company is a pure meritocracy. The teams / orgs I was a part of didn't come close to being one.
5. Don't join a company with substantial unregretted attrition targets like Amazon if you have skill gaps your colleagues can criticize, but don't also have the political power to get them to go easy on you in their feedback...which possibly means getting them to go hard on somebody else who doesn't deserve it.
6. Psychologically, the challenges shift over time when being performance managed for a prolonged period. Initially, my response to each devlist / Focus entry were the classic stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance...followed by periods of highly focused production. However, with my 3rd entry, acceptance had a different meaning. I accepted I had no career at Amazon, but that it was worth it to fight on because I had (a) more to learn, and (b) and significant RSUs to vest.
7. Surviving on devlist usually requires some aspect of your life outside of work to suffer / end...whether it be a relationship, or a deeply meaningful pursuit (like mastering yoga or volunteering). Its not just the extra work that got in the way for me, but the adversarial calculations my mind couldn't help but constantly perform.

In my time at Amazon, I learned a ton, became an expert in many exciting areas, and got paid very well. I also probably aged 2 times as fast (if someone was looking at stuff like my horvath clock and telomere lengths), and feel like the network I built there is largely dead / not something I want to touch again.

At the end of today though, I am happy to be moving on.

Base: 152K
RSUs over 4 years: 200
sign on bonus: 74K over first 2 years.