Background: Over this weekend many many layoff posts emerged in the Amazon private Blind channel. Some of which expressed anger and frustration about how much dead weight SDMs have been and should be heavily selected to be laid off. For the uninitiated, at Amazon, Software Development Managers (or SDMs) do nothing to help their teams to hit their objectives. Their primary function is to work with HRBP to create a paper trail that makes their reports to look bad in order to PIP their own people. So if you are hired as a Software Engineer here, you are on your own. Any success you have is in spite of your SDM and their efforts against you. This is especially hard for many new hires since to get things done, you need to know many Amazon specific things. The docs are intentionally made to be garbage so that tenured people can retain some job security. If you cannot figure out how to get something done with legacy repos with no READMEs, no docs, or wikis, then your SDM will say you are "below the bar for your level" since you "cannot handle ambiguity." There are many caned lines SDMs use to gaslight and demoralize their team members, this is just one. We all know this. But this weekend people have been posting slack messages by SDMs who have been discussing PIP quotas openly in public slack channels (some of these posts were shared in external Blind posts too), apparently our SDMs do not know how to create private slack channels. In the same way reading about a famous celebrity beating their spouse is different than seeing a video of it happening on TMZ, seeing the SDM messages caused quite an uproar given the cheerful nature of them discussing which one of their reports should lose their jobs and the frequent use of emojis. Some SDMs made posts amounting to basically āitās just business, nothing personalā or āyou must be a low performer broā. It was not well received. All of this to say the masses now hope that if someone should lose their jobs it should be the unproductive members of Amazon, SDMs. What everyone else here needs to do: First off please help all the great ICs here that has to work so hard in such bleak conditions to keep this place running. They truly deserve a helping hand given the ordeal they have been through. Hereās the second part that is also important, we all need to work together to stop the spread of these SDMs from contaminating the workplaces within our industry. Once they have the upper hand they will sit on your backs and watch you toil and call you a ālow performer.ā DO NOT give them that chance. If you are on an interview panel of an Amazon SDM, SINK THEM! Make sure their careers die at Amazon. Trust me you do not want to be under the thumb of one of these guys. Let us all work together here to make our industry more hospitable, letās hold the line.
Stop this non sense fear mongering. Been at both and Amazon SDMs show way more ownership than Meta EMs. Yes, pip is there, but they are forced to do that. If they don't do it, they will be pipped.
We should totally have sdm ratings on blind. Atleast that way there is some fucking accountability.
What happened to chime?
Stupid post! SDMs are messengers for PIP in Most of the cases and donāt shoot the messenger! Also SDMs get the PIP
Bound to have a bias when they are part of a barbaric practice
HR Block does this. I asked so many times and gave up. > The docs are intentionally made to be garbage so that tenured people can retain some job security. If you cannot figure out how to get something done with legacy repos with no READMEs, no docs, or wikis, then your SDM will say you are "below the bar for your level" since you "cannot handle ambiguity." There are many caned lines SDMs use to gaslight and demoralize their team members, this is just one.
Pls lay me off
Easy there killer. The Sr SDM was obviously very dumb for not having their SDM channel set to private, but she literally is just doing what happens behind the scenes for all managers at nearly all companies. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple. Canāt speak to Google since have never been there. But entire orgs are stacked ranked in an afternoon for yearly reviews at all these companies and people are losing their shit that they were going to discuss low performers within 24-hours.
Poor L4, so triggered by logic.
Op is getting laid off?
I said it before and will say it 5 million times more because itās obvious blind wants to ignore this. PIPs will be the downfall of Amazon and any other company that wants to follow their PIP culture. It creates a culture of fear and creates a culture of zero teamwork. The things like nothing being documented is intentional because it creates job security for individuals but hurts the company. This is result of PIP culture. Long term you will have a company with lots of hidden knowledge, combined with a company no one wants to work for. That is not a sustainable model for the long term. This is already playing out. Leaked internal documents showed Amazon has concerns with dealing with turnover and hiring people at all levels of Amazon, not just warehouses. Anyways, enjoy. Amazon sounds like a sh*thole company and sounds like a sh*thole company to work for.
^ nothing being documented is a big lie... there is a fantastic ramp up at company level, most orgs also have a very structure ramp up, and at team level most of the teams also have some internal documentation section just for new hiresā¦ Is that enough to be productive? Probably notā¦ but the next step is to read the codeā¦ yesā¦ programmers need to read others peopleās codeā¦ Also keep in mind all the documentation tools are collaborative, if a new hire learn something that consider is important is their responsibility to add it in the documentationā¦
You just proved my point bozo. Read your last sentence. How does your culture make anyone want to document what they learn? It doesnāt. As doing so means they potentially take away any advantage they have since you require x amount of employees to be PIPād and fired over a certain period of time. So there is zero motivation of teamwork. Your system doesnāt reward it and actively punishes it indirectly. You proved OPs point with your last sentence and your too busy drinking the koolaid to realize it lol.
Funny how Bezos pledged to give away most of his wealth recently. Why doesnāt he just help by keeping his people employed at Amazon?
Taxing the rich and corporations at levels higher than their secretaries would do far more than them āgiving it awayā. It just wouldnāt let them get as much credit though, itās all about them when they do that stuff while fighting against fair taxes.
Why give the government that money though? You think it will be allocated more efficiently by your local / county / state government?
Not only public on Blind, it was made public on LinkedIn too. Dang what a š©show!
link?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-grapeman-147474202_winning-amazon-day1-activity-6997751173143310336-NjxR