http://restofworld.org/2021/tokyo-japan-amazon-union/
Good for them. Amazon needs a serious wake up call
I don’t get why the minority of people who are pip’d at amazon ~6% LE target are able to generate this much noise for the culture of an entire company. If you’re on a pip at amazon and in a room of 100 people there are at least 94 other people in that room who are not on Pips. Think about that. Amazon has an insanely easy interview process and interns almost always get return offers for minimal work, they are giving people the chance to prove themselves on the job. If you fail you have no one to blame but yourself. Compare this with a company like Uber where we regularly have to battle going out of business. It just makes me so angry when people underperform and blame their managers .
Or think this way: Despite Amazon business doing well, they PIP people. BTW PIP percentage is around 10-15%. It was confirmed by an Amazon recruiter on blind.
underperform vs fixed number for PIP are different things. Regarding your 6% I don't agree, if you iterate over 10 years now you have 60% PIPed, how many of them are really underperforming and how many because their manager wanted to PIP someone? Tool itself might be ok, but metrics to use this tool is what makes a problem
👆🏽 this. I would even argue less than 11 years since the backfills are supposed to have "raised the bar". And if a PIP isn't backfilled, your own workload goes up, increasing likelihood of you getting PIPped your self.
PIPping is also incompatible with Japanese work culture because anyone can be transferred to any department at any time (and anywhere; you sometimes get transferred without your family), so you might have to very suddenly get up to speed on work you were never trained for. Traditional Japanese companies would logically understand that such people might be "Least Effective" for a year or two while they learn the ropes. PIP culture makes such transfers terrifying.
The misleading and inaccurate comments I see from PIPed Amazonians make me feel Amazon isn’t PIPing enough lol I think what Amazon needs to do isn’t to stop PIP. It’s to start raising their hiring bar.
I’d argue that Amazon needs to properly train and develop their managers with the goal of aligning on what performance (or lack thereof) constitutes PIP material. There’s no consistency across teams.
@sondjejm are you from Amazon? do you have any other comments about how Amazon is like?
Agree that PIP concept sucks. But can someone point me to the number of posts on 1. I am PIPed because I suck 2. I am PIPed because I am good and my manager suck. I’d bet every or 90%+ posts on blind are of type 2. Any/many employees that got PIP won’t come out and say, I am genuinely bad. True, there are some managers who are d*cks but 80% of the PIPs are justified. Next, on blind itself people say Amazon has sh*t hiring bar and any moron can get into Amazon. And when Amazon filters out these folks with low bar, the same people who said Amazon has low hiring bar now complain about Amazon PIPing low performers. As opposed to other companies, Amazon prefers to actually give a chance for proving at job rather than interviews. I do agree the pressure it creates. But I do think blind metrics are skewed. Next, people ridiculously blame managers but lol in OLR meetings, managers actually go to defend the employees. It’s the sister team managers who try to take down employees to save their own employees. Watching all the drama the L7s and mostly L8s with HR decide who should be on PIP. So the blame is diverted from policy onto frontline managers because they have to do the dirty work. Having experienced both spectrums at Amazon, one where I had panic attack that I’ll get fired in a team to one where the team is absolutely amazing that it is so different from what blind says, I’d say don’t believe in everything you hear on blind. Now sharing my personal experience. I know a person who is absolutely terrible. Like trust me, the whole team immediately knew and tried to help him but he sucked for 8 months. Not only did he suck, he used to go to meetings and fight with everyone with his wrong points. He failed delivering project and his project launch date was pushed by 3 months when ultimately another engineer had to step in and finish his work. He was put on PIP. The one case I saw in 2 years. The leadership still wanted to help him and they got him out of PIP and now he changed to different teams and setup 1:1 with old team members saying how he performed really well but was put on PIP and managers suck. Imagine at Amazon’s scale, the number of above cases only go up. So my point is 80 to 90% of PIPs are genuine. The remaining 10% are maybe because of bad managers.
I hope Amazon start filtering more when hiring to limit this occurring.
How was the team that made you have panic attacks? Did you manage to get a transfer out easily, or did anything change that made it better for you? Also, for the meetings where the sister team's managers try to take down other employees, are there cases of unjustified PIP in your opinion?
Amazon just needs to make PIPs less political and completely at the managers discretion then it will be fine
the problem with pip culture is that engineers grow to distrust the company and don't see any long term value staying there because every year pip chances increase or can be used as a threat from management where even the smallest mistake will get them chewed up for it. so it creates anxiety for everyone watching your team members get canned and you could be next. makes a fear driven development culture which eventually will ruin the company.
Japanese are used to job safety. I am not surprised that they are rebelling
Japan's more worker-friendly laws regarding firing often mean that companies are that much more vicious in hounding out and slashing the pay of underperformers.
Have you been to Japan? These guys at the meguro office work their arses off