"I felt like it didn’t matter what I said or what I did. He was going to get me out. I can’t tell if it was because of taking family leave. He basically had decided that he was going to let me go, regardless."
Amazon managers often have target URAs (unregretted attrition) to hit, around 6% per year in an organization. They are incentivized to fire people who don't perform, regardless of the reason. If they don't do it, someone else on their team might have to go. If they cannot hit URA targets, those managers could become targets to let go as URA.
This is a well-known tradeoff within most tech circles on the risk of working for Amazon. Unlike Netflix, who are clear about a similar policy (though without targets) Amazon does not advertise that they have internal URA targets externally.
I'll also add that from the outside, this setup has worked surprisingly well for Amazon for well over a decade - based on business results and how they became one of the most valuable companies in the world. However, as this policy is more known and stories like the author's surface, it's starting to hurt their brand in ways that hurts their hiring and is forcing them to have to pay more to hire ("would you take job A or job B that pay the same, knowing that 6% of people per year are fired at job A being Amazon?")
Is that similar to stack ranking, where the “bottom” X% is culled each year? Or is it exactly that? I recall that process being deemed ultimately shortsighted.
Saw this in my company few years ago when "agile" management was at the helm. But it was more in "cut X % workforce immediately", repeated few times even when financials were OK. It stressed people to no end, even well above average ones.
Quite a few better ones left on their own. The company definitely lost overall. The next CEO guy came targeted especially this - something along the lines of "we let leavers/retirees go and just don't hire for now". It worked wonders, people were more focused on actual work and job hunting.
> If they don't do it, someone else on their team might have to go.
Then fire someone else. Somebody who is not going through a family health crisis will have an easier time finding a new job. Yes, Amazon's policies are shitty, but the manager still deserves to be blamed.
Of course, the whole situation sounds completely ridiculous when you live in a country where it's simply illegal to fire workers without cause, especially on such a mass scale as Amazon is doing it.
It is not illegal to fire workers without a cause. All layoffs are letting people go for no cause (with their work or behavior). Many states are "right to work" states where you and or your employer can decide to part ways at anytime for no reason.
It is illegal to let people go for some reasons but in most cases letting people go for no reason at all is just fine.
Amazon will have to pay a premium for workers that have 6% culling risk. If pay the same, zero chance picking Amazon assuming other factors are same too.
With the $160k salary cap (now lifted a week or two ago) and the super unfriendly vesting schedule (where you get almost nothing after year one) and a “signing bonus” that takes two full years to be paid out[0] it’s unlikely they are in the same caliber overall. This is notably obvious when you apply for an internal transfer and need to go through a full interview loop again because the new team doesn’t trust that the old team were competent at screening out poor performers.
[0] imagine getting an offer with a million dollar signing bonus listed, only to see in the fine print that this bonus is paid in $10k increments over the next centry.
I worked at Amazon for five years. I was rated top-tier year over year. By the time I left, I was cynical. I had developed gum disease. I had become overweight. I was a brilliant engineer (“technically fearless” in my promo feedback) and people loved working with me, but I was broken inside. I also happen to earn a small fortune, but at the cost of my physical and mental health. Amazon did not value me as a human being.
Amazon managers lacked humanity. We had a crazy high bar for engineering talent, but engineering managers and technical program managers seemed to have no bar. Many of them were hired directly by the senior manager or director, brought from their former company as part of an empire building exercise.
These people would squirm and flail at Amazon. They couldn’t keep up. They didn’t understand the technology.
So, what happens is they project their insecurities, get behind on communications, fail to set expectations on projects… and when they panic, one outcome is some poor engineer is going to get thrown under the bus.
You can be rated top tier at amazon, which is the highest rating in the company’s annual review process. Even then, you’re going to receive feedback about your weaknesses, why you’re not good enough, how you could do even better.
The corporate propaganda machine has coined a term around this, “Growth Areas”. Your peers are encouraged to provide feedback on your growth areas, and in the feedback they should write specific anecdotes and stories on how you failed or why what you did was not good enough.
At the end of the day, it’s a place were no matter what you do, how hard you work, how many hours you put in, how much impact you have, You will go home feeling bad about yourself. That you’re not good enough.
The pace and the hours are grueling. People make decisions to build their own empire within Amazon and get their coveted Sr Manager and Director promotions. You’re just a means to an end.
Problem with policies like this is that it creates zero employee loyalty. You will not feel bad about leaving them at a time which hurts them because you know they would never have your back. Thus you will not have theirs either.
Japanese managers have remarked on this problem in the US when hiring. You cannot easily invest in employees in the US. Investing in training reduce the amount of salary you are able to pay, so people leave as soon as they have training for a better paid job which doesn’t offer training.
Of course Japan is perhaps a bit extreme in this area but as a Scandinavia I have observed the same problem with fellow Scandinavians working in the US. Many remake on the natural loyalty you have been raised with slowly evaporating under US work conditions.
My company had a change of heart a couple of years ago and decided that they "care about people" and wanted to invest in them and such and everyone was valuable..if they sucked at their current position we just had to find them another one. What's happe ned is that productivity has been decpopled from pay. There is a minority of people that do nothing and get paid and it has become the bane of my existence. They wont move because they are comfortable and we can't get rid of them, so I have to Jedi mind tick micro manage them into doing shit. People suck one way or the other =\.
Interesting, you're claiming that Scandinavians that go working in US & come back have more US attitude, and Scandinavia in general is more towards Japan?
Currently working in Japan, and being from Scandinavia I can barely see the resemblance. I've only worked at startups & briefly in a public research Institute here, So sure maybe at big corporations there might be resemblance with the trainee-programs vs new-grad shukatsu system of Japan, but that's about it and afaik that's same in US.
Friends from Uni in Scandinavia didn't really show any "employee loyalty"; it correlated with the size of the company, and inverse correlation with age.
Once upon a time a colleague went to work for another company because of the incredibly higher paycheck. When i talked to her six months later she told me she didn't like the job at all, but it paid well.
Her manager became pretty aggressive when she was one minute late for work only once. Only then she started noticing people were gone from the building within 30 seconds of the end of their shift. The job purely became a money thing. Nobody cared for each other. Just be on on time for your shift and get the hell out when your shift ended so you couldn't get forced into unpaid overtime by some manager. Zero happiness for eight hours a day.
I experienced this at a couple places. At one in particular I was one of the many workers who clashed with an absolutely incompetent PM. This piece of ... even mobbed me during meetings, while pushing for me to join another project (with help from other execs in the company) because customers knew me and wanted me. That project was really interesting and really well paid, also at that company I made friends with a lot of people, some of them I still see today after over 20 years, but if I accepted I would send the message that it was ok to treat me as garbage like that. The indecision was literally ruining my health: I spent nearly 20 days at home with psychosomatic hemorrhoids, then one day I finally had the flash. "I quit - period". After I took that decision, in less than two days the hemorrhoids were gone. I went back to the workplace, gave them the 2 week notice and finished my duties. They did everything to convince me. No way.
I spent the last evening there crying while hugging all the friends I had made there, although some already left for similar reasons; I didn't even have any job offers (not a big problem as it was well before the first dot com bust) but I didn't care: that was the best thing I could do.
As for why a company would employ an incompetent PM like that? Because he was a shark, one of those useful manipulative figures who can easily tell lies to customers or push people into resigning without thinking twice.
One day, some time after quitting, I paid visit to that company to see old friends and have lunch with them. Just guess who was the first person to call my name loudly, approach me with a huge fake smile and hug me. Yup, it was him. They're more common than we could think; if you have one nearby, be very careful.
Some people just have no chill. During the second last year of my bachelor's my best friend at the time found out he had stage 4 liver cancer and was termial. Rapidly declined in state over the course of a few months and ended up in palliative care. So of course I started dropping the ball, skipped classes and labs and such to chill with the guy cuz he was boutta die. Ofc I was massively depressed about it and was late with assignments. Eventually I ended up in the Dept chair's office and I told him the situation. This man told me to drop out or go on leave if I couldn't handle it. There was no way I was doing either because I didn't want to, I couldn't afford to, and I was completely capable still, just needed some accomodation w.r.t timing tests and assignments, which this guy refused to do. So he told me to submit doctors notes and gtfo. Fast forward a few months I'm in the dean's office getting reamed out for submitting too many doctors notes (4) in one term. So I explained my situation and prev conversation with the chair and there was absolutely zero sympathy to be had. I was to immediately stop with the doctors notes or else face discipline. So that's how I ended up at a funeral with a shitty GPA. My misfortunes didn't end there but neither did the assholes stop being assholes.
He was well paid, it's a business, knew the reputation Amazon has yadda yadda yadda. I expect more, for people to be people, and do not accept any of this. I have had enough of these stories years ago, and simply do not use Amazon for anything, ever.
You have to choose between being a human or having a job.
It's not Amazon, the whole modern society works like this.
Humans are social by nature, but since childhood we are forced to avoid deep and meaningful relationships because everybody is a competitor, the "enemy" you should leave behind.
Instead of living, we are trained to perform and win over the competition.
Instead of making friends, we push people away and divide people into groups of winners and losers.
Instead of feel like humans, we are forced to ignore the feelings to keep going, keep performing, just like we were all machines.
And at the end, if you cannot keep up, you are discarded like trash, because you are no longer contributing to your employer's revenues goals.
What I'm trying to say is that it's Amazon and everybody else.
These days people tend to focus on tech companies, but they forget about gas, oil, telecom, pharma, food, and many other sectors with the same behavior.
For example, 10 years ago I had a contractor doing a job at Monsanto. He needed to bring his own water because Monsanto's employees were forbidden to give water to contractors.
Unfortunately, the author did not mention the name of the boss. Unless there is a personal consequence for management, this kind of garbage will keep repeating itself.
I would encourage the author to name his manager. Maybe the manager can provide his side of the story. I suspect that Amazon leadership principles won't help him in anyway.
There might not be a personal consequence directly attached to Amazon employment, but this certainly has impact from a career standpoint.
Mentioning the manager could inhibit him from further employment elsewhere, because once the HR Depts of other companies' start to gather background information on him, they'll think he's a whiner fingerpointer. You cannot exclude a person from employment just for that, but they'll find another reason to not hire him.
It doesn't drive change at Amazon, but it saves him unnecessary risk.
Fortunately he did not. I never mentioned the assholes, racists, rapists and liars I met professionally. It only throws back the dirt at you, and dirt keeps sticking.
I've heard way too many anecdotes such as this to ever consider working for AWS. Even their doubling the salary caps isn't enough because ultimately the old adage "time is money" simply isn't true: time is life and life > money.
In Becoming a Technical Leader, Gerald Weinberg wrote about an IBM employee who was stuck in such a case and not performing in a training program. Once Weinberg found out what was going on, IBM immediately arranged for extended leave for the guy, and brought him back in later. Now, that was the IBM in its most profitable and secure days, and likely not something today's IBM would do. But is Amazon harder pinched than the IBM of 1965 or whenever that would have been?
A similar attitude persisted in investment banking. They paid you big money so they almost felt that they owned you. You had to on the job for them 24/7 and if you weren't there were many others who would gladly take your place.
>Put him on paid leave as a brand new (expensive) employee?
That's exactly what my employer did when my daughter was dying from leukemia. It's also what I would do for an employee in the same situation, even if I had to trim my own salary.
This, yes, for my partner dying of cancer. My company offered paid leave for any reason related to my partner's treatment and illness, from days off to shuttle them to chemo to weeks when they came off it and was officially terminal. And then five weeks' bereavement. And I live in the US; this is just what my company offered.
Beyond that, my manager also continuously offered or arranged for things that made our life easier, in part because it kept me productive but in larger part because she cared about us as a person, something that continued not only after their death, but after I left the company, and after SHE left that company.
Hell, my manager was the only person who sent us flowers during my partner's brief last stay in the hospital before dying. (Everyone else either was able to be there in person or didn't have time to make arrangements.) My manager pulled strings with hospital staff that I didn't know she had to have flowers in my partner's room within hours. When we were making last-days preparations, we even floated making her our emergency estate executor if I was somehow incapacitated, until someone physically closer to us volunteered.
So, yeah. Put him on paid leave as a brand-new, expensive employee. Even if there's no guarantee he'll stay. Even if he'll leave the company anyway. Since I'm not sure whether empathy is a factor for you, at least because everyone else on the team is watching how a manager responds to this.
Hmm there's something off: so Amazon expects the best out of people, even if that means sacrifices, in exchange of money... but people can't expected the same from Amazon?
It doesn't sound balanced, if you're a valuable resource they should want you to stay and be at your best, even if that means giving you time.
Else Amazon is yet another meat grinder, even for high performing people, where you as a person have no value to the company, except what you output. Because if something bad happens to you - which is a matter of time, because life throws curve balls constantly - you're done.
TBH I also got a bit of a vibe of how the author seemed a bit whiny. But Amazon/Bezos has how many trillion dollars? He could afford a "well-being fund" and it wouldn't even hurt. But I guess that manager wasn't going to change Amazon, his job was to make his numbers look good and this depressed guy with a dying wife was making his job hard.
There's a story about a Valve employee who got a paid extended leave when he got an illness:
> In 2004, Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Expecting his condition to require a departure from the company, he spoke with managing director Gabe Newell, who surprised him by offering an extended leave with pay. "Your job is to get better," Newell said. "That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better."
This same story has come up a couple of times and each time there is the chorus of “how inhumane etc..”, personally I’m sympathetic that his loved one was ill, and I know the difficulties with that situation, but, I am entirely unsympathetic to his work situation.
The person was making $300k a year and you don’t make that kind of scratch without really high performance expectations and stress being placed on you. He took the job after his wife was sick, he was given opportunity to take leave to handle his personal business and mental health and chose not to do it. He could have used STD and LTD if he opted and appears he didn’t. At every stage this person appears to have made the “maximize money” decision instead of alternatives which could result in less job stress, but maximizing the focus on his family’s and his health.
Was he given a shitty personal row to hoe, absolutely. Did he make it worse for himself…I think that’s a yes too.
Amazon's behavior doesn't even make sense from a hard-headed business perspective. There's a good chance that this person could have continued working effectively if they'd just let him take a months' paid leave without piling the pressure on.
Instead, Amazon faffed around for months with their sadistic extended firing process, which probably ended up costing way more than it would have cost to just give this person the time they needed to recuperate from their family crises.
Sustained growth depends on access to talent and treating talent with apathy will reduce their talent market. It would be besutifully poetic for some top HN talent to turn down an Amazon offer on grounds of this case.
Shout-out to EMC corp, when I was assigned overseas, they paid the bill for ICU costs of my son's birth while on overseas assignment when the insurance company would not. Not all companies are douche bags.
P.s. I no longer work at EMC nor do I recruit for them LOL.
If the work is unique, they can pay premium over market rate consultant and freelancer professional. Their staff policy is the same as commodity like barrel of oil ... totally fungible and replaceable. That is their IP. They themselves don't have significant IP compare to the rest of tech companies.
Too bad the sociopathic ultra-capitalists do not realise that a happy, well-rested worker with a good work/life balance is a productive worker.
I bet Amazon would be profitable enough with a 5-day, 6-hour work week and much better benefits and vacation time, but since that makes them not as profitable as they can be by using slave labor...
When companies become slave of external investments the incentives and power dynamics of the company change.
That's why now I'm a strong promoter of bootstrapping, unless you have envisioned for yourself an exit too.
Then, and only then, yes, bring external investment as incentives are aligned with your peers. Maybe seed fund yourself and then bring Series A externally.
Amazon managers often have target URAs (unregretted attrition) to hit, around 6% per year in an organization. They are incentivized to fire people who don't perform, regardless of the reason. If they don't do it, someone else on their team might have to go. If they cannot hit URA targets, those managers could become targets to let go as URA.
This is a well-known tradeoff within most tech circles on the risk of working for Amazon. Unlike Netflix, who are clear about a similar policy (though without targets) Amazon does not advertise that they have internal URA targets externally.
I'll also add that from the outside, this setup has worked surprisingly well for Amazon for well over a decade - based on business results and how they became one of the most valuable companies in the world. However, as this policy is more known and stories like the author's surface, it's starting to hurt their brand in ways that hurts their hiring and is forcing them to have to pay more to hire ("would you take job A or job B that pay the same, knowing that 6% of people per year are fired at job A being Amazon?")