Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively and how to minimize bias. Verbally, it's all about numbers and probability. The organization wants X number of people to leave this year, to do that they want Y number of people in performance improvement plans.

There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn't exist, Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.

As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. Behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time advocating for my team and trying to poke holes in the performance ratings of other teams. It was exhausting. There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not. I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.

Clearly, I'm preaching to the choir here, but... I am constantly amazed at companies that do this. Effectively, they're incentivizing their workers to sabotage their coworkers. It is in every worker's best interest to make sure their coworkers perform as poorly as possible; ie, you don't need to be faster than the bear...

Long term, that seems like a fairly straightforward way to make sure you get poor performance out of your workers.

Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.

Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.

So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.

Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.

I worked somewhere that did weird personality tests as part of the recruiting process.

I talked to my manager later and he basically explained it as - yeah, it predicts nothing. No one ever gets denied because of it.. but its something for HR to wave at you if a hire doesn't work out and say "see it was right here in the personality test".

Just a thought.

This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!

Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.

My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.

But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”

"Sun Tzu then set the women a simple drill and made sure they understood what to do. However, when he started ordering them to perform the drill, the women burst out in laughter. He tried again with the same result. Sun Tzu claimed that this failure of the troops to obey was the fault of the commanders. So, despite the warlord’s pleas, he ordered the two concubines beheaded as an example for the rest of the company. Thereafter, the women did not utter a single sound and performed the drill exactly as commanded."

This is a depiction of Amazon. However, a "simple drill" is not high speed software engineering.

End result being snakes, backstabbers, and sociopaths rise to the top of the chains. Engineering is a collaborative effort so it speaks to the culture of AMZN how they incentivize this nonsense.

I agree. I’d hate to work at any org that does this as a rule.

To play devils advocate however, I’m sure many of us have been in a situation where a co-worker was coasting, or doing the minimal amount of work, while spending energy to look busy.

I’m thinking this cynical outlook could have contributed to this practice being implemented in large organizations.

An illustration of why these performance evaluation systems are always going to produce statistically irrelevant results was the Red Bead experiment[0] designed by the late, great W. Edwards Deming.

[0]: https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm

Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR.

This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.

In my experience at the VP level you have many highly skilled reports who are gunning for your job. Once you get the VP job then there may be many more enticing opportunities at other companies with just tough competition in the current position.

The only time stack ranking was a force for good was when the French applied it to their ruling elite in the 1790s.

See also how people had to get a "certificate of civism" lest them be considered suspect by default: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_civism

Of course teams of employees with emotions and institutional knowledge are a bit more complex than a hand of cards, but that has never stopped bad management strategies.

source: recently left Amazon as SDM

What it is good for in my view is making managers look and feel tough and establishing a culture of fear that is so necessary for hierarchical power structures. Power/status hierarchies are a common trait for most primates. So my shorthand for this sort of it-doesn't-make-sense situation is, "Primates gonna prime."

Not defending, just explaining.

This is where your cards analogy falls through, in a deck of cards, you know that there are better cards you don't have in your hand, you know exactly what your Jack is worth in absolute terms.

At Amazon, you can have a Royal Flush, and because of stack ranking decide to discard your 10, and if you know your poker, that makes you go from the best hand to one of the worse.

The issue is you wouldn't know your 10 at Amazon was a great engineer and a key asset to your team, and that all replacement candidates are going to be worse, except now you've lost precious time, ramp up, and moral, as well as a great employee.

For a smaller company, it might make sense as you're building a core team and might need to go through a few people before you find a set of good ones, but where Amazon is now, at its size, over time, it has lost engineers that in industry wide averages were above it, and it has created a reputation that hurts it from attracting them back or other engineer's above the industry's average.

Due to this, Amazon is becoming a second pick. Good engineers will pick Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and even sometimes Facebook (due to their higher comp) over Amazon. And since all these companies hiring process are the same, it's common that someone who can pass the Amazon interview can pass one of those other ones as well. In fact, almost 70% of everyone I've seen be released from a PIP went to work at one of the other big tech companies.

The other big problem is that the stack ranking works like American reality TV competitions. It doesn't matter if you've excelled year over year, if you have one bad year, where for whatever reason you get identified as a low performer, you'll get PIPed. In my experience that's often contextual, a new manager or you look like a bad performer because the business and leadership couldn't figure out good projects for you to work on and own that year, or they themselves couldn't get their act together and you're a scape goat. Other people on your team might have performed better simply out of luck of having been assigned better projects.

Amazon used to get away with simply finding the best talent, but in my experience there, that's now backfiring, and instead of growing the best talent, their quest to find it is turning into a system that recruits more and more mediocre talent as time goes on.

Amazon doesn't pay top dollar for engineers, and the delta between Amazon and other companies is growing every year. (The compensation ends up being competitive when you take into account stock growth, but the new hire offers are not attractive.) And it's a very results-driven, stressful work environment. The effect of that is that people who get better offers go elsewhere, both new hires and existing employees. Those who are left either don't feel like interviewing or interviewed but didn't like their other options.

Yes comp could help to attract better talent, that's what Facebook is doing. But of the about 150 interviews I've conducted for Amazon, 90% of almost all candidates always ask me: "So is it really as bad as they say working here? With how they treat you?"

I think that's a pretty good indicator that the reputation is just tarnished, and I wouldn't be surprised that that's having a sizable effect on the decrease of talent.

The other thing is, yes maybe some real bad apples leave from a PIP, but the whole culture around it, the stress, the feeling everyone has that they constantly have to fight for trust and respect, that is also a cause for a lot of the really good engineers and high performer to leave as well, of their own, no PIP involved, but it's the same root cause for why they leave.

I see so many good ones, ranking high every year, and after 3 to 5 years say: Well I had enough of this BS, too much hassle always playing the game. If anything, that's the biggest issue.

Every time an AMZ recruiter tries to poach me from my current job, I consider replying back with links to the NYT article, the URA article, and various anecdotes from friends that worked there. Ending with a question of 'Why in god's name would I work for your company?!'

There are elements of the culture I miss. The focus on writing was great. Shipping things quickly that impact a lot of people is nice. It made up for a lot of the deficiencies, and it isn't universal (cough Google). Amazon tends to make the right tradeoffs with tech choices to enable this, not always, but most of the time.

I enjoyed working with principal and senior engineers at Amazon. I didn't meet a single PE that I didn't thoroughly respect and enjoy talking with. I miss the internal PE talks, and I wish they'd make them public.

Compensation is deeply personal, but once I broke 400k, I really didn't care too much one way or another, and Amazon's total compensation was never significantly less than competitors. It was about the work, impact, and people.

But this makes sense _in a game with a fixed hand size_. But a company's staff should grow over time. So shouldn't one have an ROI-based criteria where you want each team member to help grow generate meaningfully more revenue than they cost to employ. If my "lowest" performing team members still make meaningfully more money than they cost to employ, they still increase my ability to hire more.

This acknowledges that the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy leaves out factors -- which is true.

My point is, even if there were no emotions or institutional knowledge, even if I had a "staff" of AI agents or robots whose "knowledge" could be fluidly copy-pasted, the "optimizing a hand of cards" analogy is poor, because a robot that makes money is worth keeping even if there are better robots out there. An army of low-but-positive ROI robots can help me buy a high ROI robot.

Maybe you hired a 7 of clubs, but given time they can gain institutional knowledge and improve their skillset to become a Jack of Spades.

I'm happy there are companies that set attrition metrics as a KPI, it makes it easier for me to hire and build out a technical team for my company.

Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out.

By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.

Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.

In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.

Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..

Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning.

People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd.

The jockeying will result in disruption of team development.

People will sabotage their coworkers.

Trust disappears.

Paranoia grows.

Blame deflected.

Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it.

Bandaids rather than solutions will result.

YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE.

What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people.

And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit.

Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them.

THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT.

Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.

Amazon management practices will breed sociopathy at the root worker level.

I agree that is kind of the average-stage evolution of an enterprisey company. Amazon is worse.

The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV.

Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.

How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what?

Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output.

The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.

Where do we get one of those?

The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem.

There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and a large population the measure will be Gaussian distributed on that population, and the larger the population the closer to a Gaussian distribution. An example is supposed to be the size of the largest eigenvalue in a principle components decomposition. Uh, that largest eigenvalue was long called IQ (intelligence quotient). Nothing intelligent about it. Nonsense. 100% total crackpot nonsense. Brain-dead, cult nonsense.

"Low performers" in need of a "performance improvement program" (PIP)? Start with the managers who believe in a Gaussian distribution. Then move to the managers who believe that the "bottom 20%" are always low performers.

A lot is known about how to be a good manager, and the Gaussian probability density distribution is not part of that.

I've seen a lot of bad managers. A pattern is that they are tyrants, have lots of rules and measures, are big on formality over reality, dot i's and cross t's with great reliability, and have everyone with their nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel and trying to work in that position. But the organization is stagnant, is not changing or keeping up with the market or technology. So, after a few years like that, it becomes obvious to everyone, customers, BoD, stockholders, employees, even nearly all of the managers that the organization is about ready to die, and often that's what happens, e.g., by firing 50% of the people and going downhill from there.

Once I saw a failing organization where nearly all the managers except at the lowest level were part of a tight clique, cult enforcing failure. Finally the BoD installed a new CEO and fairly soon 80+% of the clique, cult were given "PIPs" and demoted out of management or retired.

But there is also good evidence that even such a sick organization does not have to die and, instead, just needs some good management, starting at the CEO level. In particular, with a good CEO, suddenly, wonder of wonders, 90+% of the employees can be seen as great performers.

So, net, as bad as the situation can be, it is fair to say that Darwin is on the case with improvement on the way!

At one time Amazon was a small mail-order book and record shop run by Bezos from a small office. At least looking from 10,000 feet up, Bezos was a good manager, and, thus, I doubt that he was playing with the Gaussian distribution, firing his bottom 20%, stack ranking, etc. Instead he knew all the employees and the work of each. Sooooo, it sounds like now Bezos should leave outer space, return to Amazon, and fix the destructive nonsense that is ruining the company.

HAHAHA well said.

Height cannot be Gaussian if only because height is never negative but every Gaussian density is positive for all real numbers, including negative real numbers.

"interactions of many genes that are measureable"

The interactions of many is commonly used to justify a Gaussian assumption, but there is no such theorem. The main theorem to get a Gaussian density is the central limit theorem which usually assumes an infinite sequence of independent identically distributed random variables (plus some), i.e., i.i.d. The i.i.d. is asking a LOT!!! Asking so much that in practice it is essentially unrealistic.

What people often mean by Gaussian is just a central peak, some symmetry, and long tails, but an actual Gaussian distribution has a lot more, e.g., sufficient statistics (as in a classic paper by Halmos and Savage, with a derivation in M. Loeve's two volumes, from Springer, Probability) which, as I recall, E. Dynkin showed are quite sensitive to deviations from actual Gaussian.

Gaussian is important in a lot of derivations -- a LOT is known. But in practice Gaussian has some utility but only as an approximation where don't need to be very careful about accuracy.

Sounds fine.

If you treat heights as some i.i.d.s, then can use the central limit theorem to argue that in the limit for large samples (we get convergence in distribution) the probability density distribution of the sum of heights expressed as a z-score (mean 0, standard deviation 1) has Gaussian probability density distribution.

But that does not mean that the probability density distribution of heights is Gaussian. Indeed, if include both males and females, then for the density likely get two peaks instead of just one. If also include children, then get a left tail longer than the right one.

So, net, we cannot expect that heights are Gaussian. And we will have a tough time finding a large population that is Gaussian. z-scores in the limit for large samples Gaussian -- sure, can get that. A large population Gaussian, not much chance.

1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.

I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd

For a company that's vaunted for it's long-view philosophy, it's a terribly short-sighted policy.

(Somehow stack ranking logic never gets applied that way.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h...

I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.

All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!

All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.

His answer: "because, of the remaining, a new bottom 20% will be formed"

The other bit is it's a form of resiliency. High churn improves the bus factor. I respect Amazon for building a system that's resilient like this. That's not saying it's a good system to work in, but I admire that they built a system that can operate like this.

High churn is a high bus factor, like by definition of a bus factor. Bus factor => people had kids, retried, got a better offer, got fired, or were incapacitated (the proverbial bus) on a moments notice, and thus are abruptly unavailable to maintain your systems.

Churn is not a mechanism in itself to reduce the bus factor. It doesn't encourage people to mitigate the bus factor, because if you're going to be pushed out anyway, why bother building something sustainable?

I could see the argument for a probabilistic approach in that the company continues to function with critical systems being black boxes that teams have so far successfully scrambled to replace (with varying degrees of success), kind of like a more permanent Chaos Monkey for an entire system instead of cells within an system.

However, that does seem like it would waste a bunch of time, money, and opportunity on churn to deliver what you already have instead of using experience to improve/replace the existing systems.

This is just one (very depersonalized) approach to not keeping 'dead weight' around, or optimizing staff to always be on an upwards trend. It's like an evolutionary algorithm; trim off the worst performers and the remainder will evolve to higher levels. In theory.

In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you.

Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.

Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)

The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.

Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?

If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.

PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.

In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.

In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.

And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.

I don't think performance reviews should have a part in firings, and the metrics they use to rank/rate people are generally worthless, but it's actually nice to get feedback from time to time on how you're doing. I've had managers who I never heard from at all and that's not ideal.

If a company is thinking they have to fire someone for performance reasons it's way easier for them to have documentation showing what has been going on and that they'd given the employee time to improve. It's better for the employee too to understand what the expectations are they're not meeting and to have a chance to explain what the causes are. I think most people would prefer that over being told out of the blue that they've been sucking at their job and escorted out the building.

It really depends. I have never felt this way about a performance review. I like being informed about whether my manager and I both agree on what my job is. As an added bonus, the day after a good review is when you are least worried about losing your job and your livelihood. Honestly it seems like your beef is with the lack of social safety nets and not with performance reviews themselves.

It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time.

> How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job?

Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.

I could never work for Amazon. I always write a followup email to my manager after any important interaction. I summarize what we talked about and what my next actions are supposed to be and what the expectations are. On occasion this saves me from having to redo stuff because of misunderstandings.

It did help at Microsoft, though. They tried to PIP me, and I gave them a paper trail a mile long proving that I was working exactly to specification.. We ended up settling on a few months' salary for me to leave.

In retrospect, though, I wish I'd just gotten out of Amazon as soon as the more senior people started scurrying out of my org. I wish I'd quit Microsoft a couple of weeks in when I realized what a Faustian bureaucracy it was, haha. Life's too short to work at terrible jobs, and trying to keep a paper trail like that is too stressful.

Semi-related, I live beneath my means and had many months' worth of liquid savings, which was an enormous help to my peace of mind. I was able to take a year off and relax after I ended up quitting Microsoft, and then find a new job I actually enjoyed with no rush.

Common experience, someone is told shortly before review time that they are doing an acceptable job, then two weeks later they are signing the PIP.

The assumption is their boss had to fire someone, and the PIP victim just happened to be the one who came up short. For whatever reason: short tenure, doing OK but not spectacular, their tasks of lower priority, said something that pissed off a Director, I'm sure we can think of many more possibilities.

I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org.

This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve.

This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.

Explanation: Jack Welch wrote a book called 'Winning' in which he describes a system for rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% on a regular basis to foster a performance culture. From Wikipedia [1]:

> Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

I've never seen a manager face any sort of criticism. They just lead with impunity. Often they are promoted for miserably failed projects because they took a risk, and in large tech companies with big cash cushions, risks are worth it.

In my experience most of the time managers just maintain status quo. Run standup, do 1:1s, hire, and pass on orders from above. They keep their jobs forever.

Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.

Meta also uses calibrations where I'm told managers present their direct reports performance reviews and essentially "duke" it out with other managers.

Disclaimer: I work at Meta but I'm not a people manager

> I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager.

Is n't OP's manager actually did that?

You can call it lazy, that doesn’t make it any less of the goal or KPI Amazon created.

No, this sociopath manager pushed the big red button in order to goose their own ghoulish metrics and perhaps get an extra on call shift or two out of the engineer.

That's funny, because from the other things you said:

There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year.

As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team.

It sure looks like this wasn't the case of a "lazy manager" at all -- rather, that manager was doing exactly what they were told: to force attrition for attrition's sake, regardless of objective performance criteria. In fact, at Amazon that manager would only be seen as "lazy" for not meeting their attrition quota.

It might very well be a "both" situation rather than an either/or. But focusing on/scapegoating this manager's behavior, to me, is the wrong takeaway.

Then by definition, it is the directives of senior management that are at fault.

I ended up switching teams and had a decent time at the company, but the nightmare situations are very real. You are replaceable and there’s no mercy

I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace.

My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev.

They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed.

The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do.

A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough.

It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.

Why did you undercharge by so much.

I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money."

Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.

Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up.

Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k.

Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.

Consider that most parts of the world have lower cost of living than the Bay Area.

I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.

If you take the run of the mill Java dev salary here, the net value is somewhere between 900 - 3000 Euros or so, across all levels of seniority [1]. Really makes one consider the benefits of working for companies in other countries, assuming that there are no cultural or time zone issues that cannot be dealt with.

Or, you know, to acquire skills that are high in demand but relatively low in supply.

[1] - https://www.algas.lv/en/salaryinfo/information-technology/ja...

Take Ireland for example. You're not going to be making US level money but I'd say you could easily double what you're making now and there's the potential to go much higher than that.

Well, at least as long as the culture fit is there etc., admittedly remote isn't for everyone, but on the flip side, geography/commute being less of an issue for the remainder of people is great!

If you earn 30% more than a salaried employee you are barely breaking even most of the time.

And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc.

So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.

Junior developers make 75.000€ after taxes? They make about 50 - 60.000€ BEFORE taxes.

I used 4 weeks, and by my experience that's generous (not talking about paid leave - all the freelancers I know are workaholics and don't take much leave, but maybe that's a US thing).

5*48 = 240 days, which works out to around 84000 EUR. Or 120,000 EUR - 30%.

Regardless, 700 EUR/day seems in the ball-park for a generic all-around developer.

£500/day is the absolute minimum for developer/DevOps outside London, £600/day much more common and including the cheap end for London. Senior is more often £800/day. You don't see values above that advertised, but people do obviously negotiate higher for specialist work; I have seen a mainframe developer charging £1500/day (on the low end of his range). Anything higher than that has always been a large consultancy rather than a freelancer. In my specialist niche I'd be asking for £1500/day top-end, expecting £800-1200 with negotiation depending on flexibility.

Implying that other developers in my area are available for less than I ask.

I mean, if a person is able to extract 700€ per day, kudos to them but that's still above the 90th percentile of senior developers in Europe.

They can attempt to prove it.

Probably higher now.

The least you could do for "danger money" is 1200 EUR a day (and limit yourself to 4 days a week, but that's another story).

It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.

Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).

It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.

My BS filter is highly developed now.

"We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives.

"If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)"

"Give it 110% people"

"If we dont get this done ....... "

This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it.

I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project.

This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant.

I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time.

After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming.

I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin.

I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple.

> ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))

Guess who got called in on the weekend for log4j?

Guess who only heard about the problems on Monday at 9am?

You guessed it, the call was made to not pay the (documented) day rate for contractor call outs on weekends. Full-timers got "days in lieu."

Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…

When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W-2 employee even after factoring in company holidays, PTO and 401k matching. You also have the option of not buying insurance if you really wanted to.

Most insurance in the US is horrendous too. The whole system is optimized to provide you the least amount of coverage while making the process as inefficient as possible for you. I spent literally 12 hours on the phone over a few calls trying to get basic information from a few different dental insurance providers, in the end I got nothing concrete out of it and the only way I could have gotten concrete numbers is if I submit a form that takes 30 days to get processed except in the US you only have 30 days a year where you're allowed to enroll into insurance. Basically it was impossible for me to pick insurance based on coverage because it's impossible to know the coverage without first signing up and then you're stuck in it for a year in which case everything resets the next year and the process has to start again from scratch.

It would be way more efficient for employers not to offer dental insurance and instead give employees a tax-free $1,000 yearly stipend which allows employees to use this for personal and family dental care as an expense report which in turn ends up being a business write off for the employer. Now there's no limitations on what work can get done and no wasting your life trying to chase down dental / FSA details. A higher end dental insurance plan through a company is over $1,000 a year too, so this stipend approach would save employers money and it saves employees a lot of money too because you could easily end up paying $600-700 post-tax money out of pocket for standard cleanings a few times a year when insurance won't cover them (even if that insurance costs $1,000 a year). It's a win / win scenario for both the employer and employee.

Pick the air carrier with the cheapest flight to Mexico.

This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.

It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.

If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.

If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.

At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.

Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.

I try to be professional, hard working and I even do some unpaid overtime when deadlines are strict.

But the moment you pressure and stress me to do more it's the moment I say no and all my commitment goes away.

I'm not here to clean up poor management, project planning and low budget.

Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is....

The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.

That's why a PIP puts said pay checque on the line though.

I don't need that stress. I just hopped over to another company, cut my commute, and made about 20% more salary.

I mean I don't want to do any project with a deadline, ever again, if possible, and I haven't even been exposed to the level of stress and pressure that people get at certain companies.

I thought deadlines had gotten rid of a decade ago in software engineering with the rise of agile software development and the realization that software is difficult to neatly scope, and development time is almost impossible to predict.

In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.

Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it's off the table and all I can do is wonder :).

This is the normal approach. You are experienced and wise now.

I kinda agree with the OP, I would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me.

Hunter gatherer survivalist genes just kick in.

YMMV, but I consider it a healthy thing for, at least for some part of your career, to work "Amazon hard." Aka, all the reasons that people list when they say you should really try working for a startup.

When you push yourself to your limits at your profession, a lot of stuff clicks into place and you learn so much.

You can't procrastinate, you can't do it wrong, there just isn't the time.

Maybe a cynical take, but if you’re pushing limits then you’re probably just learning the right corners to cut, shortcuts to take, and how to exploit/manipulate people to get what you want fast. If you didn’t learn any of that, then—well, someone else just learned all that at your expense and you’re setting yourself up to just be exploited again and again.

> there just isn't the time

Yeah, that’s the root cause. Why is there no time? Is someone’s life on the line for this deadline or is it just that the manager is eyeing a sweet bonus for delivering early. 99.9% of the time it’s the latter. So why learn how to get manipulated? Learning to work at a consistent pace is far more sustainable. Tortoise and the hare.

Working at such a rhythm helped me learn much. It also durably damaged my body (both because it chipped away at my health and because it made me forego health check-up), my mental health, and made me lose personal connections. To this day, I'm still picking up the pieces.

Human beings are also "designed" to survive long period of hunger if need be, but no one would argue that going without for a week is a fine and healthy way to lose weight.

I guess I should say the healthy thing to do is to work at 100% of your capacity, whilst going to bed at 9pm and doing 25 minutes of exercise every morning?

The only thing worth working 120% for is raising your newborn child. Or maybe making a civilization-altering breakthrough in the natural sciences, like Fusion energy.

Everything is simply 'meh' in comparison and not worth sacrificing your health for. And I say this as a person who doesn't even particularly like or want kids.

You should have trust issues with "management" in any corporation because these people have the interest of the shareholders at heart, not of the workers. It's just sad some of us have to go through a traumatic burnout to learn this lesson.

Of course, what i said doesn't apply in a self-organized workers cooperatives where management is the workers.

The shareholders try to build a social control structure that aligns these, but it never fully succeeds.

    def caresAbout(self, other):
        if type(self) == type(other): return random.choice([True, False])
        return False

People like to talk about how great a teacher failure is, and how it teaches you valuable lessons... and it's true! Failure does teach you lots of valuable things, including things that you don't learn by succeeding. However, succeeding at something challenging generally teaches you more.

Or to cast it in ML terms... you need examples of both success and failure in your data set, but the "success" data points are more valuable.

And like any great, secure, lasting and stable engineering giving you the knowledge and time is key here.

When a company overloads the safety officer with tasks, so they and up not being able to do their work propperly and an incident happens, the company is at fault because it failed to provide the officer with the resources needed for the job.

If they don't give a dev the resources to do their job it is not different in my eyes. The fact that there might be some magical dev who would be able to get something working out of the same circumstances doesn't matter — maybe it has a company crippling flaw in it because of all the haste.

It's a crazy approach that probably falls apart if you're unsuccessful. But they're very successful so they can just keep burning money to attract new hires. Also, I imagine it's a huge career builder if you work in FMCG or development to have "Amazon retail" or "Amazon Web Services" on your resume. Since everyone uses those platforms.

I imagine what is left at the end is a residue of "born again" workaholics, who're probably pretty great at their jobs. Who then ascend to and form middle management.

And the global express trundles on, powered by these workaholics.

The last 1.5 of those I worked with what I consider two amazingly brilliant a####les.

I ended up leaving the most amazing place I had ever worked at until then (worldwide traveling, learning new stuff, actual high performance systems).

It has taken years to recover and I still cover myself more than I should.

My boss (who I liked) tried to get me back twice after he realized I had not been the problem and the two others had left but by then my salary had increased so much I was out of reach for him (edit:,) and telling my family I'd go down a double digit percentage in salary to work for someone who had not stood up for me back the was out of the question.

Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this:

> How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server")

> Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ...

> Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5 servers?

> Hmm, probably write shell scripts.

> How about 50 servers?

> Shell scripts?

> Even with 500 servers?

> Hire more people..?

And I keep feeling that these people don't have 10 YoE, they have 1-2 YoE times some coefficient.

I feel like if you're in a "successful rut", that's what it will do to you. You feel like you're successful, but in fact, you have fallen horribly behind, without even knowing it.

Your quality of life is probably fine, until you're laid off one day.

I recently came off a project that was technically using "GitOps" but where every deployment involved copying and pasting dozens of files across 3 or 4 repos, and the whole thing was very error prone, and if you didn't change exactly the right things your service would just silently fail to deploy, or be unreachable, with zero feedback.

I've worked at a company with a bespoke CI/CD system hacked together with PHP scripts and Jenkins servers, but where every single process was ruthlessly automated, reversible, with multiple layers of fallback, failure recovery, garrulous feedback, and built-in approvals that you could automate, or if you didn't remember, you'd get a helpful reminder in email and a link to a page to fill in the required information. People could, and did, know how to do a deployment on it their first or second day.

Guess which one was more pleasant to deploy with?

It's the automation mindset that's important. You can find people with the right mindset who haven't had a chance yet to play with ansible or terraform, and you can find people who manage to create nightmarish complexities of manual processes out of ansible and terraform. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found this to correlate much with years of experience.

Not sure what answer you expect here? Just because you have 10 years of experience doesn’t mean you’ve ever worked with more than 25 servers at a time (at least I haven’t).

I consider it a source of pride, I think. You absolutely don’t need mega scale for most things (or maybe mega scale, but still not many servers)

Some people get complacent once they get a job and stop learning. The trick is to keep on learning. I have worked for a company like Amazon with aggressive schedules where we used to work for 12 hrs/day. One time I didnt go home for 3 days. I can say I learnt a lot, but there are better companies with mature planning where you would still learn the same amount.

How different ppl react to toxic environments is also different. Some people may thrive, while some may wither.

I say it is a random walk searching for the best place (for you) to work. You keep iterating until you find what you want.

They ask for a VM or a DB to the DevOps / SRE team, wait a bit days and get a URL. If a team uses CI/CD and K8s, they will write a yaml file from a template, wait a few minutes and app will be deployed.

Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.

tl;dr; everything in a large corporation is a game of telephone where everyone is incentivized to muddle the message. So any deadline/commitment handed through multiple levels of management is really difficult to negotiate. And the more unrealistic it is, the harder it is the negotiate. Nobody wants to tell their boss that the thing they want done in 3 months will actually take 2 years.

  In the beginning, there was a plan, 
  And then came the assumptions,
  And the assumptions were without form, 
  And the plan without substance,

  And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
  And they spoke among themselves saying,
  "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

  And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
  "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

  And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
  "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, 
  Such that none may abide by it."

  And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
  "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

  And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
  "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

  And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
  "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

  And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
  "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor 
  Of the company With very powerful effects."

  And the President looked upon the Plan 
  And saw that it was good,
  And the Plan became Policy.

  And this, my friend, is how shit happens.