|
|
|
|
|
|
by wtracy
2017 days ago
|
|
|
I would never try to judge a work environment by the recruiters (unless the recruiters are unusually bad, which could suggest a toxic management culture). If at all possible, talk to actual engineers. My two cents on Google and Amazon: Both companies are large enough that making blanket statements about company culture is a dangerous game. What you need to do is find out which silo you would be working in, and try to figure out what the culture is like in that silo. One thing you can grill the recruiters about is what the employee review process looks like. Both Google and Amazon use stack ranking, which is about the most brutal system there is. At Google, feedback from fellow engineers factors heavily into your performance reviews. Amazon seems to be more focused on measurable performance goals and demonstrable contributions to the company's bottom line. |
|
|
This isn't really true (at least at Google, IDK about Amazon). "Stack ranking" historically has two components:
1. Being rated relative to your peers as opposed to a rubric.
2. (Usually fast) removal of the lowest performing individuals.
When combined, these become "fire and replace the bottom 3% of people on every team every year." The downsides to this approach are that if you're on a strong team, you may be a median employee, but be the weakest on your team, and be forced out for this reason. It's clearly problematic.
IDK about amazon, but the first is only half present at Google, and the second isn't really at all.
In some sense you are rated to your peers, not a rubric. But only in the sense of at aggregate (that is, in an organization of 1000 people, you'd expect ~30 people to be in the "worst 3%" category, so if only 10 are, that may raise some questions.) This removes the competition and potential animosity with your direct peers and aligns more with the rubric based idea, though it is possible that a an organization may have across the board above-average (or below) performance on occasion.
For the second, people with NI ratings aren't immediately fired (I know of a few people who got NI and found new teams and much more happiness), though obviously consistent NI could result in that.