>why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?
It's extremely demoralizing to work with people who are bad at their job. It makes me feel as though my hard work is unappreciated, because someone who is not working hard gets the same treatment.
Sometimes the employee is slacking off, sometimes they are bad at their job. Either way, if their failure to contribute is bringing the rest of the team down, they have to go. Otherwise, the good people leave to get away from the bad people.
> It's extremely demoralizing to work with people who are bad at their job.
You're assuming various PIPs are being used in good faith by the employer. In a lot of big companies there's a nebulous and hand-wave-y criteria for putting someone on a PIP and then there's no clear path for the employee off the PIP. Too often PIPs are like "mean girl" shit lists. You can get on one without knowing it and have little to no agency in getting off one.
For companies that do stack ranking, you can end up on a PIP just for happening to be at the bottom of the stack for no real fault of your own. The employer is then happy to dick you with compensation for as long as they can justify keeping you on a PIP.
It's more demoralizing to end up black balled and screwed over on compensation than just being told outright you're on a PIP and there's some particular goals to hit to get off. Not everyone can just jump ship after they get stiffed on compensation after a review. The goal is to demoralize people so they quit so they don't have to fire them and potentially end up with some wrongful termination lawsuit.
I have encountered co-workers who bring a clear negative contribution to the team. I am not taking of not making enough of a value for the company for what they are paid but rather damaging the company even if they were paid nothing. These people have all been eventually let go by the different companies I have worked for.
That would be true. However, the word excellence, especially in IT companies is a relative term at best. We have seen others in this forum refer to Amazon's work as fixing broken code that's hardly maintainable. Hardly what one would call 'excellence' particularly given how exalted a position Amazon occupies as a desirable employer.
You could have a bunch of OOPs-fanatics who will hate the functional programmer who does things differently. Toxic culture (lack of self-awareness means that 99% of people don't know they are participating/creating/perpetuating the toxicity) means this functional programmer is demoralizing the team.
That's how objective IT is. Its culture wars of this sort - misplaced fanatic sincerity and close-mindedness, or worse mean-ness. And its demoralizing to the majority. Hence the PIP. Its like a dystopian landscape.
> We have seen others in this forum refer to Amazon's work as fixing broken code that's hardly maintainable.
Reminds me of someone that worked at a vendor of Semiconductor ATE equipment. The codebase was a total hopeless trash fire. Watching him flail and fail gave me the impression that working for a place like that, actually caring about anything is a liability.
You should only care about three things. Your mental health. The money you are making. What your boss wants. You should treat anything you are working on as a booger to get rid of as quickly as possible.
'As you are closing the ticket you may feel a sting. That's pride fucking with you'
So many companies I deal with have extremely poor management teams and practices. Things like stack-ranking, vague job descriptions/responsibilities, managers who aren't technical, the list is endemic to IT.
You want demoralizing? How about being an excellent employee, but being told that you can only get a COLA raise because your manager has been told only 2 out of a team of 15 can "exceed standards?" And these standards are as vague as HR can possibly make them.
So unless you're sociopathic, you try to "improve" which generally means kissing up to your boss. Doing a better job revolves around keeping your boss happy, regardless of whether that means your real work is being done at an "exceeds" level. Find out what metrics he considers important, and focus almost exclusively on them.
If you're sociopathic, you do this, while sabotaging your coworkers. It's pretty easy to do; keep important information away from them, point out any flaws/mistakes they make, etc.
Any large organization will end up like this if they follow traditional HR guidelines for performance evals. It's part of a competitive environment.
The only place I've seen it work better/differently was when the entire team was evaluated. That helped prevent the Machiavellian sabotage, but did allow lower performers to benefit from the work of the higher performers. But that would happen anyway; you can't fire everyone. And the motivation of the coworkers shifts from competitive to cooperative. Helping others learn new things, overcome issues, etc. When management gets behind this, it's amazing, but most managers and executives are discouraged from trying new things.
> why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?
It's the same idea behind stack ranking: get good recruits, while getting rid of the under-performers who either slip-through, or whose performance deteriorated while on the job.
Amazon would like to think they are keeping the good people onboard and throwing out the deadwood.
that is for companies without the recruit demand. Amazon has stated before they try to remove the bottom 10% regularly to keep the average performance moving up
Didn't decades of that policy at Microsoft prove that it doesn't work? People then optimize to make sure they only work on projects to keep their score up.
> Didn't decades of that policy at Microsoft prove that it doesn't work? People then optimize to make sure they only work on projects to keep their score up.
So? It's the kind policy that appeals to the prejudices of an aloof executive with a low opinion of his peons. That trumps facts.
Suppose “ability” is normally distributed in the population and in your initial team too. Replace people when the new candidate improves the team’s median ability (supposedly what Amazon’s “Bar Raiser” checks).
I kicked together a simulation of this process. The first replacement is pretty easy (50/50), but the hundredth hire on a team of ten often takes tens of thousands of interviews, and sometimes over a million. No one is literally doing this.
How many years does it take a team of 10 to get to their 100th hire? If they only replace 1 person a year, ~100 interviews a year sounds pretty normal to me (it actually sounds low compared to where I last worked where I sometimes interviewed multiple people a day).
Mine is super-dumb, but let me walk you though it.
First, you need to a way to generate candidates of varying abilities. There are all sorts of tough questions related to measuring intelligence, but let's side-step those and make something like IQ. By construction, IQ is normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
function generate_candidates(;n=1)
return 100 .+ (15 .* randn(n, 1))
end
With that, make the initial team and find the "bar" for a new hire:
team = generate_candidates(;n=10)
bar = median(team)
To replace a candidate, you just sit in a loop, "interviewing" candidates until one exceeds the bar.
candidates_seen = 1
while (new_candidate = generate_candidates(n=1)[1]) < bar
candidates_seen += 1
end
Once you find that person, you kick someone out of the team and replace them with the new candidate. I did it at random, but eliminating the lowest performer only exaggerates the effect.
team[rand(1:length(team))] = c
Having done that, you need to recalculate the now-raised bar:
I had a hunch this process would be exponential, and it certainly looks that way if you plot the results. This was meant as a quick-and-dirty way to check that: there are some tricks that might speed up the simulation and it might even be possible to do the whole thing analytically (but it's Friday afternoon).
FWIW, I highlyhighly recommend this sort of noodling around for building intuitions. At work, we recently spent a year and $$$ collecting some brain data, and a dumb model like this was the key to figuring out what was going on.
The model might work better if you assume an increasing median among the population of candidates over time. This could be true if:
* Amazon's stock price and profits made it a more desirable place to work over time
* The increasing supply of computer science graduates improved the hiring pool
Another thing that could happen is the most skilled x% of each team leaves over time for better positions, so that the median slips back. Then raising the bar each time only keeps it in the same place.
Or candidates could be rated on multiple dimensions, so while you can't find someone uniformly better than your median employee, you can hire one person to raise the bar on build systems, one on microservices, and so on.
These are all echoes of General Electric's / Jack Welch's stack-ranking 'innovation' which still gets lauded by MBA types but has been a disaster everywhere it was implemeneted.
Managers with good teams may bypass this by partaking in a "hire to fire" scheme where the newest joiner is guaranteed to be at the bottom of the performance list, shielding those with longer tenure.
This works for a while - until word gets around, then you find your hiring funnel drying up.
It's extremely demoralizing to work with people who are bad at their job. It makes me feel as though my hard work is unappreciated, because someone who is not working hard gets the same treatment.
Sometimes the employee is slacking off, sometimes they are bad at their job. Either way, if their failure to contribute is bringing the rest of the team down, they have to go. Otherwise, the good people leave to get away from the bad people.