[anonymous8979]

I've been an SDE at Amazon for 8 years. What I've noticed over time is that the quality of hires and employees has gone down. I think the stack ranking is partly responsible for it, because it couldn't evaluate engineers in absolute measures, but only relatively.

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.

[vvvnnnnvvv]

I recently left Amazon, and I don't think the stack ranking is to blame for the reduction in talent (which I also noticed).

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.

[anonymous8979]

The comp might be part of it as well, but at the end of the day, the only reason the bar is lowering is because Amazon is losing their good talent and failing to attract more of it, while also failing to have processes that create good talent (as in, if you weren't already great when coming in, Amazon won't grow you, but just spit you out).

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

>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?

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?!'

[ctvo]

I also used to worked at Amazon.

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.