Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan

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I never understood the secretive nature of these Amazon &quot;devplan&quot; &#x2F; &quot;FOCUS&quot; lists. If an employee has a performance issue, they should know. Period. If they are on a formal list, they should know that too.<p>The only &quot;positive&quot; here is that it can affect the individual&#x27;s moral to know you are not meeting expectations - but that has to be communicated regardless. If it&#x27;s understood it has to be communicated and there is a list specifically including the individual, it&#x27;s up to the company to manage that communication in a supportive manner.<p>And the consequences of this secretive list are a culture of fear and uncertainty and doubt. Especially with the harsh consequences such as - if you leave while on this secretive list (which you cannot even know you are on) - you are ineligible for rehire.<p>The solution is not to maintain a secretive list of employees who have performance issues - it is to be fully transparent about those performance issues and destigmatize being included in this nebulous secretive list in the first place - through a culture of support and shared success.<p>Honestly it boggles my mind how Amazon managers accept this status quo at the scale that Amazon operates. It is so on it&#x27;s face a recipe for having a toxic culture which breeds stress, doubt, and only serves to reinforce poor performance outcomes.<p>Out of all the things I&#x27;ve heard about Amazon culture for its software organization - this single thing (secretive lists of employees with performance issues with &quot;never rehire&quot; consequences that employees can&#x27;t even understand they are on) symbolizes for me all the reasons I would avoid them as an employer. There is no way to have this process without creating a toxic culture.

&gt; “Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?” the question reads. The response: “Do not discuss Focus with employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.”<p>The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you’re told you’re in Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manager is telling you you’re not meeting expectations, that’s plenty of signal of what’s going on.<p>The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent.<p>There’s a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your performance?

At most companies, having <i>ever been</i> on such a list is a permanent mark. Any manager can pull up your record and see the whole history.<p>Thus, any indication that you have got onto such a list is a red warning: <i>find another job</i> somewhere else, and quickly. Do not wait to see if they will change their minds. They might decide not to fire you right away, but they will think of you, forever after, as a &quot;problem employee&quot;. If you ever get off the list, you will go back on it the moment the length of your manager&#x27;s list goes below quota. You may be sure that there is such a quota.<p>This is very much like the notion of &quot;politically unreliable&quot; in the Soviet countries, and in China. Corporate governance resembles nothing so much as Soviet governance. This is not an accident: Lenin was a huge admirer of the Ford Motor Company.<p>Being <i>still-employed</i> is a huge factor in how attractive you are to your immediate future employer. So, it is important to act fast. Part of why they try to keep the list secret is that they want to be who controls when you leave, not you. Managers typically only get points for firing you, not you quitting. (But Amazon&#x27;s documented notion of &quot;unregretted attrition&quot; suggests it might be defined as somebody leaving who was on the list.)

Amazon is a strange company. After having spent 4 years there I am convinced that they hate their employees. They want you to burnout.<p>Just look at the stock vesting schedule, its 5, 15, 40, 40. First two years you barely get any stock, and I believe the average time someone stays at amazon is around 1.5 years (I don&#x27;t have latest data so maybe this is wrong)<p>On top of that, you have the pathetic 401k match (50% upto 2% of paycheck). Amazon&#x27;s contribution to 401k vests after 3 years in the job, so you leave within the first 2 and you don&#x27;t get anything. Not to mention the base salary cap of $160k.<p>Add to that the horrible WLB, I knew teams who&#x27;d get 40 high severity tickets in a week (And there are teams with much worse WLB). You are constantly waking up at 2-3AM in the night, and fixing fires for no extra pay.<p>Many times, Upper Management would dictate a timeline for your project, doesn&#x27;t matter if it takes 4 months, we need it in 2 so get it done. This obviously leads to bad code. But there is no incentive within the company to fix&#x2F;improve codebase, every thing is taped together, and On Call is there to tape things up some more so that they stay fixed. Even if you take the time and fix some of the tech debt, the company is not going to care and its not going to reward you.<p>Speaking of rewards, if the company stock grows (which it has for the past several years), and because of this growth you stand to make more than your Amazon decided Target Compensation, then you won&#x27;t get any base salary increase even if you were the best employee Amazon has ever seen. You might get additional stocks, but those will vest 2 year later. So basically, you did great work for the company in 2021, as a result the company stock grows enough that you are not out of range for your role&#x27;s compensation, so they don&#x27;t increase your salary, and they give you stocks that vest in 2024, 3 years after the you did the work.<p>More often than not, I felt that most amazon employees (current and past) hate amazon. I have never seen a company being hated by its own workers with such fervor.

The article is conflating two concepts at Amazon. There is &quot;devplan&#x2F;focus&quot; and there is performance improvement plan (PIP). You are not fired while on focus. Despite what one of the people indicates in their comments, you cannot be on a PIP and not know. The PIP is an agreed upon plan with a specific output between HR, management and the employee. Firing happens through PIPs, not focus. Though focus is what leads to a PIP.<p>I agree the lack of transparency on the focus is stupid (especially since it can prevent you from moving), but you don&#x27;t wake up one day and end up fired. You will be put on a PIP first and be well aware of it (since you have to agree to the plan or take a payout to leave instead).

Meanwhile Amazon recruiters keep spamming me to join their cult.<p>No one *wants* to work for you anymore. You don&#x27;t need to recruit. If someone is desperate enough they&#x27;ll let you know.

&gt; Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.<p>As long you are effectively communicating performance on a regular basis, I don&#x27;t really see the point in telling an employee that &quot;we&#x27;re formally thinking about firing you&quot; other than dropping a morale bomb in the workplace. If you&#x27;re telling an employee that their performance needs improvement in general, it stands to follow that termination is a possible result.<p>Either people improve when they&#x27;re told their performance is bad, or they don&#x27;t. Workplaces without formal PIPs don&#x27;t tell employees to their face that they&#x27;re thinking about firing them either. Not sure why the formal paperwork makes any difference.<p>Although maybe I&#x27;m missing something, I&#x27;ve never worked at a mega-corp.

I have a very simple rule that I adopted when I first became a manager, and it has served me well. I won&#x27;t ever fire someone for performance unless I have explicitly said to them. `If you don&#x27;t do the following things in the given time frame you will be fired` I require myself to explicitly state they will loose their job, and I require to have an explicit list of exactly what needs to be done and a fixed time frame for it to be done. I feel if I as a manager can&#x27;t do that, then the real issue is a failure in management not a failure in the employee.<p>While I have still had to fire plenty of people for performance even with this rule. I can also say that I have had multiple people actually improve their performance and get off the PiP which as I understand from talking to other managers is not a common occurrence.

What happens if an Employee of Amazon who is in a country that has a data regulation that allows them to ask for and legally get any data pertaining too them?<p>That would place Amazon to legally disclose if such an employee is on any list or anything else they have on them, be it paper or digital.

I&#x27;ve never seen anyone on a PIP bounce back. The smart move is to start your job hunt immediately when you discover you&#x27;re on a PIP. Otherwise it&#x27;s a long and stressful road to termination.<p>The second the people around you don&#x27;t believe you can cut it, it&#x27;s already too late and best to find a gig elsewhere.

Amazon workers should unionise, then collectively every single employee asks their boss “morning boss, am I on the list” every single day. They’ll soon change the policy.

Are performance improvement plans actually genuine in most cases? If I were put on one or got a negative performance review, I would assume that I have essentially been fired but my boss is waiting on key paperwork.

I recently left my employer after about an year and half. I was on the edge of a PIP - so I thought - and constantly felt like an imposter. Making it past the year-mark surprised me.. and it was getting better when I quit. My manager would insist on the bi-weekly 1:1s that I was not on a PIP.<p>In comparison, I can only imagine what a hell Amazon must be, a soul-destroying place to work for most people who aren&#x27;t in the top 25% or something like that. As an employer, Amazon sounds like an evil machine.

&gt; Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks, according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for managers.<p>Wait, what&#x27;s the point of putting someone on a PIP&#x2F;PMP if you don&#x27;t even tell them their performance needs to improve (or they need to jump ship)?<p>They aren&#x27;t likely to change if you don&#x27;t tell them to change.

Amazon and places like Amazon can go to hell. Life is too short to work in such shitty places. Ultimately everyone is just working to make investors and owners rich. Employees will only earn a fraction of what higher ups earn even after working themselves to death. Having worked in such an environment, I will be honest that I have earned and progressed more than I would have had I stayed in that shitty toxic workplace.

One way I look at this all though is do you honestly believe there are not ~5% of employees at your company that really aren’t cutting it and shouldn’t be there? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a place in my career where that was the case… and often the number that should go was usually higher. Thus at some level is Amazon not just solving a problem (albeit probably imperfectly) that other companies just choose to ignore?

Most successful companies I know are constantly recruiting and trying to keep people onboard - why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?

There’s a Heisenberg principle at play here as anybody that knows they’re on the thin ice is going to respond to that knowledge in some way.

I mean this in all sincerity: don&#x27;t treat an Amazon interview seriously. If you must, use it for practice.<p>Employment stability is much more important than what I call &quot;alleged compensation&quot;.<p>They hire you promising $160,000 base and all this stock, and 6 months into stringing broken libraries together you are suddenly getting the feeling you won&#x27;t be welcome at the company anymore.

I had an ex that was in all honesty was a horrible employee. I feel bad for anyone that ever worked with her. She was always qualified for the job but a nightmare doing actual work. She came to me with some project that her boss asked her to work on looking for advice. This Fortune 500 company was asking her, as a software engineer, to create an Excel spreadsheet budget for her next project. I honestly helped her to the best of my ability (it actually wasn’t half bad haha) but they ended up firing her within a few weeks. They were just looking for a final project to show in plain view that she couldn’t do what was asked of her.<p>Anecdotal but… I suppose they could be protecting themselves from these situations where once they have made up their mind, it’s probably in their best interest to see their everyday work ethic. I think most of us would like the chance to know whether they are doing a good job to improve, but this sounds like once they are on this list, their days are numbered

There are many types of PIPs, and Amazon seems to be trying a new flavor. This one seems to be about managers focusing (hence the name) on floundering employees, giving them the attention they need to get back ok track. And maybe telling the employee &quot;you&#x27;re getting extra attention&quot; could make them pessimistic and less able to be improved. It&#x27;s a good theory, anyway. We&#x27;ll see if it works out.<p>Of course the other, darker possibility is that this is an attempt to take the evil parts of the PIP and get rid of the actual improvement. Keep the &quot;build a case against the employee so we can fire them without a lawsuit&quot;, ditch the &quot;actually trying to improve their performance&quot;. I prefer to think this isn&#x27;t the case.

What about double secret probation?

Can anyone explain how this is not a breach of employment law? It reads like an on-the-face-of-it constructive dismissal case: if your manager has future intent to sack you, has no intention of helping you improve, is kpi rewarded for sacking you for reasons which don&#x27;t actually relate to your performance and doesn&#x27;t inform you of your status, surely it&#x27;s premeditated?<p>I don&#x27;t understand how H&#x2F;R and legal can sustain this. (I do understand that they have: I&#x27;m not that stupid. So there must be some underlying reason this is legal, but I suspect it&#x27;s not well &quot;tested&quot; in all jurisdictions Amazon employs in)

I assume this doesn&#x27;t go on in the UK, as it would fail to meet the ACAS code on performance management, and likely lead to successful constructive dismissal or unfair dismissal claims.<p>&quot;If issues do arise, employers should make the employee aware of the shortfall in their performance as soon as possible. The employee should then be given a reasonable timescale to improve.<p>Employers should provide their employee with any relevant support and training in order to reach the required performance standard. They should then monitor and review the employee’s progress throughout the period assigned for improvement.&quot;

Obvious irony here is that someone in management failed to keep secret what was supposed to be a secret plan about keeping secret perf man plans. Management should put themselves on a performance management plan.

That Amazon or any company has such a plan is actually laudable. I was under the impression that folks who are not performing just get given a 2-week notice. But it&#x27;s likely more profitable to rehabilitate or retrain an underperforming employee than to go through the process of hiring and onboarding a new employee. None of this is out of altruism -- it&#x27;s a cost benefit analysis (see also the scene in the Fight Club movie where the un-named narrator explains the math behind his company issuing a recall or not...)

this sounds suspiciously like something a organization theory &#x2F; game theory team thought up. Incidentally, we know that amazon hires such people from math and econ departments for big bucks.<p>Attrition is good for exploration and against other &quot;stagnation&quot; phenomena (textbook March&#x2F;Levinthal early 90&#x27;s). And if you are willing to throw aboard any ethics, then a &quot;usable period&quot; (pre burn-out) for some percentage of workers is a pretty good boost to performance.<p>A secret focus list is probably some &quot;well&quot; thought out mechanism (as in mechanism design) tuned precisely to kick out x% of people while setting incentives to self-identify (slackers vs. normal workers vs. workaholics) by generating uncertainty or ambiguity, thus generating some ideal workforce distribution: people who are doubtful are incentivized to just leave right away, people who are extremely competent are moderately pressured, people who are willing to grind themselves into dust for amazon do &quot;okay&quot; for as long as they are useful, and &quot;normals&quot; are retained probabilistically to the degree that their contributions are needed that quarter.<p>Much has been written about how these models don&#x27;t reflect human behavior. Sadly, as a normative forcing function, they work out just fine. edit: in the short run, until such articles as op appear

I&#x27;m curious if any Amazon (ex-)employee have experience with this that they can share.<p>A lot of Amazon&#x27;s practices get really severe backlash online, and yet if working for Amazon is as bad as they say, how is Amazon one of the biggest employers of software engineers?<p>I personally buy into the hivemind and would not work for Amazon, but it seems to me like there is an incongruity between how bad their practices are and how many talented software engineers are willing to work for them.

What makes Amazon employees so eager to work there? Is it purely because of their salaries? I have worked at large companies where none of this dystopian stuff happens.

Makes absolutely no sense. The main point of a PIP is to give people time to make a graceful exit; sure, in some cases performance can be turned around but that’s not really what it is about. So you should want the employee to know. Supposedly Bezos is going to be focusing on making Amazon a great place to work; here’s some low-hanging fruit for you Jeff.

There is some rationale for this, as why tip an at-risk employee off to what is essentially a foregone conclusion?<p>Napkin math, if your salary is $100k&#x2F;year - you are necessarily delivering at least $200k in revenue&#x2F;value, so if you have a rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on the other part of that expected $200k value, the opportunity cost is harming the company.<p>The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as a purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to not disclose it. The laws make it such that everyone has to sustain the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates that creepy gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping it secret could mean a more personally honest and less psychologically harmful relationship for all involved.<p>Reality is, performance in most organizations is secondary to relationships in them (and perhaps credentials) because the reason a (profitable&#x2F;long-lived) company makes money as a business is because it can operate at scale with interchangeable parts that get along, which means the marginal value of a high or low performer is not as significant to its bottom line as downside risks from a lack of cohesion, so the main thing you need to care about in an organization is your key relationships.<p>If your relationship with co-workers or managers is getting dicey, all you can do is &quot;read the room,&quot; keep your CV updated, and your recruiter contacts warm, because unless you deliver some large multiple on performance (product breakthrough they need you to execute, or land a large client, etc), opinion-wise you&#x27;re done there and it&#x27;s time to move on.

This is a company that is enjoying roaring success with such questionable employee management practices. How does this happen? Does success have no correlation with bad culture? If yes, why are other companies focusing their time and energy on good work&#x2F;employee culture? What gives?

&gt;&gt; But some workers who have been on Focus say they were never told what their performance deficiencies were, or how they could improve.<p>Sounds like therapy. Doesn&#x27;t really work most of the time. You can&#x27;t invoke your higher level brain functions without knowing the game being played.

What are the effects of this list&#x2F;Focus on employee? The article mentions performance hell but at the same time says people don’t know they are on the list so they probably don’t really feel the effects?<p>Or is it slower promotion less bonuses that are somehow not obvious?

Which manager came up with this brainwave of an idea to make themselves appear useful?

&gt; The secrecy surrounding performance management is one more reason why some Amazon office employees say the company is not living up to its April pledge to become “Earth’s Best Employer.”<p>Rules for corporations:<p>Actions &gt; Words<p>Rules for politicians:<p>Policies &gt; Rhetoric

Why people go to work to places that treat engineers like some farm animals?<p>Zero respect to the craft. Plus the company is avoiding taxes, so everyone gets paid less thanks to that.

As far as I know... nobody at Amazon when I was there got taken off &quot;Focus&quot; (whatever it was called in the past). They only ended up leaving the company.<p>But that said, I think Amazon had a very long interview process. Too long. (But I hear it&#x27;s gotten better.) And so to grow fast, they need an easy way to exit people... that&#x27;s not a bad thing.<p>Interviews are never a great way to hire people. Working with them tells you a lot more about personality and work ethic and commitment.<p>From what I&#x27;ve seen, I don&#x27;t disagree with any of the employees that had been on Focus. Like generally speaking, we showed the people the door who needed to be shown the door.<p>For the good of the team, some people just don&#x27;t fit, or they distract... a lot of it was personality, but a lot of it was really they were lacking the Ownership quality we needed.<p>If you have someone waiting for 12-levels of approval, they just slow down the others. I don&#x27;t know quite how to say it, but it was a common thing you&#x27;d get someone from a big company... and they had various processes in mind when doing anything. We need that &quot;Bias for Action&quot; instead of anyone just looking to do things the way they did them at past jobs.<p>Or we had a guy who thought, &quot;We&#x27;re Amazon, we print money... let&#x27;s just solve all our problems by throwing money at them.&quot; Oof. Amazon is, silly as it sounds, a startup at scale. And their Leadership Principles really speak to this.<p>Some people just don&#x27;t get it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;leadership-principles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;leadership-principles</a><p>Anyway, my 2 cents, as a former Amazon employee... It&#x27;s good for any company -- especially one that wants to grow fast -- to exit about 5-10% of their workforce every year. Find the ones that aren&#x27;t doing what&#x27;s needed... and encourage them to go work somewhere else where they can add value. I never saw anyone bullied, I never saw anyone put on &quot;Focus&quot; who shouldn&#x27;t have been there.<p>Playing devil&#x27;s advocate... given so few people get off &quot;Focus&quot; plans, what&#x27;s the point of letting people know they are on it? Kind of just seems like a waste of everyone&#x27;s time. Some conversations just burn hours, no?

AMZN is Doomed :)

As the runt of the litter in my AWS team, I thankfully have avoided such plans. I’ve never been at a company so willing to frame mistakes and shortcomings as chances to grow.<p>Other people clearly are having different experiences.

Another goodie from AMZN - hard cap on max of years of experience for a position. Nice way to filter out the old dudes like me. I suppose the trend will naturally spread through the industry.<p>Edit: it is max cap in hiring requirements. The requirements are directly from AMZN recruiter (AMZN email address, etc). The max is bullet pointed together with the min. The max is also additionally clearly stressed in the description to make sure that there is no misunderstanding (i&#x27;d definitely would have hard time believing my eyes if seeing it only once in the bullet points)

It’s not a “conceal” as it is a lack of discussion. I get that being put on performance management plan can be demoralizing. The article makes it appear unjust. It only reveals the true nature of the concealing AFTER it has narrated the whole story with opinions. This is ridiculous.<p>Amazon is doing it exactly right. However there needs to be transparency at the minimum expected performance. For all employees. And when employees know they don’t meet that expectation, they do whatever they need to do including use corporate resources to get there.<p>But this article is a hit piece