Amazon Pip Horror Story

I&#x27;ve been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form.<p>Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn&#x27;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.<p>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.

I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”.<p>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

Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company&#x27;s PR of removing its toxic work culture.<p>It&#x27;s worth mentioning that it wasn&#x27;t uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far.<p>One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn&#x27;t like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as &quot;it shouldn&#x27;t happen&quot;, &quot;managers wouldn&#x27;t do that&quot; and &quot;it&#x27;s fine&quot; by the project stakeholders.<p>The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven&#x27;t seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can&#x27;t even imagine what it&#x27;s like for the rest of the company.

This is a phenomenon common to all low grade&#x2F;incompetent dev managers: When a dev asks for a team change they view it as a slap in the face because it has happened to them so often in the past and they take it as a personal offence. The fact is they are lousy managers and usually incompetent and nobody wants to work in their team.<p>So they go on the offensive and try to manage the dev out before senior management realises that yet another dev doesn’t want to work with them.

The pip quota is a HUGE perverse incentive here. Choosing someone to put on pip is hard because it is in manager&#x27;s best interest to protect their core team from pip.<p>So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team.<p>The other pathological result is hiring dummies just to put them on pip, again protecting the core team from it.

Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times &quot;crying at desk&quot; expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle &quot;Leadership Principles&quot; which make no actual sense and aren&#x27;t principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon&#x27;s leadership principles are: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9QMGAtxUlAc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9QMGAtxUlAc</a><p>Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon&#x27;s fuckwit bulletpoints like &quot;Be right a lot&quot; or &quot;Frugality.&quot;<p>Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn&#x27;t undo what the backend spaghetti is... That&#x27;s why the outages of late will continue. It&#x27;s all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.

While I feel bad that this guy didn&#x27;t understand what he was getting into when joining Amazon, it is the middle manager at these companies that have the worst jobs.<p>I interviewed for an Engineering Manager job at MSFT and they looked like they had about 35 hours of meetings a week. On top of that they are expected respond to urgent issues from their direct reports and respond from urgent issues from upper management. Then there is the corporate politics of other middle managers.<p>The kicker was that most of the interview they were wanting me to do leet code. Really, I&#x27;m going to take this job and spend 50 hours a week of dealing with management tasks AND you think that I&#x27;m going to be keeping up my coding skills?

This echoed so much what my girlfriend is experiencing at Amazon (London) that it is scary. She was not put on pip but one of her co-worker was last week. According to her the guy is competent and hard working.<p>Everything about the toxic culture, the (unpaid) on call every 4 weeks, management doesn&#x27;t care about estimations they just set you impossible deadlines, lots of turnover in the team, custom, unstable not documented tools, the &quot;customer first&quot; narrative to make you work overtime and feel guilty. I hear about this everyday. Even me not working at Amazon I have sev2 PTSD.

This comment killed me :<p>Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story…<p>I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down!<p>However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment?<p>It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue.<p>But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away.<p>Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?

How it started - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7Cyia1U.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7Cyia1U.jpeg</a><p>How it is going - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;pdYHy#selection-525.105-525.423</a>

Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you&#x27;re doing an internal transfer) there&#x27;s no one to talk to to make this right?<p>Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can&#x27;t believe there&#x27;s no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?

I took one Amazon interview for an engineering manager role. Literally all they wanted to talk about was PIPs.<p>I’ve been an EM for a while. I have a lot I can discuss on a lot of different topics.<p>Nope. All they wanted to hear about was PIPs. I said I’d never had to do that, the goal after all, is to help people improve before it comes to that.<p>The guy explained that PIPs are a very large part of what their EMs do and are heavily emphasized in the interview process.<p>I politely declined round two.

At this point, I&#x27;m not sure why anyone would choose to work at Amazon over other companies.<p>What do they offer over their competitors? Same work and pay at other big tech, but you don&#x27;t have to worry about potentially crazy hours or getting fired for no reason. Or any of the other great companies outside of big tech. Good pay, good impact, no PIP culture.<p>Recruiters from AMZN are trying to lure me away from Google (as recruiters do), but why on earth would I leave my good job and risk being a sacrificial fire?

Same thing happened to me. After 8 years working at amazon including multiple raises and promotions, I got piped. I was trying to transfer to a new team led by a new senior manager who was a peer of mine at one point. Exiting the pip requirements were vaguely defined and included tasks with dependencies I knew wouldn’t be fulfilled. So I took the 50k they offered me to leave and I left.<p>There are some great directors and executives at Amazon. I enjoyed my time there. There are also some toxic, toxic people with too much power and ambition.

I have a question for other former&#x2F;current employees of Amazon.<p>I worked there for 4 years on the AIV &#x2F; Prime Video platform across a few teams (2012-2016). Obviously we had performance reviews every year, and I did ok. I transferred 3 or 4 times (within AIV), never a problem. I never heard of mandatory quotas to fit in the under-performing category, I didn&#x27;t hear my colleagues talk about it either, &quot;under-performing&quot; laid off employees were rare (and unsurprising). Was I ignorant of what was going on around me?<p>From my perspective, the &#x27;bar raising&#x27; in Amazon worked through the hiring process, of which I did many interviews. You only hired someone if you thought they were better than average either technically or on leadership principals.<p>Did this PIP quota thing always go on? Does this go on now to the same effect as people are talking about, or is this an echo chamber magnification of something that happened within a subset of one org?

(dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check...<p>Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved.<p>PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatisfactory results. It&#x27;s a few months long plan where you got assigned some tasks you should complete. If you are not able to complete them in time, you are fired.

I feel for the guy—taking the post at face value, it sounds like he had a shitty team and a shitty manager. At the same time, this post does not make me want to hire him and in fact quite the opposite. He seems to be fairly junior, but even at that level I cringe at measuring ones self in terms of lines of code written (though lines of code deleted is a metric I can get behind).

I&#x27;ve spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it&#x27;s not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.

After many years at Amazon I figured out that although managers were mostly engineers at one point and could still talk like engineers, they are first and foremost company bureaucrats playing a very different game to what you and I do.

I smell bullshit<p>&gt; I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a &quot;Least Effective&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he works 10 hours 6 days a week. Of course he takes no bio breaks, doesn&#x27;t eat or drink and is not required to attend any standups or status meetings or design reviews.<p>This nets you 15600 minutes to code. So even under these absurd conditions he has managed over 3 lines of code per minute. What a god.

&gt; I only have one humble request, if I submited 51k lines of code in January and my whole team submitted 68k, do not call me a &quot;Least Effective&quot;.<p><pre><code> $ npm update</code></pre>

And in case anyone thought this was an isolated incident, I have heard from 3 different people about this happening to them. As soon as they try to transfer they get put on a PIP.

Who in their right mind PIPs a yearling? You&#x27;ve barely introduced them to the real world and they&#x27;re far cheaper than your seasoned contributors.<p>As an aside, I don&#x27;t see much horror in this story - this happens in many industries and is especially prevalent in companies that try to cull their lowest performers. The only sad part (and maybe illegal) is that it appears to be retaliation for requesting a transfer.<p>To the engineer who posted this on LinkedIn, producing three-fourths of your teams code shouldn&#x27;t be a metric you use to measure yourself. Communication with the computer is perhaps 20% of your job - communication with your coworkers&#x2F;customers is the more important 80%.

I spent almost a decade at Amazon. Their system for removing low performers has two key flaws.<p>First, the mandatory minimums. If an org is full of superstars, the org still has to ensure it has at least X% turnover per year, so a superstar has to go. Usually well-performing devs whose manager wasn&#x27;t skilled enough to convince the larger group that all of their people are superstars.<p>It&#x27;s cruel, unfair, and harms the company far more than it has ever helped them.<p>The second problem is that sociopaths can and do abuse it. There isn&#x27;t supposed to be a way for a manager to fire someone on a PIP when they ask for a transfer. There&#x27;s also at least one manager in the Toronto office who openly brags that he does it. He&#x27;s been there a long time, and the devs warn each other not to go work for that guy if you value your job.<p>Being a sociopath is not a requirement to become a senior leader at Amazon, but the qualities of a sociopath strongly overlap with the qualities it takes to get those promotions. So naturally, the systems in place are designed to favour sociopath behaviours. There is no system to try to identify and remove such people who abuse the PIP system, because the people in charge would never want such a system.<p>Kind of glad I left. When I chose which offer to take, I decided to turn down a much higher paying offer because &quot;That company feels too much like Amazon&quot;.

&gt; Since it is performance review season at Amazon, he quickly sent me into a dev plan (PIP)<p>I think the lesson of this story is to apply for another role after the performance review season.

Pretty sure GE had a similar bottom slicing program and look at how that company has performed. They were once a big conglomerate and they are now a shadow of their former self.<p>Companies are just collections of people who are delivering goods and services to customers and returning money to shareholders. The PIP story isn&#x27;t even surprising based on reporting from Big Technology and even the New York Times story from a few years ago.<p>I suspect Amazon is going to be in decline the next 20+ years and the start of that decline will be the company breaking up and selling off it&#x27;s &quot;non-core&quot; businesses.

My new response to every Amazon recruiter that reaches out will simply be that post.

I managed at Amazon and Google. One nuance to the Amazon stack ranking is that it is supposed to be only applied at org sizes &gt; 50 or levels &gt; 50. In theory Line managers themselves shouldn&#x27;t feel too much pressure on their teams to do this. I do agree that it should be an even larger N (e.g. 200) or larger as Google has the same effective policy but their N is much much larger. The scale of the stack ranking really matters for how toxic it can be IMO.

Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one&#x27;s challenged it so presumably it&#x27;s true:<p>&gt; The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package.<p>&gt; 50% of his CRs are merged without approval.<p>&gt; So, yeah, there you go !

Over 700 comments, and noone questions maybe there is a little more to this story.<p>For example: * Yes, he &quot;submitted&quot; &gt;50k lines of code. Most of it is auto-generated from infrastructure generation templates.<p>* His teammates are submitting less lines of code because they&#x27;re working on business logic<p>* Amazon doesn&#x27;t let you put people on performance improvement plans because they are trying to switch teams. What is happening in these situations is that someone is ALREADY on a performance improvement plan because of a problem (and it could be technical, or it could be personal or professional), is receiving feedback for improving, decides they are not interested in working on fixing these issues, and tries to switch teams. This is when they find out that Amazon (like most companies) doesn&#x27;t want you to just run away from problems by moving internally, and that you are not allowed to transfer. Then they go run to Blind or Linkedin to talk about how their manager is trying to sabotage them or hit PIP quotas.<p>Just saying. There&#x27;s always more to stories like this.

The idea that there are KPIs that can be used to objectively measure the performance of an SE and that the worst performers will be fired is an illusion. In reality, the direct manager has it in his hands: If he wants to get rid of one of his employees, he will find means and KPIs to do so. It is a political and human decision, KPIs only serve to justify his decision.

&gt;I submited 51k lines of code in January<p>that is well beyond real.

Sadly, there is no comeuppance in this.<p>The manager got what he&#x2F;she needed, which is meeting the attrition target and thus will get a TT or HV and carry on, doing the same thing again next go-around. Amazon still carries its brand value and millions of CS grads will still be clamoring to join the company, or experienced SWEs looking to switch company and start the recruiting process.<p>Jiawei Wang is leaving a big tech company, which happens at thousands a day, and unfortunately he is looking to join another company as a 9-5er, fading into the oblivion of corporate history, like a single blade of grass in a million square mile field.<p>Unless of course Jiawei join&#x2F;starts a unicorn and gets a couple Bs, then he will get a nice bio entry in wikipedia and do something like what Tepper did to Corzine to get his ultimate comeuppance.

&quot;Being oncall every 4 weeks for a team that lost 50% developers over one year? Piece of cake!&quot;<p>At least it&#x27;s not every other week like it was for my team for a while. Now we&#x27;re up to every 6 weeks.

People say that working for Amazon for a year is enough “training” to serve as a resume badge. However, I’d like to provide a counter to that: when I see Amazon on a resume, I actually discount the candidate. In my opinion, the branding has suffered tremendously and I view the candidate as a compensation maximizer beyond all costs- why else would you join Amazon despite the well known horror stories, as well as their complete disdain for human life in the name of “customer obsession?”

Rookie mistake, internal transfers after performance review not before. Also, pretend you’re happy there and will be a loyal worker right up until the last minute.

I hope the guy was not on a visa. Seen many people with visa issues being played with just because they cannot easily move or are halfway down the greencard path.

&gt; I submited 51k lines of code in January<p>wait wat? how is this possible? I&#x27;m not sure I would be able to even mindlessly type 51k lines of code in one month

I don&#x27;t know why is there a concept of a PIP Quota. IMO a PIP should be used if you really f*ked up. This just seems petty and small minded.

From a big picture point of view, I understand the original intent of PIP. However, it seems severely disconnected from the ground reality.<p>* It promotes lazy managers who easily put engineers on PIP. I have heard so many stories where managers put engineers on PIP as soon as they apply for internal transfers and execute very shady stuff like suddenly sending MoM for 1:1 meeting 3 days later with stuff that was never discussed, etc.<p>* It creates an environment of distrust amongst engineers for the system. I&#x27;ve talked to engineers who have lost trust in all internal mechanisms like Connections, Forte, etc. Blind is full of stories &amp; have seen personally where none of these mechanisms are able to surface structural &amp; cultural problems. Examples like: Managers putting unnecessary pressure on a smaller team due to inability to hire good talent and literally abusing them when they decide to leave. Managers not talking about growth and not doing anything &amp; more importantly not knowing enough to be able to grow their engineers.<p>* When faced with a bad manager or bad culture, a skilled engineer faces 2 choices, either fight the good fight, try escalating, try reaching out to HR or leave the team or leave Amazon. Even if there were no bad stories, its so hard for an employee to choose the former, but with so many stories floating around, the first choice becomes impossible. That leaves Amazon with a huge blind spot around bad managers, bad teams, and bad orgs.<p>* In terms of impact, a bad manager has 10x more negative impact to Amazon as compared to a bad engineer, yet the PIP process is carried about when IMO Amazon should be investing in re-establishing trust with engineers, creating processes to discover bad managers, bad teams and then establishing a process to weed them out.<p>Disclaimer: Amazonian here (soon to be ex).

Kind of OT: is it just me or the archive.TLD domains aren&#x27;t working sometimes? I can&#x27;t reach the websites, but sometimes they work

A good lesson I&#x27;ve learned over the years: there are 2 sides to every story, and on the Internet you usually get just one.<p>Not saying this guy is wrong, his manager is right, or vice versa. I&#x27;m saying <i>you don&#x27;t know</i> by this post, and by many of the pitchfork comments I&#x27;m reading, a lot of folks feel an unwarranted sense of surety in their outrage.

Has there ever in recorded history been an instance in which someone has been subjected to a &quot;performance plan&quot; and then gone on to be successful in the company?<p>My intuitive expectation would be that the second my boss even expressed concern (in a non-constructive way) about my performance it&#x27;d be time to get out. Like what&#x27;s the point?

Getting a 403. Is there a mirror?

I was on a team at Amazon where I was in a role that had 5 peoople in and out of it within 2 years. The team had basically designated the role to be the one that they would PIP each year to help ensure that they could meet their UAR metrics.

I think it is our holy duty to not be customers of such a company. Every time we pay Amazon(including AWS), we die a little inside.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;report-amazon-employee-jumps-off-company-building-seattle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;report-amazon-employee-jumps-o...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5fj9mh&#x2F;amazon_employee_jumps_off_company_building_after&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5fj9mh&#x2F;amazon_e...</a>

After having worked for very long time(compared to people who wish to become managers just few years into the job) as a SDE &amp; being managed by many different style of managers, I have found poor managers mostly are failed up engineers or those coming from non engineering background. Also, the tech rush has brought so many &quot;managers&quot; from outside the US who not only lack real management skills, but dont adopt to the US management style. I really worry for the future of the silicon valley if these sort of mediocre managers start to manage high performers in top tech companies.

Oh, I thought this was a story about a Python installation that had gone rogue.

This <i>particular</i> incident seems like an easy one to solve, if someone has an offer from another team, nothing the manager does should be able to impact it? This seems like a simple HR change.

I think the PIP quota is not necessarily evil. Amazon is a huge company. Like every big company, you&#x27;ll have many coasters. With everyone working remotely it can get even worse. The problem however that the PIP quota is not a secret anymore, most employees know it exist (thanks to Blind). So it puts unnecessary stress on good employees who will never get PIPd . I think Amazon need to modify the plan in such a way that it&#x27;s still effectove in removing coasters and bad performers, without stressing out everyone else.

Really what needs to happen is another New York Times story. The market for engineering talent is so tight right now that if this lands with new data points, Amazon will end this practice for another 3 years before quietly resuming it.<p>I have friends with horror stories about Sr. SDMs going behind their back to put down names they fought to save. Imagine that SDM now having to tell that report they&#x27;re at risk of being fired at a performance review.<p>L6 SDM is the most difficult job at Amazon.<p>---<p>SDM - Software development manager.<p>L6 - Entry level for the role (L5 SDMs exist, but are more rare).

I personally wouldn&#x27;t choose to get blackballed by every MAGMA&#x2F;MAAAM if I was living in the US and taking that sort of career path. Glad some folks are making this decision.

With Amazon&#x27;s &quot;Hire to Fire&quot; going on PLUS remote work, i wonder if there is a market opportunity for a recruiting firm to offer that as a service.<p>&quot;Here is a dev good enough to get through your screens and panels, they will be keeping their actual job, but will make enough appearances to pull the secondary salary for whatever period time you need before your team is required to lose someone to attrition&quot;

Piping the tail of curve only works if you can prove that people progressively fall from the high ranks and get piped.<p>I really doubt that companies raise the average with stacked ranking.<p>The real reason tech companies use agrressive hiring (and firing that funds hiring) is to steal the most possible fresh IP from competitors (in a legal way).

Does anyone have any insight into what the culture for Product Managers in AWS is? Currently interviewing with them, and it’s impossible to determine the culture from their interview process. For example, I asked how large the team was, and the interviewer responded that he couldn’t tell me that information.

Somewhat controversial opinion but from my experience <i>most</i> people at Amazon who got pipped deserve it.<p>Especially with new grads, they&#x27;ve lowered the bar and stopped doing interviews since it&#x27;s so hard to hire, that there&#x27;s a lot of people not cut out for the job so they rely on pip to calibrate quality.

Last time a recruiter at Amazon messaged me, for the umpteenth time, I told them &quot;please remove me from your recruiting databases, I am not interested in Amazon&quot; mostly because of stories such as this one.<p>Good luck hiring into a toxic workplace culture, Amazon recruiters!

This article is pretty accurate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;patrick-mcgah-quit-amazon-opaque-pip-unregretted-attrition-2022-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;patrick-mcgah-quit-amazon-op...</a>

I also believe that staying long in that culture also changes your personality at a deeper level. You might start treating your personal life in a similar manner as well. So someone either exits or stays long enough to start believing in it.

&gt; Since I was warned to take down this post<p>If this happened in the US and the warning came from managers at Amazon, wouldn&#x27;t this be an infringement against protected concerted activity and thus illegal?

PIP: &quot;Performance Improvement Plan&quot;.<p>Perfect example of <i>betriebsblind</i>

&quot;hey welcome to your first day at Amazon! We&#x27;re so excited to have you. Here&#x27;s your desk, and here&#x27;s your PIP. Oh yeah, here&#x27;s your computer too&quot;

Oh look, another PIP story. What is this, Blind?<p>This may have happened, but doesn&#x27;t align with my experiences at Amazon. Maybe things are different based on what org you&#x27;re in.

Such stories do make me thankful for working in a job that allows me to quit one day and to start somewhere else the next day. This is a luxury for most people.

PIPs are a courtesy most of the time. You&#x27;re giving 60-90 days notice that someone needs to find a new job instead of suddenly dismissing them.

I honestly thought this was going to be a development post on hosting a python package in AWS.

This exact thing happened to me when I tried to transfer internally.

I&#x27;m neither supporting Amazon or the person who got Pip&#x27;ed. But 49k out of those &quot;51k lines of code&quot; are just auto-generated npm package-lock.json diff

their captcha is not working with noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html browsers, any copy of its content somewhere?

PIP?

What is this PIP thing?

site is down ;(

And I thought this would be another Python package management horror story.

Why are people who do this never named? They should be named. This type of behavior perpetuates because despite this employee revealing a company issue.. the individual perpetrator can still hide behind anonymity. CALL these ass holes out.

Amazon is a shit company with a shit culture and a shitty founder. This company is like a virus. Wherever it goes, it kills off the local business population. Never work for such a company.<p>Fuck you bezos!

Where is dang on this post. Why do we think so many of these comments and even this post are okay and on topic for HN. Next thing you know this place will revolve into blind. I guess dumping on amazon is on the right side of the line here but anything questioning Covid vaccine efficacy should be banned because it’s not science. This place has become a mockery of itself.

As much as I feel sorry for this person and their experience, it seems to me this wasn&#x27;t the best way to handle this situation.<p>It would have been more pragmatic to fire up leetcode, take a few interviews, and leave the job professionally. This probably would have come with a small pay bump, even with this persons limited professional experience.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m just lucky and I&#x27;ve never had a bad experience like this, but I couldn&#x27;t see myself posting something like this professionally.