Amazon Pip Horror Story
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).