Amazon’s HR Failures
One thing stuck out to me:<p>&gt; Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.<p>So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don&#x27;t think for a second you&#x27;re immune to this &quot;up or out&quot; force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It&#x27;s just not as blatant.<p>Here&#x27;s how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you&#x27;ll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly.<p>How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone&#x27;s performance was given their review and their level. To avoid &quot;ratings inflation&quot; each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can&#x27;t be &quot;strongly exceeds expectations&quot; by design.<p>But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument&#x27;s sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating.<p>Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door.<p>In corporate America the &quot;up or out&quot; culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you&#x27;re out) but the effect is basically the same.<p>This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.