Amazon Pip Horror Story
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.