Amazon’s HR Failures
One thing stuck out to me:> 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.So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant.Here'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'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly.How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design.But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument'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.Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door.In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same.This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.