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I've been in Amazon for almost 2 years, and I'm still constantly fear of being PIPed. We have a joke that Amazon is a fear-driven development as opposed to TDD. Recently the fear of being PIPed becomes the reality: I'm told that I'm entering into PIP, which I'm surprised because during previous 1-1s, the manager said I'm on the right track to promotion, and he asked me to prepare the promo doc. There's no announcement of putting me on dev-list even. Seems like he just put me on the dev list secretly while asked me to write the promo doc. Gladly I've already received several offers because I always knew Amazon is not a right place to stay long unless you enjoy backstabbing colleagues and playing politics. I start to wonder though if the PIP culture is just Amazon's thing. By PIP culture I mean, there is a mandatory PIP quota enforced by the management every review periods. When the quota comes to your team, the manager has to pick one regardless if everyone in the team is performing well. In this culture, the manager learns to keep track of every small trivial matter, or mistake the SDE has made along the way, such as too many code review comments/revisions (though they are just styling comments and refactoring), answer 1 question wrong during the on-call meeting, break pre-production (alpha stage) environment twice, ask questions that other peers think its too shallow even though you are just new to the team and not sure where to find the doc, or docs are poorly written. I was criticized of every thing above when my manager said I'm entering into PIP. I can see he tried to match every single anecdotes into me failing LPs. Though I think this is ridiculous and he's just nitpicking, I don't give a shit because I know he is just abusing the LP and trying to pick a PIP victim here. I won't feel embarrassed because I know I've successfully delivered two mid-sized projects and always work hard. I think the reason he picks me is because everyone else in the team is the same ethnicity as him. I know I'm not the top one but also obviously I'm not the worst performer either. Another girl has broken the "Production" two times causing outages, and she is not blamed at all. Funny thing is she is promoted to SDE2 after 2 years. She doesn't even deliver a project that has a mid to large size scope. The last project she did: she just "leads" another new SDE1 by coordinate meetings and talking with PM. No code implementation, no design. That's it, and she is promoted. After all these, I only have one thought: Fuck Amazon, fucking pathetic place full of unfairness, nepotism, and those idiots using LP to weaponize and fire ppl. Just want to say this to my manger: I got a TC bump from 155k to 300k in my next job. Going to Apple as ICT4. Bye suckers and losers in Amazon. Keep enjoy your LPs and FREE bananas #amazon #amazonaws #pip #leadershipprinciples EDIT: Didn't expect that many views and comments. Thank you for the support. My overall feedback for the experience of working there is: Unless you're a good friend of the manager, thus benefiting from favoritism, DO NOT make any single tiny trivial mistake! All the "mistakes" will be secretly recorded by the manager, and will be used as his material to create dev-list/pip docs. The manager would keep all these materials for his reports, and when the pip quota comes, it's up to the manager to pick which one will be the victim. This is how disgusting the Amazon PIP culture is. In this culture, you will be judged if you ask "stupid" questions. In this culture, your manager would proactively ask around for your negative feedbacks after he've made up his mind to pick you for satisfying the mandatory quota. How toxic it is! If you don't experience this, it just mean you're lucky. It doesn't automatically prove this culture doesn't exist. Otherwise, how come we rarely see others complaining about this online. Remember, Google, MS, Apple and Amazon all have the similar amount of engineers (80k-100K). Someone may claim it's because Amazon has a low hiring bar, so those who are PIPed are incompetent and deserved it. This may be true for some cases, but there are also A LOTS of cases where the PIPed guys successfully get a much better offers in Google, FB, Apple, and many other good startups. They are able to thrive there and be promoted and promoted. This just shows how Amazon trashes the real talent and its system is totally broken and abused.
Great read. Take my like.
Is this normal or just a bad particular manager? This sounds extreme.
This abnormality is normal here. Good manager and a helpful non-backstabbing team is a rarity. This comes from my personal experience plus I've seen similar things shared by my friends as well as online.
This is very normal for Amazon. A team or a manager who does not do this will be considered abnormal and manger will get fired..
Yeah this place sucks
Is this just relevant to Amazon or is AWS also impacted?
Lol, AWS is pinnacle of PIP culture. Amazon is better than AWS
OP, if now is not the time to share the manager alias, I don’t know when is.
I've signed the doc that forbids to do so. You don't need to know the name though. He is not the first one, nor the last one in Amazon abusing the LP to fire SDEs.
It won’t prevent him from going to Apple in future. You should not sign anything.
Amazon is a managers' paradise. It's full of incompetent POS managers. Throwing their reports under the bus to make their paycheck.
Yup I've never had any help from mine, just expectations, I ccd him to all my collaborations with other teams, mostly he doesn't join, doesn't read email chain but asks them for feedback about me.
Feel you. My manager would ask them specifically for "negative" feedback. If he doesn't get some, he would ask someone else until he gets it. Simply terrible and pathetic.
Which org or team is this
All of them
👏👏👏
Thank you for the post and All the best in Apple
Yeah I think it just comes down to your manager like you or not. I've gotten back to back accolades related to the project why I'm on pivot for the past 4 weeks but it says I'm not performing. Affected teams would tell you I always respond quickly and concisely, get on a call and help them whenever they have questions. I've asked for help and a teammate but in 2 years I've resolved 79% of my teams tickets, of the remainder 10% I'm working on and the rest I'm delegating to a new member I'm trying to train. Most of these efforts are me bridging gap between teams who aren't delivering to us consistently, I'm on the phone with them helping them get realigned consistently. To add insult to injury one of my pivot expectations is create a training and onboarding plan for new hires. LOL
No one is perfect. In a normal non-toxic company, managers recognize that you may make mistake, and they let you learn. Yet in Amazon's culture, your small harmless mistakes will always be recorded by your manager, which he can use in the future for PIP evidence when the quota comes. Pathetic company run by a bunch of idiotic managers. Modern sweatshop that uses LPs and PIP to enslave and brainwash employees.
Amen. And even my leadership says success story, this is working great we have a new standard thanks to these efforts. Then 2 days later pivot because you're not performing related to just that effort mentioned above.
How long it took to prepare for interviews and until you had an offer ?
2 months Leetcoding is enough for me
Check inbox please