
Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year) - avinassh
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/al2p6q/7_months_into_fang_company_want_out/efad55p/
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chasingthewind
I once worked at a company where the new CIO came out and said very plainly
that the attrition rate was too low. The implication under the circumstances
was that there were too many low competence long-timers. This was followed up
with a ham handed campaign of making everybody miserable by dramatically
increasing the sense of stress and "urgency" that everyone assumed was
designed to increase the attrition rate. That in turn was followed by a small
exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave
easily when things go south.)

Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original
attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. The
company still has a ton of long-timers that they seemingly can't get rid of.
Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent
people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale
by being a dystopian nightmare?

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panzagl
Maybe focus on making the less competent more competent?

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zhengyi13
Nonono, that would require actually investing in your people^Wresources.
You're supposed to minimize CapEx, man. Human resources are a fixed asset;
depreciation is expected, and good for taxes.

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dragonwriter
> Human resources are a fixed asset

Human resources are rented, and thus an expense not an asset; I mean, since
the abolition of chattel slavery.

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TeMPOraL
Which seems like a part of the problem here. Also, since they're an expense,
not an asset, why would you want to invest in them? After all, you wouldn't
pay for a paint job on a car you're just leasing.

And then companies are surprised people job-hop :).

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jmull
If I have to push out X number of low-performing people every year, I'm going
to damn well make sure I have X low-performing people around to push out so I
don't have to get rid of anyone I value.

The first one or two times a manager is asked to do this, there may be
adequate dead-weight around that has accumulated "naturally".

After that, a significant number of managers will game the system -- they'll
attract and retain people for this very purpose. Meanwhile, general employees
will realize what's going on and you're going to have political games.

I don't see how this works for a company as a policy. It's too rigid.
Meanwhile, a great way to get your attrition rate up is create a generally
miserable environment. I can see executives patting themselves on the back for
achieving their attrition goals even as their better employees are leaving for
greener pastures.

This makes so little sense I would doubt it could really be true. Except I've
see it myself, and worse (not at Amazon).

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johan_larson
Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the
practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate
getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers,
because those coworkers are also competitors.

Could Amazon really be falling into the same trap so soon?

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C1sc0cat
The actual number of really bad hires is actually quite low give my experience
at BT (15 years) and I only knew two cases of really bad performers.

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scottlegrand2
As a former Amazon manager, I don't have a problem with forced attrition so
much as the proportion of my time that was put into finding the candidates for
that forced attrition.

There are a tremendous number of low achievers in every industry and if you
keep them around they are toxic, every bit if not more toxic than Amazon's
culture in 2019.

That said, I would have liked to have seen most of the time dedicated to this
task allocated to developing the careers of my direct reports because I think
that is of much higher value to any organization.

Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this
problem, but that now seems intractable. It seems there's a real temptation to
scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill positions these days.

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unlimit
> Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this
> problem,

If you hire all rockstars and you have to let go of 10%, then how does this
help?

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Pfhreak
Across thousands of hires, can you hire all rockstars? When you hire 1,000
people, how many do you expect are underperformers?

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logfromblammo
No matter how many people you hire, at least half of them are going to be at
or below the median for your new employees.

So I'd say 500. You'd have to be very good at hiring to get a lower number,
and judging from my anecdata, companies that hire software pros use hiring
processes that are terrible predictors of future performance, if not entirely
useless.

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lordnacho
Marginalism.

As someone who's managed teams for many years, I think it's really odd to do
this stack-rank thing.

A team is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts. People on the team do
different things that are complementary. If you've ever watched sports, you
know what this means. Not everyone is scoring the goals, someone needs to make
critical passes, someone needs to get the ball out of defence, and so on.

That's not to say everyone should be paid the same. Clearly some roles are
more rare than others and need to be compensated thus. But it is also true
that your star needs someone to carry water for him, and that having the star
and the water carrier makes the team more effective than two of either.

So when it comes to letting go of people, it rarely makes sense to try to
decide who is productive and who isn't. A lot of businesses wouldn't even
operate without juniors on the lowest grades. For instance junior investment
bankers make powerpoint slides and financial models. Senior investment
bankers, who have long forgotten how to use PowerPoint, take these to
customers and get business.

The only times I've let people go is when I've thought the team really doesn't
need this person. It's not a question of being inherently productive, it's a
question of whether the marginal productivity of the team goes up. And as in
sports, sometimes you find it's a star player who needs to go. Sometimes a
bit-part player.

But in no sense is there a magic score from which the bottom can be removed.

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drugme
_Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year)_

What Amazon fails to consider is the number of high-caliber engineers who
would never consider applying to work for companies that have policies like
this.

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astazangasta
Here is one of many articles on Microsoft's stack ranking debacle:
[https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-
secretiv...](https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretive-
cynical-and-paranoid-20130827-2snei.html)

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bb88
I've seen managers game this kind of system out.

1) Reserve 5%-10% of your staffing for people going to be laid off.

2) Hire people that won't make the cut after 1 year.

3) Fire them

4) Rinse and repeat

In other words the only reason they were being hired was so that the manager
could protect the performers of this team. Basically if the manager's view is
the only one that matters, he can pretty much get away with it.

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hopler
How do I apply for that job? :-)

I want to be an SRE:

Scapegoat Redundancy Engineer

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antisthenes
You have to make a career out of it!

Charge by the month and rotate in different companies to be hired and fired
yearly!

~~~
bb88
God, the pain of interviewing.

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renholder
Another big technology corporation has forced attrition rates because their
previous CTO came from Wal-Mart (yeah, that works-out well). Managers are told
that, even if everyone on the team does the same amount of work, they either
have to pick someone to _lose_ or find themselves "lost", instead.

Forced attrition is bad for morale but it's an especially shit situation every
review-cycle, when people are on edge because _someone_ has to go, no matter
what, and it's either going to be themselves or someone that they work with.

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maximilianburke
If only forced attrition were so enthusiastically applied to Amazon’s
recruiters.

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ex_amazon_sde
Ex Amazon here. The attrition rate is much higher than what most people
expect. Yes, the company does stack ranking... unofficially.

Even in team with very skilled and productive engineers managers will still
set expectations so high that someone will be put on dev plan.

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auiya
I thought most companies have figured out Jack Welch's rank-and-yank system
doesn't work by now? Surely Amazon isn't that naive are they?

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czbond
So I think it depends on the organization. I have tended to work in more
aggressive, competitive fields. Different versions of "rank and yank" (as you
call it) or "up or out" or other types. BigCorps need to do it to keep the
average talent bar from trending down (A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire
C-Players). Startups need to do it generally because the pool of applicants
tends to be either "great", "good" or "can't get a job elsewhere" and it needs
to weed out. I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game.

~~~
rightbyte
This doesn't make sense.

"A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players"

If B:s hires C:s than in analogue A:s would hire B:s since it's a bell curve-
ish distribution not digital buckets. Who hires the A:s? A, B and C:s by
accident?

"I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game."

You probably want people to improve their skills in their craft, not players
to improve their skills in the a management game.

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edelans
mandatory quote :

CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we
don’t and they stay?

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foobaw
Netflix and Facebook definitely have something similar too especially for
newer grads (although the former rarely hires new grads). Amazon just does it
in the worst way possible.

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40acres
The interesting thing about Netflix is that they are very upfront about their
hiring culture: no internships and no hiring of developers without at least
five years experience. They are upfront in the fact that they are liberal when
it comes to letting people go and pay way above market rate to compensate for
it.

I'd rather deal with a company that puts all of its cards on the table like
Netflix does rather than an implicit forced attrition process that is
described here.

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mempko
Competition undermines any form of cooperation. Presumably Amazon is a company
of people cooperating, otherwise they would all just be individuals under
competitive contracts right? Competition undermines cooperation but we do it
anyway because some must be good right? Just like some amount of child abuse
must be good right? Or a small amount of lead in your body is good right?
Sometimes moderation is not a good answer. There is no safe level of
competition in a cooperative organization.

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throwaway98121
How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily
posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous.

The forced attrition is no surprise. I’m in Seattle and considering the
thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would
be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm
problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.

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apacheCamel
> How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? ... The forced
> attrition is no surprise.

I believe because people do not see forced attrition as a surprise, they also
believe this post. I agree that we shouldn't take every Reddit post as truth
but it makes sense in the culture Amazon portrays. Also there hasn't been
anybody that offers a counter perspective into the inner workings (that I have
seen). True or not, it would be interesting to see the companies that do
practice this and what kind of workplace culture they put forward.

Edit: Formatting.

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jkingsbery
Current Amazon employee here (Senior Software Engineer) - I don't speak
officially for the company obviously, but I wanted to share my experience. I
am not a manager, so I don't know the particulars of what goes on during the
process referred to in the linked post, but I can offer a few things:

My experience has been that people at Amazon are generally pretty willing to
help each other in various different ways, whether helping a teammate on a
project or helping someone new to a technology on one of our internal mailing
lists.

Many on the reddit thread take it for granted that Amazon is, as one person
called it, a "hellhole." That is not at all my experience - I know others in
different orgs or different roles may of course have a different experience.
Amazon has been significantly less stressful than almost everywhere I've
worked (and the one exception was not less stressful in a good way).

At least among people I know, most of the people who leave our team join
another team at Amazon. I've known a few people who have left Amazon, but we
haven't had 5% of our team leave Amazon every year as this thread would
indicate.

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cryptonector
Is stack ranking something Bezos wanted, or something other executives brought
in that Bezos thought might be a good idea?

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kevin_b_er
This is one should reconsider hiring anyone from Amazon. They came from a
culture of backstabbbing, distrust, and a cutthroat ideology. How can they be
a good cultural fit anywhere that relies on trust?

~~~
hopler
For juniors: because they _left_ Amazon.

For seniors: yes be wary.

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dba7dba
When Toyota US HQ moved from CA to Plano, Texas, there were rumors that part
of the reason was to purge out employees with low/no energy, initiative,
output, etc. Employee with no output at work will most likely not bother with
the whole enchilada involved in relocating to another state.

Apparently the US HQs of Japanese motor companies follow Japanese corporate
model and do not lay off employees. So they end up with quite a bit of low
performing employees. Just rumors I heard.

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denimnerd46
wouldn’t desperate people who have low skills move instead of people who can
get a job anywhere

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dba7dba
From what I gather, some were old employees near retirement and really did not
want to pick up and move to Texas, leaving family/friends/CA behind.

And then there were those who really really did not generate output at work
and apparently management hoped(?) they would do the same in their personal
life and not bother moving to another state.

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misiti3780
Im not trying to be a dick, but it seems to be working for them pretty well.
Why is forced attrition rate a such a bad thing?

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czbond
A lot of companies do this - without it being known. I see nothing wrong with
the practice. Some companies I know of rotate each quarter to cut the bottom
people or % that just don't make it. (eg: Q1 might be operations, Q2 finance,
Q3 development, etc). It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving
it higher.

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quotha
If you try a bit harder, maybe you might be able to think of something that's
wrong with this practice.

~~~
czbond
An acceptable variant that I've seen implemented well is "the pass". Where a
competent leader, decides to "pass" (one or many rotations) because of hiring
rates or current team excellence. Just my experience.

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rightbyte
Then it is not forced?

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megaman8
the reason has nothing to do with the ones being let go. It's about the people
who remain: they're gonna be working a lot harder when they see their
colleagues laid off. No one wants to be next. It's like running away from an
alligator. You don't have to be faster than the alligator, you just need to be
faster than your friends.

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rightbyte
Are there any proof of this, that it's making people work harder?

If there is, does it offset the potential tendency of workers to not want to
help new hires getting up to speed in fear of being eaten by the alligator?

What about teams that turn around and beat the alligator to death with sticks.
It sounds like the foundation of civilization.

Maybe cooperation is not for co-operations. Who knows.

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cheeze
Isn't this common throughout the industry? I love to bash on Amazon as much as
the next HN'er, but is this really news?

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kevin_b_er
This is Amazon, Netflix, and, in the past, Microsoft.

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qbaqbaqba
That's nothing compared to what is going on in their warehouses. Buy hey, who
cares.

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dawhizkid
Is this that surprising? In my experience it's less
prevalent/institutionalized in tech consulting, banking, etc. where the "up or
out" philosophy is much more transparent e.g. if you aren't promoted in a
certain window of time (say 2 years) to the next level then you're expected to
leave.

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ensiferum
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve)

