Amazon Managers Say They 'Hire To Fire' To Meet Annual Turnover Goals (businessinsider.com) 289
A Slashdot reader shares a report: Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them. "We might hire people that we know we're going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team," one manager told Insider. The practice is informally called "hire to fire," in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager's URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn't regret seeing leave, one way or the other.
Not even cogs in the machine (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many things ethically wrong in just the summary that I'm lost for words.
Managers are punished for NOT firing enough people, whether firing is in the company's best interest or not? WTF kind of psychopath came up with that?
Re:Not even cogs in the machine (Score:5, Insightful)
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I guess it's one of those misguided policies where they are trying to only "keep the best" so they force managers to fire people.
Dumb policies.
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Meanwhile I know other companies that are struggling to find employees only to see them leave in short order.
The idiot that came up with this metric should be replaced. What happened to "Working together for the good of the company?" What about all of that team based nonsense that we used to strive so hard to get? Apparently their anti-union rhetoric is so strong that they are looking to destroy any semblance of team building.
To be fair, I didn't read the article for paywalled reasons.
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Re:Not even cogs in the machine (Score:5, Interesting)
So I had a simple metrics... % of time my support cases were in Service Level Agreement. If I had 10 cases and 1 was out - I met my SLA 90% of the time...
There are always long standing bugs that take forever to fix so there is always something out of SLA - nothing can be done about it. What was perverse is my wallet was tied to this metric. If an easy fix came in that had a 2 week SLA - it was against my best interest to fix it immediately. I mean I have 10 cases with 1 bad - now I fix one I now have 9 cases with one bad... My metric went from 90% to 89%. I lose money. Tried to explain this to management - they didn't get it... so off I go to give customers fixes right on the due date, instead of when they are available to keep as many cases open as possible.
Got to love simple metrics.
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They probably did get, but they are just kissing up to their own moron boss(es) who probably think they are a stable genius. Brownosing trumps logic in most orgs.
IBM Canada had this in the late '80s/early '90s (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing was, it was the right thing to do in the situation and there were certain controls in place.
I became a manager in Toronto Manufacturing 1988 and there were a *lot* of workers on the line and in administrative/engineering positions that had been hired during and immediately following WWII who were struggling with changes to the manufacturing processes (going from being a primarily mechanical assembly factory to all electronics) as well as changes in business processes (ie email and automation). These guys (they were all men) had been excellent performers over their decades of service with deep networks within the organization but many didn't want to/were able to change with the times.
There was an edict to remove the bottom 10% of the population from the business. Note I say "remove" as the first approach to deal with the older, lower performing employees was to encourage them to retire if they were eligible. When it came to firing people, the names came out of human resources based on their performance evaluations over the previous few years as well as their time of service and a general management perception of the employee.
Being a manager I was fairly close to the situation and there are a couple of things that stick in my mind. When the guidelines came out, I did have an older employee that was 63 (two years away from mandatory retirement) was an excellent performer as PCB board designer but was not well known by the management team at large, although very highly regarded by the rank and file engineers and had mentored many of them. I had a real fight in keeping him for the two years until his mandatory retirement to keep him on staff but I was able to by arguing that the morale of the department would be seriously damaged by his leaving.
The second thing was that I saw a number of other managers taking on poor performers from other departments with the intention of firing the transfers and looking good to senior management. What amazed me was how quickly they were identified as "hatchet men" by everyone in the plant with employees refusing transfers into their departments (even long after the policy was stopped) and they got poor employee surveys. By doing what they thought would make them seen as being effective managers by the senior team ironically hurt their careers (you can't move up the ladder if people won't work for you).
It doesn't seem like Amazon has the same situation or controls that IBM Canada had all those years ago and if it's happening, then they have a very poor HR department - it should be pretty easy for them to identify managers engaging in this behaviour and shutting them down. It seems like Amazon HR either doesn't agree with the edict (which means they are allowing managers to "hire to fire") or they are incompetent and not seeing what is happening the business.
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Managers are punished for NOT firing enough people, whether firing is in the company's best interest or not? WTF kind of psychopath came up with that?
This is how lots of institutions operate. In academia it's called "publish or perish". In the military it's called "up or out". In the private sector it's called "rank and yank". It's an antidote to the Peter Principle [wikipedia.org]. The point is let good people climb the promotion track by getting rid of the poor performers who clog up the system.
The mangers in this article however are idiots, "hire to fire" completely defeats the purpose. You're supposed to shed the worst ~10% with the expectation that the average new
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Rank and yank doesn't solve the Peter Principle, it speeds it up. If you rank and yank the peter principled incompetents you make room for more good people to rise to their level of incompetence faster. If your organization somehow managed to have better than average employees, this policy will quickly regress it to the mean.
Re:Not even cogs in the machine (Score:5, Interesting)
It is like the story of a tax investigator, he was so good and so ruthless that people simply paid their taxes, because they knew that otherwise the guy would find them and they would be in trouble.
As a result, less and less people got caught, an indicator of poor performance, so our super tax investigator was let go, and people started cheating again, the number of cases increased and the higher up were happy despite a considerable increase in tax evasion.
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WTF kind of psychopath came up with that?
Jack Welch [wikipedia.org].
It sounds bad, but it's worse than it sounds because it creates a culture of backstabbing, and people become emotionally scarred (a suggestion for improvement in a code review can give them nightmares, since that's one thing managers look at to see "bad" programmers).
This kind of stack ranking has been studies, and has been known to be counter-productive for decades. The exception might be sales teams, where people don't need to cooperate at all.
Re:Not even cogs in the machine (Score:5, Interesting)
At least according to legend, in Japan firing an under-performer brings shame on the manager. A good manager should be able to identify and correct the reason the employee is under-performing.
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This approach has been around for a long time. When I was managing a team at the former Motorola, there were a bunch of bins we had to rank employees into. There was the bottom 10%, and they were to be sacked. Each year. Of course, when you had a small team (I had a total of 35 or so, but those were subdivided into smaller teams, which just made it worse) that meant you HAD to get rid of a certain number of people each 12 months. It was a sucky barbaric way of running things, especially if you had in genera
Nice (Score:2, Interesting)
A bit like that sweater factory in Bangladesh that makes sweaters out of PET bottles, but since they are not collected there, they installed a used PET-bottle-factory right beside it, where they manufacture bottles and then immediately shred them to make sweaters out of them.
Turnover Goals? (Score:3)
That says to me that Bezos Inc considers everyone who is not a 'C suite' exec with stock options as totally expendable. Having goals wrt turnover and hiring people that you know that you are going to fire is totally crass IMHO. This is the final nail in their coffin as far as I'm concerned.
Their behaviour towards workers needs to be exposed for everyone to see the reality of working for the richest man in the world.
Too bad that the attempt to unionize in Alabama failed. Next time I hope it works.
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That says to me that Bezos Inc considers everyone who is not a 'C suite' exec with stock options as totally expendable
You appear to think this is unique to Amazon.
I'm trying to think of any American company that does not have the same attitude.
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Costco, but they are the exception that proves the rule.
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This is the final nail in their coffin as far as I'm concerned.
Right, surely this will get them to change. Face it, Amazon could fire their employees out of a canon and people would still shop there, hand over fist.
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Right. Funny how there isn't a goal to turn over 10% of the C-suite every year.
Neutron Jack (Score:3, Insightful)
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Admittedly, this is 20 years ago now, but I spent a number of years at Trane Co / American Standard. At the time, there was a lot of praise for the Jack Welch model, and there were rumors of the same thing occurring.
We regularly saw significant layoffs around the holiday season, and while a decent chunk of that was in the production facilities (associated with cyclical production), that was also the time you'd see cuts in the offices.
The terminology used that I heard was not "hire-to-fire", it was "sacrifi
Re:Neutron Jack (Score:5, Interesting)
GE stock was $59 in 2000 and it was less than $6 last September. It has rebounded to $13 today. Hmmnmm....
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I read his book about how he reduced failure rates for GE light bulbs. I then got an entire year worth of "failed light bulbs" if you believe their failure rate all in the same box.
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I would have assumed that ten years ago the faults in Jack Welch's management would already be part of an MBA curriculum. The house of cards he built went crashing down just before he left. He wasn't a horrible CEO or anything but he certainly shouldn't be regarded as a God like he was in the late 90s.
Re:Neutron Jack (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack Welch ruined GE. He milked the co's brand for short-term profits and tried to turn it into a financial institution instead of manufacturing.
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Agreed, and amen. I would argue that GE is just one of many: The entire manufacturing sector has been gutted in my lifetime, (and coincidentally the middle class), and replaced with this kind of thinking. The trouble is that these types of "leaders" know how to suck blood from a rock (extractive value) but no idea about actual wealth creation (production value) by using ones own labor. And of course they own all the politicians. Ross Perot with his "giant sucking sound" was doom for millions, myself include
Re:Neutron Jack (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this philosophy is it is incredibly short-sighted. Much like Jack Welch.
You have 100 employees. 10% are bad at their jobs. You fire them, and hire 10 new people. Well, 9 of those 10 are good at their jobs. You should only fire 1 person, and something like 1-3 people that survived the first cut. Yet you are still required to fire 10%.
The result is an incredibly hostile environment where sabotaging your co-workers is the route to job security. Which is extremely bad for the company, since the company is going to do far, far better with employees that work together.
Re:Neutron Jack (Score:5, Insightful)
You have not proven that, nor have you provided a compelling argument for that
You're already working as hard as you can to get your tasks done, so there's no headroom for you to climb any higher above the firing line. This year's firings is going to come around. You hear about someone else's project in the breakroom. You have a lot of helpful information due to a similar project you already finished, and from what you overhear, they're going to hit a wall that causes them problems.
You could share that information, and benefit the other employee and the company. But why would you? It's just going to make the other employee look better compared to you, and now you get fired because they're above you on the cut list.
It is part of their manager's job to watch for precisely this sort of behavior, and to use it as grounds for deciding who gets let go.
If you actually believe managers are this omniscient, you appear to have never worked for any employer ever.
BUT I am not going to make unfounded doom-and-gloom predictions about it due to this bias
I have worked for a company that applied this philosophy. I know exactly how it turns out in practice, as opposed to you trying to argue from theory of omnipotent managers and stock price.
The reality is you end up firing a lot of good-but-not-stellar employees, and your stellar employees leave for places where they don't have to watch their backs. You waste a ton of employee effort manipulating their managers instead of doing their projects. You waste tons of resources because helping other employees is bad for you.
If it worked remotely as well as you imagine, Amazon wouldn't have such a long list of product failures.
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Humans always want to feel secure. This policy eliminates that feeling of security, so we hate it. But it ALSO forces us to really push ourselves in order to get what we want. It abolishes our natural laziness, AND it ensures that, over time, the company's talent pool is saturated with top-tier talent, rather than lazy but socially-skilled parasites. This is just another example of natural selection at work. The world of fight-to-survive is brutal so we hate it, but it is also a solid guarantee that resources will be optimally allocated.
Is this policy kind? No. Does it work? Apparently so.
I question whether it actually works as intended. It seems like it would reward clusters of friends who are the posse of a manager who is happy to hire people with the intention of firing them.
Are 10% of the managers on the firing line? Are 10% of the directors? The VPs? The board? Because if the shit only flows downhill, then I do not expect the incentives to work the way you suggest. Because I seen enough ugly situations in real world businesses to know socially-skilled parasites are more clever tha
Re:Neutron Jack (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be a brutal policy, but it doesn't even achieve its purported goals.
The ramp up time for productivity for software engineers is often 6 months to a year for modestly complex systems. For systems with more than 250kloc, the process can take years, and even then, the productivity improvements may extend well beyond the 5 year mark.
To hire and fire every year means that you always end up with at least one underperformer, and relative to the more experienced peers, the performance gap only grows. Constant turnover destroys the productivity of even the more experienced engineers, because they are constantly mentoring the new guy, rather than concentrating on getting work done.
The Army takes a different approach: the mission is critical, and if there is a team member who is underperforming, they undertake training to improve them. When it comes to productivity, the Army achieves more each day before most civilians start work, and in conditions far more hazardous. It is through teamwork they are able to achieve far more than just the sum of their individual efforts, a lesson seemingly lost on Amazon.
Seems completely rational (Score:2)
Maybe not the most ethical, but it's certainly rational if managers are forced to fire some % on an annual basis.
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Welcome to the gig economy. At least contractors and consultants make enough to deal with the treatment.
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We save money by firing people, then we spend that savings to hire contractors to do the work that the fired people used to do.
What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every article on worker retention makes the point that hiring people takes a lot of time, effort and money. Companies should be carefully considering who they hire because of the costs involved.
Now we have a company which is deliberately incurring costs to hire then fire people because of some policy from on high. What is the end game?
The only one I can see is to keep incurring these costs against revenue to show a smaller profit which in turn means paying less taxes (not that Amazon pays taxes to begin with).
Obviously I'm missing something because I don't see the benefit for this churn.
P.S. Another example of people getting up in arms about this policy but who will continue to buy from Amazon.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
The theory is that if you fire the poor-performers regularly, you're only left with high-performing employees.
It makes some degree of sociopathic sense when you're first building your company and teams - if 10% of all people are going to be bad at the job, firing 10%/year lets you get rid of them.
But you'll reach a point where you don't have poor-performers to fire. You have 100 employees and fire 10. You replace them with 10 new employees, but 9 of those 10 are good at the job. Now that?
Well, you keep firing because a famous CEO in the 80s said it was a good idea. You try to justify it as providing incentive for workers to not become complacent, trying to ignore that you're creating an environment where sabotaging your co-workers is required for job security.
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This is common practice in the USA for any company that has actual HR practicioners.
I've seen this done in companies as small as 25 people.
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Every article on worker retention makes the point that hiring people takes a lot of time, effort and money. Companies should be carefully considering who they hire because of the costs involved.
Now we have a company which is deliberately incurring costs to hire then fire people because of some policy from on high. What is the end game?
The only one I can see is to keep incurring these costs against revenue to show a smaller profit which in turn means paying less taxes (not that Amazon pays taxes to begin with).
Obviously I'm missing something because I don't see the benefit for this churn.
P.S. Another example of people getting up in arms about this policy but who will continue to buy from Amazon.
One of the big costs of hiring people is that firing them is difficult. Not just the paperwork but on a personal level it really sucks and it can be hard on everyone's morale.
This means that you can end up with poorly performing or problematic employees who stick around for years because no one wants to actually tear off the band-aid and fire them.
As others mentioned the old GE model was fire ~10% every year, to force managers to make those decisions. Similarly, I've seen companies benefit from cash crunche
If you read the article (Score:2)
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Unfortunately the article is paywalled so all anybody sees is the headline.
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A site full of "tech people" who can't figure out how to bypass a paywall.
https://archive.is/dI92l [archive.is]
Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.
"We might hire people that we know we're going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team," one manager told Insider.
The practice is informally called "hire to fire," in which managers hire people, internally or externall
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Ooh, good idea. web.archive.org also works.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Microsoft got rid of stack-ranking because it turned employees into paranoid back-stabbers.
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After a certain number of bottom rankings they were automatically fired. I overheard a team discussing who was going to volunteer for the low ranking that review cycle so they could avoid firing anyone.
Terrible policy (Score:3)
The goal of low level managers should be to find, hire, and retain the best employees for the team. The incentive, especially at the staff level, is to make poor hires so that the new guy will be on the chopping block. This policy fosters back stabbing and poor morale.
Reminds me a bit of (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's "lost decade"
https://www.vanityfair.com/new... [vanityfair.com]
Where managers were required to fire 10% of their staff, regardless of the reason.
If It's Paywalled (Score:2)
Goes in line with the general world view (Score:4, Interesting)
That allows people to say "I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to outsource 5k jobs to Mexico/China to make them more money" and other practices.
My great grandfather ran a very successful business during the depression. Capitalism worked back then because a huge percentage of top men were like my great grandfather: men who feared God and went to church. When the depression hit in earnest, he and the other executives cut their salaries down to the point they could buy food, pay utilities and make mortgage payments and that was about it. They decimated their incomes to free up cash to keep the company going. It never occurred to them to make the bottom pay dearly for it today.
Cynical fools love to poke at this era and those who came before, but for whatever problems they had naked greed was widely reviled from the bottom to the upper ends of society. The influence of religion on the marketplace was largely very positive because it made the haves more humble and much more prone to living by noblesse oblige.
I once asked a rabid libertarian a question they couldn't coherently answer about all of this and proves why modern capitalists are as retarded as socialists:
"Say I am a worker at a factory that got shot down so some big investment fund can optimize their efficiencies at my expense and exploit arbitrage to make more bank. Then I see the owner of the fund lying in a ditch needing help. Why am I obligated to call help for him so he can survive if he said it's not his obligation to take reasonable measures to protect me as an employee and part of society working for him?"
If you say "common decency," then you're a myopic idiot who can't grasp the fact that a man who can't even be bothered to sacrifice some wealth so his employees can eat and keep their home does not deserve the greater decency of one of those people saving his life.
Re:Goes in line with the general world view (Score:5, Insightful)
I would answer your question as thus:
"Because I was raised to be a better human being."
Does it get me ahead in life? No, not really.
But it does allow me to sleep better at night.
A non-paywalled version (Score:2)
This link provides what seems to be an outline of the paywalled story:
https://outline.com/JTrxEk [outline.com]
It's light on detail, but it fleshes out TFS a bit.
Stupid Company Rules Result in Stupid Workarounds (Score:2)
Stupid Company Rules Result in Stupid Workarounds
Need an union there! (Score:2)
Need an union there!
Instill paranoia (Score:2)
This policy should cost them dearly (Score:2)
Fallacies of Stack Ranking (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like either explicitly or implicitly, Amazon is practicing a form of stack ranking. That sort of strategy rests on a few fallacies that shouldn't be hard to grasp:
1) Proponents of stack ranking think they are only getting rid of the people they want to get rid of. In practice, firing people often causes the employees you want to keep to look for a new job. This is because they may not trust the review process or not like the environment of constant churn.
2) Proponents of stack ranking think that you can correctly identify who the low performers are. The actual low performer could be the one tasked with identifying the "low performer" who is unable to correctly do so. They may try to mitigate this by using committees for performance reviews, but there is typically only one manager who actually knows the employee well enough to have a meaningful take on their work.
3) Proponents of stack ranking think that you can rank completely different roles against each other in a meaningful way. You may only have one employee benefits attorney at your company. How are you going to meaningfully compare that person to your mergers and acquisitions attorney? They do completely different things even if they may work in the same department and may have the same boss.
4) Proponents of stack ranking fall for the "grass is always greener" fallacy- that outside hires are less likely to be low performers than current employees. In a tight labor market, the reverse could actually be true. High performers who are valued by their companies and are being promoted tend not to want to leave their companies.
5) Proponents of stack ranking typically ignore the productivity costs associated with this practice. It requires: 1) the overhead of identifying the "low performers" (high stakes performance reviews tend to become huge time sucks), 2) the overhead of having to hire large numbers of new employees every year, 3) the overhead of training and ramp up time, 4) the need to pay the opportunity cost for the incoming employee (switching employers is a risk, so people thinking of switching jobs tend to demand higher wages than their old job to compensate them for that risk).
To be fair, sometimes you do need to fire low performing employees. It can drag down both productivity and morale if other employees have to do the work of the underperformers who aren't doing their jobs. But even then, low performance is often a fixable problem. And there is never going to be a fixed number of people who need remediation. I've worked in environments when a full quarter to of employees are total dead weight, and I've worked in environments where there is absolutely none.
Re:Fallacies of Stack Ranking (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly my experience on several of my previous jobs.
Mostly, the good performers left because they knew that objectively measuring developer performance is at best difficult, and, hence, no one was safe, no matter how much value they added to the company.
Leaving behind mostly dead weight. Those who knew they weren't safe either, but didn't have any better options.
In sociology this is called "Campbell's Law": (Score:5, Interesting)
This holds across a wide array of fields. Management by numbers schemes are always gamed by subordinate managers; high stakes testing inevitably encourage schools to focus too much on test preparation.
It's not that metrics are bad. What's bad is the uncritical acceptance of *any* piece of evidence, especially in isolation from other evidence that might validate it or put it in context.
The problem with metrics is that they're particularly prone to being accepted uncritically. A single number on a spreadsheet hits the sweet spot in our cognitive biases, particularly for smart people. It doesn't make things *so* simple you're obviously making shit up, but it doesn't require very much critical thought and investigation to come up with a decision. Sure, that decision may be supported by evidence, but how good is that evidence? If you aren't regularly checking and critiquing that evidence, it *won't* be any good.
Tale from the Trenches. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . .both of my daughters, who were approaching their third year at an Amazon Distribution facility, just got let go. In fact, about 40% of the Year Two Cohort were let go in the last month. The thing about three years at Amazon, is it automatically pushes you into a higher wage and better benefits package. Meanwhile, the Distribution Center is on Mandatory Overtime (~50 hours/week) despite volume being way down.
Not sure what's going on, but the Firing Impulse appears strong. . . .
Been there done that (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Replacements are many times worse. The strategy assumes that you will end up hiring new people with better skills than the "bottom 10%" you laid off. Finding good talent is difficult and expensive and often the replacements are worse performers than the people you arbitrarily laid off.
2. Continuity problems are rife. While the people you laid off might not be as performant as many of their peers, at least they knew their job. By firing them, you throw away their business knowledge and now have to train new people who will inevitably have to "reinvent the wheel" in many areas where knowledge was lost with the outgoing crew. Beyond that, everyone has to learn to work with the new people.
3. Churn is very expensive. It costs money to lay people off. It costs money to recruit new talent. Once you get the new talent, it costs money to train them. Most successful businesses have programs to reduce churn, not encourage it, for this reason alone.
4. Arbitrarily firing people is bad for team morale. Ultimately, many of the "good" employees (including myself) chose to voluntarily find other employment because we didn't want to work in that kind of environment.
In the end, instead of building the "best possible team", you find yourself mired in mediocrity. Your best talent leaves because they can easily find a different job with an employer that values their employees. You fired the bottom 10%. So all that is left is the people in the middle...good enough to not get cut, but not good enough to readily get a job elsewhere.
Counterproductive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me that the problem is with top management, middle management is just trying to protect their team.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me that the problem is with top management, middle management is just trying to protect their team.
The one with the ultimate responsibility for the company, should be the one addressing such a policy.
If the CEO even condones shit like this, then you know where the rot starts.
What's the turnover goal for boardmembers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Amazon needs an annual turnover goal for board members. Bezos should be at the top of the unregretted attrition list.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you being paid to post this crap, or are you really that naive?
There's a required turnover rate to prevent people who've worked there for years from getting raises and promotions, with the plan being to hire kids right out of college, who'll work for crap wages.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
The article is talking about firing the new hires and keeping the old staff. That's the complete opposite of what you're proposing.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were trying to downsize, rightsize, capsize, whatever, then they wouldn't let the middle managers hire people in the first place.
It's either a play to keep salaries low or it's part of a policy to manage through fear. Keep 'em afraid so they don't ask questions when they get orders to do things that are immoral, unethical, or illegal.
It's the kind of policy that comes about when upper management forgets that the employees are human beings and cashes in it's own humanity.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
It's either a play to keep salaries low or it's part of a policy to manage through fear.
I've seen it before in an American owned company. Ditch the bottom 10% in the performance rankings.
The theory is that this ditches the deadwood and incentivises other staff to perform, while also freeing them of the drag of their lower performing former colleagues. Productivity should rise!
Obviously productivity is linked to morale and that plummetted. People were literally asking for demotions because they didn't think they could match the performance that others at their grade had been sacked for. Others determined that collaboration might help someone outperform them so better to undermine and obstruct. In one instance a manager pulled together their peers and asked, "How did we as a group cock up so badly we lost that person?" and as a result got cut in the next round.
Finding out that Amazon has that policy is superb. It means I know not to go anywhere fucking near.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes this is a way to constantly improve the workforce. The idea being that you'll turn over your lowest 10% performers and in theory higher better people as replacements. The problem is that if you have a solid team working for you, you're forced to fire a good performer just because they happen to get the lowest rating on your team.
I've been a manager in a system like this using stacked ranking. It's high level management looking at all employees and teams equally. I've worked for a VP that actively had his managers/directors trade team members to spread the good people across teams so that every team had someone to be on the fire list, but still had them doing their duties for their old team. We've withheld promotions from people because once they get a promotion, they're potentially the lowest performer compared to others in that new job description that have been in that grade for years. Instead, we gave spot bonuses and other incentives to keep them in the old grade where their review would be at the top. It gets tough when you need to start a new project and want to seed it with two or three top people to get the foundation started before growing the team. You need to time that project formation around the timeline for ranking/rifs. Management still expects to see a certain headcount and expense allocated to the project, but they also want to see headcount churn. It's a lot of fun when the MBAs implement spreadsheet based headcount.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, thanks for that. I was the target of a Fire The Bottom 20% strategy after getting bonuses for great work the two previous years.
Trust me, people know who the duds are in an organization, and I was not a dud. I was buoyed by the fact that when my termination became known, there were quite a few people who got in touch to ask, "What happened?" Stacked Ranking is what happened.
Rankings are subjective anyway -- a skip-level takes a dislike to you, your ranking dips down, and three months later, you're gone. Then HR is surprised that it's so hard to hire .. really, genius? Really?
In my team, they had someone lined up for my spot .. then a month later my Team Lead quit, and month later another guy left .. and suddenly they were down to two experienced people on the team, and they were frantically trying to hang on to the last guy.
Well, I'm just happy I'm not there anymore -- it quickly went from a fun place to work to a very toxic workplace.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
Often when one sets simple measurable goals (that they believe will improve operations and/or profit) and tells someone those goals, then that someone can change their behavior in a often trivial way to meet your new goal (and get a good rating/bonus), but defeating the intent the goal is attempting to produce. If you set a goal (measure something) to get a bonus, they goal will be met, but there is no certainly it will be produce the intended results that that measurement previously correlated with the results. By measuring it and telling someone you are measuring it you fundamentally change what you though you were measuring and decouple that goal from the results once you couple the goal with a bonus/good rating. The goal becomes the target not the desired result.
Covey (the seven habits of highly effective(defective) people) gives example after example of management setting goals and those simple goals decoupling from what is intended to happen by measuring it. Management of all companies continues to make these same mistakes over and over again and never has nor will learn. They like simple and easy to measure goals and those goals are often too simple and will cease to work once the goals are known and they managers are managing to the goal, not the result.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The result is get rid of the dead weight, not to actually fire a %, but someone determined that firing a % equates to getting rid of the dead weight (firing a % is easy to measure, determining if the dead weight is fired is much harder).
And of course that is true if you hired managers that are not able to learning and continue to hire the same amount of dead weight without the goal in place. If the managers are learning to hire better then the % should be be slowly going down as they get better determine
Re: (Score:3)
If the managers are forced to fire a percentage, then it doesn't really matter if there is dead weight or not. By making this goal, you assume that there is guaranteed to be dead weight, but what if the team doesn't actually have dead weight? Right, you end up with exactly what is happening now.
The problem is not the managers who hire to fire, the problem is the goal. Whoever came up with the goal should be fired.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes there is dead weight, but it is the managers who set policies like this, not the people the policy applies to. Management always punches down.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what Amazon's policy is, but the original design and intent of this management system is to literally fire your bottom performing 10% every year, on the theory that you can keep hiring new people and eventually end up with a superior workforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
To me, this is the business equivalent of the eugenics movement. In theory, it may produce a superior race, but only if you ignore little issues like ethics, compassion, and human nature.
Anyone who advocates or implements this sort of policy, IMO, are complete sociopaths. They completely ignore the psychological downside of such a brutal, Darwinian system on morale, and underestimate the games people will play to product their subordinates when they don't want to literally decimate their teams every year. It turns your employees from collaborators into competitors, with all the negative ramifications that entails.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Funny)
... when they don't want to literally decimate their teams every year. ...
I salute you for actually using the word "decimate" according to its formal meaning (1/10th). Well done!
Re: (Score:3)
Well, formally it would mean that the lucky employees have to kill the unlucky ones...
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, formally it would mean that the lucky employees have to kill the unlucky ones...
Actually, it is even worse than that. In the practice of Roman decimation, each group of 10 soldiers would draw lots. The loser would then be beaten to death by the other 9 using their helmets. Maybe we should do this with management so they learn how dumb this policy is. It is basically designed to make the soldiers think that their own commanders are to be feared more than the enemy who is trying to kill you. It often backfired and would usually only work in Italian territory. When done in the far reaches of the empire, it often ended up with a dead commander in the next battle (accidents happen, it was a shame that the Senator fell off his horse).
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but only if you ignore little issues like ethics, compassion, and human nature.
And from a more practical standpoint, hasn't your original hiring process weeded out bad employees? Sure, there may be better new ones that pop up, but there is not guarantee that there is 'better' out there. My company has run into this problem due to the fact that they treated our employees out on the factory floor like replaceable machines. When production is up, hire a bunch of temps and train them. When production went down, we would let all of these trained temps go. A few months later we repeate
Jim Pattison (Score:3)
The original design and intent of this management system is to literally fire your bottom performing 10% every year, on the theory that you can keep hiring new people and eventually end up with a superior workforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
To me, this is the business equivalent of the eugenics movement. In theory, it may produce a superior race, but only if you ignore little issues like ethics, compassion, and human nature.
One of the more well-known business moguls here in Canada is a guy named Jim Pattison. He got his start running a car dealership, where he made it a policy every month to fire the salesman with the lowest amount of sales. Whether you approve of this strategy or not, (and I do not), it nevertheless contributed to him becoming very rich. Which reinforces my opinion that if your overriding goal in life is to simply make money, being a cold-hearted selfish prick goes a long way.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
It turns your employees from collaborators into competitors, with all the negative ramifications that entails.
This. It creates a situation in which coworkers have an incentive to backstab one another to get ahead (or just to survive), rather than help one another. This is bad for the employees and bad for productivity.
I often get asked what my favorite thing about working for my employer is, and it's that I'm consistently surprised by how helpful and friendly everyone I work with is. I reach out to some random person because I need their help to do my job, and find that they're not only smart and competent, but also willing -- even eager -- to spend their time helping me solve my problem. This happens over, and over again, and after 10 years you'd think I'd stop being surprised by it, but I had 20 years of prior experience that trained me to expect something very different. Of course, I make a habit of doing the same for others who come to me for help. It is so pleasant. And highly productive, which is also pleasant. I like my work more when I feel like I'm accomplishing things rather than beating my head against a wall.
A policy like Amazon's would make such a work culture all but impossible.
Re: (Score:3)
Like poker, usually you have some unproductive cards in your hand and discarding a couple of cards makes sense. But sometimes you are dealt a full house, and it would be madness to discard and draw.
This is the problem with across the board percentage based forced layoffs. You force each individual little group to discard, even if some of them have really nailed a complete team, and you probably will backfill to a worse state. Also like this article shows, the tendency to "protect" your team for non-business
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a deeper problem: Poor communication and a culture of fear.
Middle managers are unable or unwilling to communicate up the chain of command, so top managers are oblivious to the dysfunctional effects of their policies.
If middle managers feel more comfortable talking to reporters than talking to their bosses, Amazon has a problem. There is likely an attrition quota for MMs as well, so they live in fear and want to be seen as "team players" rather than complainers.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
...but defeating the intent the goal is attempting to produce.
The problem here is that there is no clearly defined benefit to implementing this goal. If I have 20 good to great employees, and you say, "Fire 10%and replace them", what has letting go of two good employees (and then taking the time and effort to find/train replacements that might be worse) suppose to accomplish? How has this benefited the company?
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like a be careful what you measure you will likely get it problem.
Reality - turn over is expensive. HR on boarding, tax filing, benefits filing, etc cost money. Training means lost time, which costs money. There is nothing good about having more turn over.
There is clearly good about getting rid of dead weight employees who contribute nothing. However what we see here is the clear hazard of creating explict up or out, or shed the bottom N% schemes that tie supervisory level managements hands.
The problem is it ignores you can super excellent team with nothing but great employees but somebody still has be at the bottom end of the curve in whatever metric you use. The assumption you bring in someone better just might not be true. So what does the mid level manager do - obviously he tries to keep his team intact and make them feel like he is looking out for them keep moral up etc - he goes and finds some other sheep to shave.
This isnt a mid level management problem its an upper management - I read Jack Welch did this or its what hear they do over at ACME problem.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Insightful)
There is clearly good about getting rid of dead weight employees who contribute nothing. However what we see here is the clear hazard of creating explict up or out, or shed the bottom N% schemes that tie supervisory level managements hands.
The basic issue here is they created a metric. Any time you have a metric that people are judged against, people will figure out a way to game the system. Whether it's Lines of Code, Word Count, or this "URA" thing at Amazon.
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Any time you have a metric that people are judged against, people will figure out a way to game the system.
I wouldn't use the phrase "game the system" in this case because of the negative connotations. These middle managers have a problem caused by upper management and they needed a solution to protect their current employees. Not a lot of malicious intent there.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet every productivity training program seems to be focused on so-called "SMART" goals (that M is "measurable"). Yes, it is hard to have a goal that cannot be measured, but the focus on "measurement" has many, many pitfalls.
Glengarry Management Style (Score:2)
As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Except there's no Cadillac or knives. Put down that coffee! Coffee is for closers and people with urine bottles.
Re: (Score:3)
I've worked at Amazon for 8 years and I've never heard of this practice. The teams that I'm on (physical security on the Corp side) have trouble enough just getting qualified people onboard. In my previous team we had one person that it took over six months to get rid of, in spite of him continually showing up late for work in a 24x7 SOC and coming in stoned repeatedly. (He started good, and went downhill when he started earning enough money to get smashed every day.)
ESG ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
These managers need to talk to their upper managers, not doing âoehire to fireâ â" which is the dumbest business practice Iâ(TM)ve heard in quite some time
Nah, dumb as it is it doesn't beat sub-prime mortgages in a deregulated banking environment.
Re: (Score:2)
These managers need to talk to their upper managers, not doing âoehire to fireâ â" which is the dumbest business practice Iâ(TM)ve heard in quite some time
What makes you think they didn't talk to their upper managers. Not everything I talk to my upper managers about gets resolved. Often I need to find a way to make things work even when upper management is making it harder.