> “Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?” the question reads. The response: “Do not discuss Focus with employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.”
The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you’re told you’re in Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manager is telling you you’re not meeting expectations, that’s plenty of signal of what’s going on.
The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent.
There’s a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your performance?
> One Amazon engineer, who joined the company in late 2016, said he found out that he had been on the development list for nearly 18 months only after his manager changed. His new manager, he said, inquired about his performance-management plan.
> “My response was, ‘Are you sure you don’t have your wires crossed?'” he said.
Headline seems pretty accurate to me. Nobody should be on a performance improvement plan without being told.
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To further on this -- it's really the absolute basics of transparency. Imagine if students didn't get any scores on tests back until they were about to fail the class. It's super important to know accurately and early exactly what people think of your work so you can adjust.
Aside from every other reason, let's remember that nobody is perfect, including managers. At least 20% of the time in my experience, when a manager thinks somebody is doing poorly it's because they manager is missing key information or relying on outdated information. Just one anecdote I know a manager who was only assessing somebody based on Jira tickets, but that engineer was doing tons of important work outside the jira tickets. The manager needs to initiate that communication clearly and immediately to resolve the discrepancy.
"I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I'd like to see him try."
The process is relevant to the company. So it's relevant to the employee.
The headline is correct unless Amazon policy is not telling employees about performance problems before Focus. Otherwise the discussion about Focus sounds just like the discussion they should have before Focus.
> There’s a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your performance?
I haven't seen even 1 comment even imply anything even close. I've seen many comments say employees should know where they stand.
You said you work at Amazon in another comment.[1] It would have been appropriate to say here.
“It would have been appropriate…” I don’t think I did anything inappropriate, which is what you seem to be implying. My other comment about working at Amazon is in this same HN discussion. And you can see that I work for Amazon from my post history.
Performance management is a necessity in any company, but whether you’re in “Focus” or not is besides the point.
There’s no company policy that managers cannot or should not discuss performance or providing coaching until an employee enters focus. This is absolutely false, and if someone’s doing this, they’re a bad manager failing at their job.
Performance feedback and discussing career growth is exactly what manager 1:1s are for. You’ll know way in advance if there are performance problems. If you don’t know or somehow it was never communicated with you, that sounds like a manager who is failing their team. And among the size of Amazons workforce, the probability of no manager ever dropping the ball or failing at their job is 0. Managers can be ineffective, just as the people who report to them.
But to repeat, company policy is NOT to hide performance feedback from employees. The article is editorialized. One example the article provides is a person who was put on Focus who is a person of color. Actually, I’m a person of color too. You could try to argue my perspective reeks of survivorship bias. On the other hand, a significant chunk of the workforce in engineering and tech related roles are people of color. Amazon is significantly more diverse than other industries I previously worked in. Again, I 100% don’t believe your skin color, race, religion, gender, or any other type of discrimination is a factor in performance. That’s simply not the company I know.
And my question stands - yes, there are employees who under perform. And when they’re let go, they’re going to be upset with the company. Most people, no matter how brilliant they are or are not, are not great at receiving feedback, particularly negative feedback. But the issue I see here is it’s implied that these are all solid performers who were put into performance management for no reason at all or they were blind sided. I don’t believe that’s a systemic issue.
In my opinion, the hiring interviews do their best to establish a high bar for candidates, but we do make hires who are great on paper, can white board problems, but they fail to deliver at their work. These people are given plenty of feedback PRIOR to Focus or any performance management plan kicks in.
This article makes it sound like Amazon hires and fires at will. From my personal experience, this is not true where I work in the engineering organizations. Given the interview bar, it’s difficult and costly to find and hire candidates. Once someone joins your team, your team puts in an investment in ramping that person up. If that person isn’t so effective at the tasks they’ve been assigned, the first step is to identify their strengths and place them in projects or tasks where they can flex those muscles and grow in whatever areas there are gaps.
Now did some team somewhere have a manager who dropped the ball or senior engineers who didn’t come together to help the new hire? Yeah - probably. But that’s not a cultural or systemic problem. That’s a problem with that specific team. And if that’s how that team is run, it’s going to be obvious when they fail to deliver. But yeah, this unfortunate case is what drives outrage and readership (for this paper), and so that’s what you’ll see in the news media.
You're talking in circles a bit. The point the GP was trying to make is there's no real downside to letting employees know they are on FOCUS and that a structured plan in place for tracking, rather than telling employees something vague like their work "needs improving".
It is the most basic level of transparency and just seems like a decent thing to do. For some reason your comments keep avoiding that point. I wonder if this is the effect working at Amazon has on everyone.
I disagree, I think this kind of corporate mentality should be stomped out from existence. Employees should have a right to know if they are trending, or are on, a performance improvement plan.
Muddying the waters with corporate speak “your performance is not meeting expectations” is beating around the bush and not saying what is actually happening.
I disagree. If my manager tells me (as you wrote) “your performance is not meeting expectations”, that’s plenty signal that either we are not on the same page (and we need to fix that), or that I need to get my performance up to the bar.
If your manager gives you that feedback, they’ll then tell you specifics and come up with a plan. I don’t think this is “corporate speak” as you put it.
We can formally give this process any name, but it doesn’t change anything.
> If your manager is telling you you’re not meeting expectations, that’s plenty of signal of what’s going on.
Isn't this the part that's not being made transparent to the employee?
Asking the employee to constantly read the manager's mood to guess if you're on the "list" or not is incredibly stressful. What if your manager is just having a bad day?
A number of key engineers who I loved working with left my team around the same time, and their departure made me uninterested in continuing on that team any longer. I applied internally to a few other teams, and found out a couple weeks into that process that I was on the devlist when the manager of the team I wanted to join suddenly said he couldn't take me.
Through some backchanneling with a manager I had been friends with before he joined Amazon, I found out I had been placed on the devlist the same week my friends left the team. No performance issues were ever discussed with me, and at that point in my career I'm very confident I didn't have any. I am pretty sure management of my team guessed (correctly) that I would try to leave once my friends were gone, and worried the entire team would implode with additional departures, and all institutional knowledge of a shitty old perl/mason/codigo codebase that needed to be maintained would implode with it. So I am pretty sure they placed me on the devlist purely as a mechanism to make it difficult for me to leave (I would have needed to get the director / L8 level manager of the team I was attempting to join to override the devlist block. this pretty much never happens unless you have a relationship with that person, and I didn't).
I was never able to get a manager in my org to have an open conversation with me about that, despite lots of effort. Lots of hemming and hawing and a few canceled meetings. I was eventually told I was taken off the devlist, but when I again tried to transfer a year later, found out I was still on it. I'm not sure if it was a case of "forgot to take you off" or "lied" and will never know, but that happened to me circa ~2018.
Edit: Unrelated to your question, but I also suspect having been on one of those lists once and escaped makes you a target to get put on again. No manager backchanneling confirmed that for me, it's just an educated guess. My performance suffered for a couple months at the start of the pandemic for obvious reasons, and I was placed on the devlist again (now called "Focus") around late April / early May 2020. I was never told this, nobody ever said the word "Focus", nor was I given any performance coaching. I was only able to infer it because my manager told me "I don't think you should try to change teams right now", and at that point in my Amazon career I knew what that really meant. I started job hunting immediately, kicked my feet up for a while, and took the severance the moment I was finally pip'd. Worked out extremely well for me actually, but a less experienced employee who might not connect the dots between "don't try to change teams ;)" and "your performance is considered below the bar" would have been blindsided.
This sounds even worse than what was stated on the article. But predictable with lack of transparency - management essentially have carte-blanche to maintain their teams.
To be honest, it's quite possible this kind of focus-listing exists elsewhere that's not FAANG level exposure.
This was very similar to my experience. I had a new manager ask me why I was lying to him about the timelines for promotion I had worked out with my previous manager, my skip level, and discussed with my skip skip.
I had optimistically reached out internally and started a process with a team prior to all of this happening. I think my manager focused me then.
I have seen these mechanisms abused by managers to retain talent exactly as you are describing. Guaranteed way to lose talent rather than just let it switch teams. Poorly managed teams should wither if the skip level doesn’t recognize it.
> The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they have a stated goal of cutting the bottom 10% every year? I gotta think that can't go on forever without hitting the "capable talent" unless managers are hiring sacrificial lambs on purpose. Hmm, I feel like I've heard about that somewhere...
I’ve only read about that online. I’ve never seen this happen in my six years at Amazon. In my experience we have the opposite problem. There are a lot of folks who are extremely talented in interviewing and whiteboard elegant solutions. But they fundamentally can’t or won’t deliver results. And what I’ve seen on Amazon is it’s really difficult to let go of someone once they are hired. But in my experience a lot of managers struggle at having hard and difficult conversations. And so you’ll see an engineer on the team who doesn’t pull their weight but the rest of the team picks up their slack.
I fundamentally don’t believe that Amazon is letting go of talented engineers. Can some individual manager be terrible at their job and screw up? Yeah absolutely. But as a company, it’s extremely hard to find talented individuals. And then once you bring them in you have to invest in them and ramp them up.
Having said that I worked on really hard problems at Amazon. Not everyone can or wants to solve those kinds of problems. I was successful because I enjoyed it. That’s where my priorities were. And there were other times where I struggled. Sometimes trying to solve a particular kind of problem or sometimes not having enough clarity, or realizing that we haven’t broken down a problem.
But then there are individuals who just don’t have the ownership. If you have a not my problem kind of attitude, I don’t think you’ll last at Amazon very long. Eventually you’ll be let go and then you will be bitter about it.
As an aside, you won’t ever hear about all the engineers at Amazon who enjoy doing their work, who enjoy the teams that they’re on, who have a really good relationship with their leadership teams. But you’ll hear the most loudest and vocal feedback from the people who are the wrong hires or they had a bad manager who messed them up. In the latter case I don’t think it’s a systemic issue. And to be honest, the positive stories don’t get the Readership or drive the outrage
> should be permanent, regardless of your performance?
You're assuming that the tool will only be used objectively and transiently, a big if in a tool with mandated secrecy. The real question is should the tool remain secretive so that people in power can use it completely unchallenged as a weapon against employee?
> “Should I tell an employee that I entered them into Focus?” the question reads. The response: “Do not discuss Focus with employees. Instead, tell the employee that their performance is not meeting expectations, the specific areas where they need to improve, and offer feedback and support to help them improve.”
> “If the employee directly asks, ‘Am I in Focus?’ you should answer honestly,” the response continues. “However, remind the employee that the use of a specific product should not be their take-away from the conversation, as there are important performance gaps they must address.”
That doesn't sound like mandated secrecy. That sounds like they think the employee shouldn't care what the specific product is called.
That sounds like employees who are well-connected enough to know to even ask that question will get more information on their status than people who aren't as extroverted/social/charismatic/privileged.
I've worked for managers who really don't like giving negative feedback, and would only give very obscure hints. The upshot would be that you'd get put on Focus and have no idea you have performance issues.
The headline is editorialized. IMO whether you’re told you’re in Focus or not is irrelevant. If your manager is telling you you’re not meeting expectations, that’s plenty of signal of what’s going on.
The discussion in this thread is written more as if Amazon is pushing out capable talent.
There’s a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your performance?