Comment by tired-turtle 10 months ago
(from my peers) the MO for those who want to leave seems to be slacking until PIP/Focus/Pivot (for the payout) while looking for outside opportunities. There are a ton of companies out there that meet your criteria, but you’ll have to do some digging. YMMV
FWIW, there are lots of comments here calling you a sucker (or saying words to that effect without the name calling), and I'm here to say the opposite.
I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
I'm really torn here. It feels like a good thing for society if everyone has that attitude of "do the right thing".
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
> The game "tit for tat" requires you actually tit if you get a tat.
My understanding is that in iterated prisoner's dilemma, "tit for two tats" will often outperform "tit for tat", so in its original setting that's not really the case.
Here in reality, of course, "tit for two tats" can be better exploited if it can be (easily enough) identified and there are more potential ways of doing that.
> Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
100% agree. Never compromise on what is part of your character build. It's not about them, it's all about you, your mental health, and your career trajectory.
Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
While it may be comforting to think you're just sticking it to "Amazon", if you look at almost anything you're doing, you're going to see other people who are really at the other end of this apathy. Whether it's co-workers you're blocking or giving half-effort to, customers being ignored, or the new engineer that is neglected.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
Man, all of that sounds awful for those coworkers and customers. But it isn't GPs problem. It isn't their company. He doesn't employ them. He isn't responsible for their experience. Put the blame on their poor experience squarely where it belongs: management. Why is shitty management letting some underperformer ruin things? Super convenient to claim personal integrity and shift the blame to the underperformer when management is clearly not demonstrating personal integrity and protecting their team and customers.
> Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
Personal integrity must always be in play, or else it means nothing.
Integrity is as much about the kind of person you want to be as it is about the beneficiary of your treatment.
Don't sell yourself short.
Integrity is about moral vision. Either your moral vision will become moral reality or it will become moral wishfulness. Reality is how you hold your morality accountable as something more than a story you tell yourself.
So on the moral realities of Amazon...
Reference:
"What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.
Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
> amoral
I thought you meant ‘immoral’, and do believe that word is probably correct, but objectively ‘amoral’ is accurate according to https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/amoral-i...
Seems ironic to be working for a company without integrity, drawing a salary ie your livelihood from such an organization while believing somehow your personal integrity is not already impacted by doing so. The two seem incompatible to an outside observer.
Integrity doesn't vary based on the actions of other people.
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
I know someone at IC level there who hasn't done actual work in many months. There is literally no work because their old team was cut and they haven't found a new one yet. They are just collecting paychecks until an eventual (hopeful) layoff and severance package.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
I believe this could happen, but find it hard to believe it would last a few months. The systems would auto-assign them a manager. That manager would be getting reports on their productivity, and would have them in their list of people they have to give ratings to. At this point they would have gone through a mid-cycle stack ranking.
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
I’ve heard if you are on focus when you quit you may have a lifetime ban on ever coming back anywhere in Amazon. Is this correct?
I filed a formal complaint Brian O was breaching fiduciary duty in the 10-K and was subsequently fired unceremoniously for my “performance” by two directors on a call the next morning.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
I wouldn’t worry about it, too much.
Amazon always needs bodies. So whatever ban there is, they will “make an exception”..
"Amazon" may not, but the manager, VP, SVP etc may. Careers aren't made by having the right skillset. They're made by having the right set of contacts. YMMV
This may also be the case for URA (unregrettable attribution?). Someone I know left just short of two years for personal reasons, was never put in PIP/Focus, and then they tried joining a new team after and was told when they left their manager put them as URA, which prevents them from coming back. I've heard it can just be a year, though.
Unregretted attrition, which means you no longer work there and you're not sorry about it.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
Have you ever dated someone that you can’t quite break up with for whatever reason, and weren’t bad necessarily, but still breath a sigh of relief that it’s over when they dump you?
The work equivalent to that is a URA, for a manager.
If you’re that manager and now ‘single’ (have open headcount) and looking to find someone to ‘date’, would you hire that person back, or go find someone else - even if they were a complete question mark?
If hiring managers/recruiters have more candidates than they can handle, a prior URA can impact a candidate the same way. ‘There are many fish in the sea’
Does that mean you’d never get hired back? Nah, it happens. But it isn’t likely to help.
It's tempting but not really compatible with my personal sense of integrity. I don't judge others though since Amazon has zero integrity.