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Comment by variaga | Hacker News Reader

The article specifically stated that Amazon managers were hiring unqualified people:

>Instead, Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal.

And as OP is correctly pointing out, that can't happen, because the bar raiser can veto any hire they think is unqualified. Or at least it can't happen without the bar raiser colluding - and since the bar raiser is not the hiring manager (or even from the same part of the organization as the hiring manager) and they are not being evaluated on the UAR, they have no incentive for this.

If, as you suggest, managers were hiring _qualified_ people with the intent of firing them... I guess there's no way to prove that isn't happening but FWIW, I'm also at Amazon and have been part of a bunch of interviews and I've seen no evidence of that.

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The sentence you quoted says the manager “wouldn’t, or shouldn’t” hire these candidates. In my understanding, this means they aren’t needed, not that they aren’t qualified. That’s the essence of the “hire to fire” practice - hiring someone not because you need them to do the job, but because you need to meet your firing quota.

For a person to get placed on a team at Amazon, the manager must be making some representation that they need another employee. Amazon isn’t going to waste headcount by giving it to managers who don’t ask for it. This means managers have control over whether hires are joining their team. Therefore a manager can execute the plan of hiring to fire. It doesn’t matter whether they have the power to approve a specific candidate.

This makes sense. If I knew my team was going to lose 6% of it's members, I'd hire 6% more people to compensate for the loss. Even if the goal isn't to fire them that's what ends up happening.

6% is in the noise for software planning. Is there ever a single project where you are confident that 20 people is what you need so you can submit a headcount request for 21 so that you'll have one to drop? I've never seen planning that was able to achieve this level of precision.

But if firing is mandatory, ALL hiring is hiring to fire, so where is the story?

Obviously if you are forced to cull X% you are going to try to maintain 1+X% staffing level.

Yes, hiring to fire is an obvious consequence of a firing quota. The firing quota is the headline. The hiring to fire is a gory detail.

This is all old news, anyhow, is it not? I recall hearing about the Amazon mandatory firing process years ago.

Yet soft influence mechanisms exist. Pretending like the “bar raiser” is an infallible human being or has extra skill in detecting talent vs not is a dangerous assumption. This is especially the case when you consider that tech companies have repeatedly stated that the data shows that no one has such an ability and that’s why interview panels are needed in the first place.

Whether or not this actually happens, I don’t know. Do I think that managers (or really anyone else) can use soft skills to exert some influence some of the time? Having participated in many such panels, I think it’s pretty doable despite what many people claim because of the discussion process that happens.

Candidates can also just be coached. A friend of mine interviewed for Amazon and was surprised how much he was told about what to expect.

In my experience, if you ask the company recruiter what to expect, they will generally tell you and even tell you about the interviewers (if known).

The need to get vacancies filled.

"This is especially the case when you consider that tech companies have repeatedly stated that the data shows that no one has such an ability"

Where is this data?

In internal presentations at Google (& FB too? Can’t recall). I think some of this may have published but I’m not too keen to do research at the moment. At the very least it might appear in Laszlo’s book.

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