>> Getting rid of employees you don't want is a good thing. How well this method works for them relative to other ways to evaluate employees?
It is not a question of whether the employees being PIP'ed / fired are good employees that perform well or not. It is all about meeting the unregretted attrition (URA) quota set by human resources regardless of the employee's current or past performance.
The Twitter thread states: "The URA targets are set at org-level. Most SDMs will not be aware of this: usually director-level target. It’s almost always been fixed 6%".
Employee quote: "I was Focus/PIP'd out after 10+ years of good to great reviews, by a manager I worked under for a total of ~2 months. This system is completely and utterly broken."
"the company is demanding, sometimes brutally so, and it can lose sight of its employees’ humanity — which is neither good nor in its strategic interest. Amazon’s insistence on hitting “unregretted attrition” milestones, to the point that it would push out solid performers, is one example of the culture’s downsides." Source: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb...
If you have poor performers, then obviously they should be let go. But if you have a solid team, who do you let go? If you have a solid team with a few open headcount and you have trouble hiring to fill the open headcount, who do you let go?
PIP'ing and firing good employees just to meet a quota is stupid and yet that is the policy.