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Comment by unyttigfjelltol | Hacker News Reader

> But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.

So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.

If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.

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I was thinking the same thing reading this article. In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest because its probably a lot cheaper to spend $100,000 hiring a new person than lose several 100's of thousands to a decent worker who has just been at the company for a while.

While atrocious its very clear math, but I hope employees keep leaving after they vest.

Unless you're a director you will never come even close to $100K of stock vesting in a single event, and directors are not subject to PIPs.

So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.

So the person interviewed is lying then, you claim? Inflating the number?

> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.

> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.

> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.

No, she isn't necessarily lying but just making it seem as if she would have received $200K over a single vest while it would have likely happened over at least 2 years and 4 vests.

I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.

Well, it seems what the interviewed person is saying is that "Day X I didn't have the money in my bank account. I waited for Day Y, and now I have \"couple hundred thousand dollars\" in my bank account", which sounds like it didn't happen over 2 years and 4 vesting occasions. But maybe it's just worded weird.

Good eye, and accurate original observation.

You’re just out of touch with how much people can make in the US.

An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.

This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.

I'm very aware with how much people can make per year in the US.

A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.

6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.

Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.

> principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year.

You ignored what I wrote

IIRC, truly well performing employees there can get very good stock. Amazon hates giving out cash. For a time, even during interviews, they would brag that even Bezos himself didn't make more than about $160k in base pay annually. Stock, stock, and stock are used for incentivization, and Amazon has indeed had some very good market performance over time.

They had direct reports in HR so you might be on the mark in terms of ladder just more in the HR camp with OP as a senior manager where they combined their bonus and vest payouts? You'd just have to be a bit above Staff to hit 200k with bonus and a single vest.

> I have £110K coming up

The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.

A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.

And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.

I know exactly the salary bands of Amazon in the US, no HR PIPer is earning even $100K in a single vest, let alone $200K.

Look at how their boss responded.

If it wasn’t about the equity, why would they be so mad? The point of the PIP is generally to remove the employee.

Maybe it was that the manager was being pressured to PIP a certain percentage of people, and instead pushed back really hard to retain this person because they wanted to retain them instead. Before spending their political capital, they asked the employee if they were committed to the long haul.

In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.

The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.

If that were the case you wouldn’t even mention it to the person or strip them of their direct reports

Yeah. I read that as the manager taking away their ability to beat the PIP under the guise of “focus.”

No, a PIP is about creating a culture of fear, so that management can PIP anybody with no or manufactured reasons, and control workforce with loss of job.

And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.

It's 100% about culture of fear and control.

I was offered a position with near-enough 100k per quarter. With amazon, a quarter is the financial decision making resolution.

And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.

But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.

(obvious throwaway account) I had a similar experience in Amazon, ngl the thing about "precendent caching" is real. People have to be put on PIP regardless of performance so management set crazy standards that people will fail.

Amazon has a weird vesting schedule (40% in the third and fourth year IIRC) and it has gone up quite a lot over the last few years. It also appears to have yearly vests. This doesn't seem implausible under those conditions.

They used to have a salary cap of $165k until 1.5 years ago, I’m not sure what the cap is now but it’s significantly higher.

I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.

So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.

Y1: 165K salary, 15K stock (15 RSU), $120K bonus.

Y2: 165K salary, 45K stock (45000/(1001.15) RSU), 90K bonus.

Y3: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(1151.15) RSU)

Y4: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(132.25*1.15) RSU)

So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.

After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.

I work for Amazon, vests are at least spread over two per year if not more.

How Amazon's behavior here, clearly mandated as official corporate policy, is not an instant class action lawsuit demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.

> demonstrates how far we are in our "late stage capitalism" and economic slaves, not free, not by half.

I'm not sure what earlier periods of history you're comparing it to that were utopian in comparison but I am fairly certain they were pretty limited in range both geographically and temporally.

If you instead move laterally and look at other "modern" countries, instead of temporally, it's easy to see how the working class and more is getting exploited in the US.

Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.

I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.

This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.

I'd say PPE is. Getting paid 5k to spend 4k on rent is pretty similar to getting paid 2k and spending 1k on rent (all else being equal).

> PPE

Personal protective equipment?

> This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.

Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).

I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement

I'm guessing you're a US-native then? Where this salary/work obsession seems a lot stronger than around here (South-West Europe).

My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.

Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman

You aren't sitting on a beach playing guitar with your friends if you get a tech job in Germany, you're doing the same boring pain-in-the-ass dead-end work either way. Just with less threat of being randomly fired or mistreated, which isn't even particularly intimidating or stressful when you're sitting on an enormous nest egg

Since you avoided the question, I'm guessing I was spot on :)

And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.

But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.

I think you need to go touch grass, or at least check out some real numbers and think about them

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?

> How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?

This is the mindset difference I'm telling you about. The rest of us don't want to "grind" at all, never. Not now, not later.

We want a work/life balance that allows us to do whatever we want to do when we retire, but now. Spend time with family, enjoy hobbies or whatever, but not wait until retirement to do so.

This is how many of my friends already live, as they've chosen jobs that allow them a balance in life, without any "grind" or "hacking" or whatever you want to call it.

You're going into a bad, boring place for 8 hours a day. You're pissing away your precious time on earth while lying to yourself that it's a "balance" and you're happy about it.

I feel the same about you, so probably that's OK, people try to live the life they want to live, and that's alright :)

If this was real, then the people I know at the companies paying Valley money wouldn't be handcuffed to continuing to work late into their lives. And that's not to omit the many, many software professionals throughout the United States for whom a $70K USD salary is actually pretty good due to accidents of geography and credentialism.

As it happens, I've done quite well and I should, knock-on-wood, do pretty well getting towards retirement; I'm well-paid and I don't live in the Valley so my finances make more sense. But if you're in the same boat with regards to financial capacity, neither you nor I are remotely close to the median or modal software professional in the Valley (let alone in the United States), and it's worth thinking deeply about whether that median/modal software developer is well-served by this system.

This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.

It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".

Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.

And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.

They're being paid half as much but they're much better off because world-class health care and education are effectively free. And if they have a job it's much harder to fire them and leave them twisting in the wind.

Try again and compare Purchase Power lol. And comparing it to Western Europe already 50% of that larger salary disappear

The U.S. is not really a “modern country”. It’s not fair to compare it to functioning Western European democracies.

I'm not comparing this against history, this is clearly illegal behavior, yet no legal professionals will touch it because Amazon has just so much money to throw at their legal defense it is not possible to combat their clearly illegal behavior.

There was a brief moment in North America where almost every worker belonged to a union but employers hadn't figured out offshoring yet. The adjustment definitely was hard on American workers, but the fact that it came with a huge benefit to developing country workers is conspicuously overlooked by most of the 'late stage capitalism' narrative.

In earlier times, they'd just fire you without any kind of PIP process.

Are you saying that PIP vs. immediate firing is worse?

In many jobs "in earlier times" there were for-cause clauses negotiated into contracts and you could not be fired without management proving that you had done something wrong, even after you had been through a negotiated disciplinary process.

In some ways, yes.

Firing you immediately for bullshit reasons is something you can potentially take to court, and also make a solid case for unemployment payments due to unfair termination.

If they put you on a PIP, and then claim that you're failing to meet it, even if they're lying through their teeth, that makes it much harder to prove that their actions were unfair or illegal. Suddenly it's no longer a "person said, faceless company said;" it's "person said, faceless company had months of documented (if falsified) evidence to back up their position". Unless you are savvy enough to start documenting everything, which is a) hard to know you need to do, b) hard to know how to do effectively, and c) kind of exhausting even if you can get it right.

To a large extent, the PIP process is there to cover Amazon's ass and make sure that your firing sticks.

And all that is if you don't just get frustrated and fed up with being constantly told you're failing to meet expectations that either you are, in fact, meeting, or no actual human could ever meet.

This reminds me of the big piece years ago talking about employees crying at their desks from the pressure. People joked about it, and to be fair, it wasn't that common.

Reality is, you wanted to find a conference room or the bathroom for that.

Let's not forget that in order to use said documentation legally later, you would potentially run the risk of violating company policy on confidential information disclosure.

If the PIP is intended to get the employee to quit, then yes, I think the PIP is worse.

i was given the option to take 1 month PIP or take 1 month severance. I took severance but not quite sure why they offered me pip. I am guessing something do with unemployment benefits?

You did the correct thing. The PIP is to cover their butt that you really were a bad employee and you were not wrongfully terminated. The laws vary wildly state-to-state but generally if you're PIP'ed out you can't claim unemployment or wrongful termination.

At least in Washington state, that's not the case. When I was PIPed out of Red Hat and claimed unemployment, benefits were approved.

"You or your employer said you were fired.

We decided:

You were fired, but there was no misconduct. You gave your best effort, but you were unable to do your job as expected.

When you are fired but there is no misconduct, you are eligible for benefits."

My dad had a government job where the move was to enforce all contractual obligations rigorously, remove any benefits provided, and give them absolutely 0 work to do.

He had a disagreement with his manager (let's leave it at that, heh), and over the next week, his arrangement to work from a different office (the rest of his team were based in this office too, just his department's office was technically somewhere else) was removed, his flex was removed, he was taken off all projects, and told that using his computer for non-work purposes was a disciplinary offence.

He had a 90 minute each way commute, was required to be clocked in between 9:30 and 4:30 every day (not 9:31, 9:30), required to work 37.5 hours, requests for using TOIL due to commute or other issues were immediately denied, no work to do, and not being allowed to use the computer in his office. The resolution was he found someone in a different department in the city we lived in that had the exact same thing happen to them, and they negotiated a swap with each other and things got better again.

Point being, these processes are a combination of ass-covering, parallel construction, and outright abuse. Nobody deserves to be treated like he was (or like people are being treated in these PIP programs), it would be more humane for everyone if we did something different.

Generally yes. Being PIP'ed or otherwise softly managed out is worse than being immediately fired.

Being fired: Happens quickly, they either give you a reason or tell you "your position has been eliminated." Sucks, but rips the Band Aid off and done is done.

PIP: I've seen this happen to good and bad employees. Bad employees - it just drags out the process and provides a lot of friction and anguish, for the manager and maybe the employee. (Depends on whether they are actually even aware they're a bad fit or not, and whether they're well-intentioned or not.)

Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.

Suddenly (as described in the parent article) they're being hit with complaints they've never heard before. Maybe there's substance, maybe not. It's a major blow to self-esteem and it's a dragged out process. They're not even given the satisfaction of a quick firing where they can be angry and done. It's a long suffering.

And to make the managers do this stuff - it's awful. Having to lay somebody off when a company RIFs people sucks. Having to fire people usually sucks unless they've really earned it. But telling a manager they have to PIP a percentage of their team arbitrarily and participate in this gaslighting process is simply evil.

> Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.

Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.

I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.

I went through the process there. The process gave me months to prepare for another job and by the time the official PIP happened, I was more or less waiting on it to get my severance.

I could have quit anytime during the process and had other opportunities waiting for me. I was offered another job before my 10 days of paid time off elapsed let alone my 3+ months severance and I survived through a vesting event.

At almost 50 years old and Amazon being my 8th job out of now nine, why would I wrap my esteem on my job? It was just my 8th time to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

Late stage? This is SOP for many large companies going back decades. The tech companies are just sort of new to it and gave it a new name. Many companies in the 70s/80s/90s famously had their 10% culling every year. Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no. But is something you should expect from companies. They are not your friend or buddy or partner, no matter what lies they tell you. They are the people who pay you to do work.

In the past 15-20 years the tech world has been sheltered from it. If you could code you could make decent money. That part is starting to stabilize as more people can do it. The supply is catching up with the demand. 'Late stage capitalism' is a catch all term for 'the parts of the economic world I think are bad'. If you ignore the curves the curves will remind you that supply and demand exist in all models.

Also lawsuits do not happen 'instantly' someone has to pay for the lawyers to make it happen. You have to make sure the law is on your side. You also have to make sure the judicial system is on your side. A class action lawsuit is not a cheap thing someone does in their spare time. Oh and if you mess up you run the risk of ruining your law practic and the political estabilisment going after you.

I did know about Microsoft (in the 90s), and I think many companies took inspiration from them; do you have older examples?

invented at ge

Pretty much all of the big banks did it too.

> Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no.

Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).

And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.

I read through the article expecting this, but... if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?

> I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away, or they would work with me.

> ...

> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.

They let him stay long enough to find a new job and for his options to vest, and then he quit.

at some point, I assume they meta game the PIP expecting employees to leave willingly.

Bingo. Remember, one of the key points of a PIP is to gather documentation. When they sit you down for The Meeting, the 'evidence' is already on record, reducing your leverage should you decide to pursue them legally later for something like wrongful termination. Then, they often dangle a pittance in the form of severance pay if you go ahead and exit right away, of your own free will and volition. This gets even worse if the person is on a H1B.

It's a machine.

> if this is the case, it doesn't feel like they tried very hard?

I don't think you get it. The way this stuff is done is just as described - totally blindsiding, and potentially flat-out gaslighting. There's no actual metrics or data until they fabricate a paper trail and force you out.

You don't win these things. Rather, you take your money and go elsewhere. Then turn down the subsequent job offers you get from them, using them only as leverage to juice your pay elsewhere with a competing offer ;-)

But it sounds like he won? He got his $200k and found a new job before any PIP was implemented? Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?

Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?

The manager wasn't the one doing the forcing - the overall stack-ranking system was, and the manager was just employing the required level of doublethink to convince themselves the employee was both suitable for firing and also worth trying to retain.

How can they be maintaining these completely antithetitical interests, like wjy do they want to arbitrarily fire the person at all if they have already evaluated that person to be worthy of retention? Why is this even on the table in the absence of any failure to meet whatever metrics?

Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?

> Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?

This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.

Even Bezos?

"Everybody" meaning "the normie plebs who work for a living".

I think I did read about there having been extensive succession plans and efforts established already

I assume there are different competing priorities at play that converge in particularly dumb ways sometimes.

Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.

Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.

Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.

Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.

I disagree, this is not some junior manager drinking the company cool aid. They are a middle manager with hundreds of indirect reports - in HR, no less - fully aware of what they're doing and with a metric to hit.

So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.

So, good? The employee recognizes that the employer is just screwing around with everyone, seems like a FAFO situation; I hope Amazon has this happen endlessly.

To the point here: I think people think these managers are in a position of real power. They are not. They are cogs in the wheel as are their subordinates. It's entirely possible this manager wasn't even the one doing the direct ranking, sometimes this roles up to levels beyond where the manager can give real input. Someone has to get pipped as the system demands it, it happened to land on the person in the article. The manager is then trying to get them out of it because they believe they don't actually require the pip.

So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).

I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.

> Why would his manager have been upset if they were actually trying to force him out?

The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.

The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".

To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.

His manager was likely upset because the guy left before he was put on the PIP and so wouldn't count towards the HR VP's (and by extension his manager's) 6% goal.

That doesn't sound like he won to me. It sounds like he managed to get a good consolation prize, though.

Most people are probably going to eventually leave their company anyway. If they can do so more or less on their own terms, that counts as more of a win than a loss.

The manager was upset because leaving before PIP is regretted attrition which is a metric the manager themselves could get PIPed for.

I'm specifically addressing the parent comment

> In this case it seems it was pretty clearly meant to push this employee out before their stocks vest

which if so it singularly failed at.

> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.

The mechanism I'm trying to describe is when employers pay a base in X dollars and stock in Y dollars which takes Z years to mature. AWS sounds like they're being somewhat reasonable about it by giving an employee cash before their options mature, but I have interviewed at places (Envestnet in New York City) where I was offered a base comp which was meh and then options which were gonzo. The offer, if I remember correctly, was $105k/y base and then $100k/y in stock which took three years to vest. I passed on the offer because $105k/y in NYC was cutting it too close for me. They did not have a "cash float" mechanism.

Amazon's stock vesting schedule is 5% - 15% - 40% - 40%, so you're not new anymore by the time you reach any significant number of stocks vesting.

Convenient considering their average tenure is less than 2 years.

Given they backfill the first two years with grant value bonuses, this is irrelevant: the first two years just pay straight cash to make up those % to 100. First year is an up front payment, second is monthly payments. If anything that vest schedule retains people for those two years rather than being a way to pay less.

Amazon typically offers cash bonuses during the first 2 years that bring total comp up to a similar amount in the years where 40% of stock vests. They manage towards a target compensation number. The stock vest schedule just changes the mix of cash vs. stock.

The last two 40% chunks vest at 6 month intervals. Amazon’s RSU comp also vests in 6 month intervals (May and November). If you’re in year 3, you could be waiting on a vest that includes signing bonus comp and regular comp RSUs.

If this isn't an open admission that it's such a shitty place to work, that they have to withold your pay to trap you there once you work it out for yourself, I don't know what is.

Places that provide good working environments don't need to trap their employees into staying.

If they did this even once how is that not criminal fraud? Proformance isn’t subjective, if an employee lies and says my proformance is bad that’s a crime.

I've heard ancedotal stories years ago about Amazon trying to force employees out just before their share package vests.

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