At amazon, admitting to a problem will guaranteed lead to having to open a COE, correction of error, which means meetings with executives, inevitable "least effective" rating, development plan, scapegoating, PIP, and firing.
I've caused and authored many COEs at Amazon, and additionally have been involved in maybe fifty for neighboring teams. I can't recall a time it had a negative career impact for anyone, much less any of the consequences you list.
I work at AWS now and can second that. Nobody is happy when things break, but COEs are looked a positively and are circulated constantly to prevent repeats.
Not at AWS, retail Amazon, but what I saw was COEs were either normal business process or PIP material depending on which org you worked for. And sometimes just the excuse to get you gone.
Where I was about 99.9% of the COEs where just a lesson learned and new process to prevent it. There was one that was basically used as a tool to remove a VERY good engineer, that didn't mesh well with new leadership.
A sister org, one I worked a lot with, wouldn't COE anything. If you were the lead engineer on a product or service that had a COE you were going to get a PIP by year end review. I wasn't surprised when all the talent left that group.
I assume this to mean that it is an element of an individual's PIP, a formal process to set guides for getting someone to commit to a higher level of achievement.
While on its face PIP is a guide to getting someone to commit to a higher level of improvement, for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go.
> for many companies its a formal warning that you need to shape up or you're going to be let go.
Patently incorrect. A PIP is management telling you that you need to seek alternative employment, now.
Joking/sarcasm aside: I’ve never seen or heard someone who is placed on a PIP successfully “exit” the PIP. They exit the company or they’re exited from the company. PIPs seem to mark the start of the “we are building formal documentation to fire you” phase of losing a job.
I got PIP'ed and actually fixed the problem I had and resolved the PIP. The problem was that I would mis-ship items sometimes in a warehouse. I figured out that I couldn't reliably read some of the product labels, so I went to go get an eye exam. Apparently I had 20/100 vision in one eye due to astigmatism. Getting glasses meant that I quit fucking up, so they dropped the PIP and moved me into another part of the company.
I guess I'm the poster child for having vision insurance as a company benefit.
Wow, I didn't know pickers and stowers got PIPs. Obviously you did a smart thing in that you went and got a medical diagnosis. The company would be facing a medical disability lawsuit if they followed through with the PIP/firing.
A lawyer I spoke with suggested employees regularly visit their doctor about work related stress so that when they inevitably get PIP'ed they can claim medical leave and work related illness. Some places its a war zone and that's what workers have to do.
Was it management's decision to move you or yours? If it was theirs', it seems like management didn't have confidence you could improve once the problem was found and fixed. Kinda like changing two things at a time when troubleshooting. How did you feel about that?
> I’ve never seen or heard someone who is placed on a PIP successfully “exit” the PIP
I have and at Amazon and AWS. The pattern I have seen is medical related. Someone is on some sort of medication that is screwing with their abilities and don't realize it. I've seen multiple cases: one where it was meds that caused liver problems and the person didn't know they were supposed to get regularly testing (crappy doctor) and another where they found out meds they were on caused short-term memory loss. These surfaced during the PIPs and were fixed - and the folks got out fine.
Performance Improvement Plan, they are not unique to Amazon, most places have them though the process may differ. Not to be too cynical but ultimately they’re a way to document that you’re not meeting expectations - before being fired. Should there be any sort of employment claim later its a mechanism by which an employer can show documentation that any issues related to your being let go were performance related and not some sort of protected status or prejudice.
Outside of someone protected by a labor union, I’ve very rarely seen anyone recover from a PIP and not be eventually let go. Most commonly employees see them as a 30 or 60 day window to proactively find a new job before they’re terminated.
I think that's a bit simplistic. I've had coworkers that became better employees over time. The "problem" with PIPs is by the time you've screwed up long enough to be put on a PIP everyone knows there's no turning back.
For example, a friend I have that recently left Facebook knew for a good 6 months he needed to shape up. But they hadn't put him on a PIP in that time. They eventually offered him a decent severance to quit, and he took that rather than continuing to try. If he stayed, he probably would have been put on a PIP fairly shortly. It was the best thing for everyone. He wasn't all that happy there anyways.
Amazon fires between 5-15% of engineers per year. PIP is to get you to quit. Amazon hires a TON of entry level
SDE 1 engineers to sacrifice at the altar of Bezos so more shitty employees get to stay. Lifespan of a SDE 1 whipping boy/girl at Amazon, as a result is 3-6 months.
Performance Improvement Plan. In theory, it sounds like a plan to fix your supposedly inadequate performance. In practice, like 99% of the time it means somebody decided to fire you for some reason before you have even seen the first one, and they're just creating documentation for why they fired you to head off HR requirements and any future complaints. They'll run you through a few rounds of supposedly evaluating your improvements as inadequate and eventually fire you, unless you quit first.
I too have caused and authored many COEs at Amazon. I have also been involved in 50 to 100 COEs written by other teams and have also observed no instances of this having a negative impact on anyones career. COEs are core to Amazon's learning experience and you can be assigned to write one for simply being unlucky enough to be oncall when the incident occurred.
Nothing against you personally of course, but I just have to congratulate whomever it was who came up with this gem of an euphemism. It's definitely going up there next to 'career-limiting move'.
This is complete opposite of my experience at AWS. I'm one of the biggest critics of how we do "software" (just ask any of my managers), but in none of the orgs I've worked at COEs were ever used against you. On the contrary, a good COE is usually applauded.
(cause|correction) of error, though 'CoE' is the much better known identifier (like IBM vs International Business Machines).
They are a formal, in-depth retrospective on customer-impacting service degradations or outages. They include a thorough functional description of how the state of your service evolved into failure, a exhaustively recursive review of the operational decisions and assumptions that contributed to that failure, and a series of action items the team will take to ensure that the service will never fail again for the same reason.
Edit: This list is incomplete, and the link included in the sibling provides a better, more thorough description.
If anyone notices a problem you'll likely need to write a COE, there's no way to get around that. Not updating the status page absolutely doesn't get you out of that task.
COE also doesn't lead to negative marks on anyone at AWS that I know of. It's a learning experience to know why it happened and action items so it doesn't happen again.
This is very true. It doesn't lead to PIP always but whole amazonian culture makes it difficult for the person to stay in team/company.
Writing COE is kind of admission of guilt and I have definitely seen promotions getting delayed. During perf-review, lot of times managers of other teams raise COE has a point against the person going for promotion.
