mistyislands

UnRegretted Attrition.

He has to push the big red button on someone. That's the problem.

hard to say. probably the people who are high enough to make any change are too removed from the action to see the problems. maybe stories like this going viral will change things (companies do anything these days to avoid bad PR).

Agree. It is unlikely the manager did this out of pettiness. He probably got pressured by his L7/L8 to fire someone for his org to meet the URA goal. He made the obvious choice and picked the guy applying for internal transfer. Why lose two people when you could just lose one?

The root cause for almost every Amazon horror story is the URA goal.

I'm suprised to hear Facebook is this way. Almost everyone in Facebook that I know is chilling 50% of the time :)

Yes they can be. Managers also get evaluated the same way. But replacing a manager is usually more hassle, so it's not as common to push them out to meet your URA quota. I've seen it happen once, and they re-org'ed and abolished the entire team (distributed everyone to other teams).

Failing to meet URA targets is one sure way to get antagonize superiors.

On theory it makes sense. Any large organization experience bloat and there are lots of white collar employees who do nothing while collecting a salary. Regularly trimming the fat is good.

In practice however, attrition goals are terrible. It destroys team cohesion, encourages people to sabotage eachother and incentivizes sociopathic tendencies. If you know the lowest performers will get kicked out, then you have every incentive not to help those around you.

Typically the people who get pushed out are not the lowest performers, but rather those who have pushovers as managers. A vicious manager can fight and defend his reports. The weak ones end up sending someone to the "least effective" bucket, about half of which get fired in the next few months.

Also an Amazon tech manager. I confirm that this is also my experience.

Managers don't like to put people into Focus or Pivot (unless the employee is absolutely terrible, which is rare). But we all have URA quotas to fill, mandated by HR.

This is absolutely terrible for team cohesion and morale; while also being the largest source of friction and inefficiency.