Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: This article rang a lot of bells with me. I heard about the inhumane performance ...

This article rang a lot of bells with me.

I heard about the inhumane performance evaluation at #Amazon before. And I experienced it on my own skin when working at #Flexport - which, at least during my employment there, proudly applied the Amazon performance management textbook.

I wouldn't advise Flexport to my own worst enemy, and I guess the same applies to any company whose HR strategy is inspired by Amazon's.

Flexport is the kind of company where people would literally receive an email along the lines of "we're going to lay off 20% of our staff soon, keep an eye on your mailbox in the next 5 minutes to know if you're in or out, and if you're a manager don't write directly to your reports to find out if they've been laid off until official communication comes". And, if you dared to criticize such an inhumane way of running a company on social media, you would literally get HR to harass and threaten you until you removed the comments. (I don't give a damn anymore now btw: I already left that cesspit a while ago, so I'm finally free to call a cesspit by its name).

I ended up on a PIP myself back in the day, after almost a whole career as an over-performer. And what the writer wrote in this article resonates so much with my experience.

In this kind of companies, you can end up on a PIP literally out of the blue, and even after having received literally zero negative feedback from your manager until then. A PIP with no prior warning isn't about improving your performance: it's just a way for the management to say "we genuinely don't give a fuck if you're out tomorrow, but we can't fire you because we actually don't have a reason for firing you".

In this kind of companies, performance isn't actually about the value you add. It's all about identifying a proxy metric that gives managers the illusion of objectiveness, slicing employees in buckets of arbitrary size based on that proxy metric, and anyone who is unlucky to end up in the bottom 20-30% goes on a PIP with no warning. In Flexport's case, the metric for engineers was the infamous number of commits and lines of code, even though basically everyone realized that it's as good as judging the quality of a book by its number of pages.

In this kind of companies, managers aren't even expected to have the skills to understand your job: they are just given a bunch of Github dashboards showing them how their reports perform according to the selected proxy metrics. Managers in this kind of companies don't give a damn if your job is to improve supply chains or to lay bricks.

Being a manager is a hard job because it requires people who excel both in hard and soft skills in order to understand all the nuances that go into somebody's performance and evaluate it properly, while also taking into account all things that happen to humans in their lives. In this kind of companies, however, the illusion of a objectivity and "performance through dashboards" removes that constraint: anyone who can look at a graph and read numbers can become a manager. Performance management becomes a multi-layered Kafkaesque nightmare. You don't go on a PIP because somebody genuinely felt that you were under-performing. You go on a PIP because "computer said so".

In this kind of companies, treating people like humans with their dignity and their complexity is seen as a liability rather than an asset. Once I emotionally broke down and told my manager some of the health+family issues that prevented me from giving my 100% in a given month, just to have him respond to me with "well, my father passed away a couple of months ago, but I didn't tell anyone nor I let that impact my performance: why should I care about your issues?". You'll notice that managers in these companies don't even bother to do team building activities, or facilitate communication and bonding among their employees - after all, why invest in people in a place where everyone is seen as a disposable asset?

This kind of companies are morally bankrupt, have the potential to permanently harm talented people and jeopardize their career, they are the worst emanations of the worst cynical capitalism, and we should always make sure to steer clear of them.

In this kind of companies, PTSD and burnouts are extremely common, and the management simply doesn't give a fuck about the damage they do to people unless it harms their finances and funding.

If hitting their wallets is the only way of getting them to care about their own employees, then it should probably be everybody's duty to ensure that their wallets are hit as badly as possible.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hr-performance-improvement-plans-pip-pivot-had-to-quit-2023-11