Alex Kantrowitz's newsletter on the tech industry, covering Big Tech companies, AI, social media, and the creator economy.
HN commenters link it for its reporting on the human cost of RLHF training work and for its disputed creator economy article.
>> 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-plebs-amazon-leaders
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.
Was the article actually plagiarized? Yes, the two articles look at the same topic, the economics of the "creator economy". However, they seem to have different points of emphasis. The alleged original [1] focuses on the effects of the hollowing out of the creator economy on firms that provide services for those creators. The key quote that stood out to me was:
"Trying to siphon off 5% fees from an industry where even the top
1% are only mere multi-millionaires was never going to work," said
one top 1% content creator. "How are you going to reach a billion?
Your addressable market itself is not a billion-dollar industry."
Whereas the other article, the one that is alleged to be the copy [2], is a far more generic-sounding one which expresses pessimism about the prospects of a "creator economy" to address growing economic inequality. The key quote there is:
The creator economy was once hailed as the solution to economic
inequality and the savior of the middle class. But as it stands
today, it is a world where only the top echelon of creators are
able to make a living, while the rest struggle to find their place
in a market that is oversaturated and dominated by a few big
players. It's time to take a hard look at the harsh reality of the
creator economy and ask ourselves: is this really the future we
want?
They're not really talking about the same thing, and while the second article is certainly expressing a less original…
I’ve been talking to close to a dozen current and former Amazon employees since the end of 2021, and reached out to people publicly sharing attrition observations. Amazon attrition is really bad, even in AWS (Amazon employees all agree that AWS is a much better place to work in tech than Amazon retail).
At the same time, Amazon has had to pay very high for new hires. Hiring managers used to need to get L10 approval to go out of bands on offers outside bands, but starting late 2021, they could go out of bands up to ~20% higher with no approvals.
To top all of this, Amazon has a 6% internal URA (non-regretted attrition) target: something that has been in place for close to a decade. The Amazon Music group revolted late 2021 as reported by the Big Technology publication in-depth [1] as they didn't have 6% of people to fire, at the very time when they could not hire. Yet they were forced to hit this URA target, just like all other orgs in Amazon. Apparently this “rebellion email” leaked across the company and is sparking Amazon-wide outrage, and adds fuel to the fire.
Amazon has been extremely frugal for the skillset they hire for, very demanding and have created a stressful workplace. They still force 6% of engineers to be fired, even when their own leadership opposes this (Amazon Music).
I wonder why they can’t hire. Also, why is Amazon still part of the FANG abbreviation when they have this culture across many of their organisations?
[1]…
From another Musk's conversation [1], if you ever wondered how you reach high management positions - hard work:
Musk: Please send me anyone who actually writes good software
Steve Jurvetson: Ok, no management good coders, got it.
Musk: Yes
Musk: Twitter is a software company (or should be)
Jurvetson: Yes. My son at Reddit and some other young people come to mind.
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson texts to recommend former Uber exec, Emil Michael, for the Twitter CEO job. When Musk says he’s looking for people who can code, Jurvetson volunteers his son.
[1] https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/elon-musks-text-exchanges-show-twitter
> limiting bias by RLHF rather than picking the right datasets
This is the same as curation and picking out the dataset, except as post-processing. The reason why RLHF has to happen (and traumatize the people <https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/he-helped-train-chatgpt-it-traumatized>) is to address the problems by censoring the model.
Leaked memos show Amazon’s senior leadership asks managers to “manage out” (PIP or let go) the bottom 6% of their workforce each year:
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-plebs-amazon-leaders