<story><title>My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit</title><url>https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/i-was-an-amazon-staffer-i-finally-had-enough-when-my-wife-was-dying-and-i-was-told-to-perform-or-quit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gregdoesit</author><text>&amp;quot;I felt like it didn’t matter what I said or what I did. He was going to get me out. I can’t tell if it was because of taking family leave. He basically had decided that he was going to let me go, regardless.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Amazon managers often have target URAs (unregretted attrition) to hit, around 6% per year in an organization. They are incentivized to fire people who don&amp;#x27;t perform, regardless of the reason. If they don&amp;#x27;t do it, someone else on their team might have to go. If they cannot hit URA targets, those managers could become targets to let go as URA.&lt;p&gt;This is a well-known tradeoff within most tech circles on the risk of working for Amazon. Unlike Netflix, who are clear about a similar policy (though without targets) Amazon does not advertise that they have internal URA targets externally.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll also add that from the outside, this setup has worked surprisingly well for Amazon for well over a decade - based on business results and how they became one of the most valuable companies in the world. However, as this policy is more known and stories like the author&amp;#x27;s surface, it&amp;#x27;s starting to hurt their brand in ways that hurts their hiring and is forcing them to have to pay more to hire (&amp;quot;would you take job A or job B that pay the same, knowing that 6% of people per year are fired at job A being Amazon?&amp;quot;)</text></comment>
<story><title>My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit</title><url>https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/i-was-an-amazon-staffer-i-finally-had-enough-when-my-wife-was-dying-and-i-was-told-to-perform-or-quit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>socialdemocrat</author><text>Problem with policies like this is that it creates zero employee loyalty. You will not feel bad about leaving them at a time which hurts them because you know they would never have your back. Thus you will not have theirs either.&lt;p&gt;Japanese managers have remarked on this problem in the US when hiring. You cannot easily invest in employees in the US. Investing in training reduce the amount of salary you are able to pay, so people  leave as soon as they have training for a better paid job which doesn’t offer training.&lt;p&gt;Of course Japan is perhaps a bit extreme in this area but as a Scandinavia I have observed the same problem with fellow Scandinavians working in the US. Many remake on the natural loyalty you have been raised with slowly evaporating under US work conditions.</text></comment>