The Amazon Pivot Program

Take the money and run, or stay and fight

I just posted the below message in an anonymous forum for verified employees of Amazon on the “Blind” app. I’ve added some things in brackets to give context for people who don’t work at Amazon.

I’ve been at AWS for almost 10.5 months and today I was entered into the Pivot program. [“Pivot is a program for employees who show a sustained period of underperformance, despite coaching and support.” Pivot gives you two choices: You can accept a severance package and leave the company, or you can enter a performance improvement plan where you have a month to complete a difficult project.]. I was originally hired from the college new grad program. My team is pretty high-performing. We have 17 engineers including me on our team and 3 of them are L6 [senior software engineers].

The primary reason my manager cited for entering me into Pivot is slow velocity of changes (Deliver Results) and taking too many revisions with too much senior team member oversight. Since joining, I have added 5,150 lines of code, removed 1,078, and shipped 77 CRs [Code Reviews] with an average revision count of 2.3. I have the second highest average rev count and the second lowest number of CRs published on my team. I am the newest member of my team besides the two past interns who just returned as full-time last month (which means I published more CRs than the engineer who started over a month before me.)

On June 12, my manager emailed me with three areas to improve that were below his expectations. He said “we will be having more focused check-ins about these over the coming weeks”: Ownership during on-call rotation (don’t wait for other people to take over tickets), dive deep and deliver results (more CRs, less revisions), Learn and be curious (look outside immediate tasks, pick up quick-ops tasks). It’s possible that he mentioned he was entering me into Focus, in either case I was not aware of what “Focus” was or that I was being entered into a formal program that can lead to a lay-off. I was also not aware of a timeline for these improvements. It’s possible that if I had asked for a timeline, my manager would have been able to tell me that I had three months to improve.

On August 17, I had a check in with my boss where he conceded that I was doing better with “Learn and Be Curious” by reviewing more CRs and checking in on pipeline failures. He also acknowledged I did well with “Ownership” by writing a design doc for the elimination of an MCM [automating a manual process] and writing effective WBR [business] updates. He said the area to focus would be on CR velocity, he acknowledged that I had some improvement but said to keep up CR between projects by picking up miscellaneous tasks.

In the Pivot explanation and our conversation, my manager said I failed to improve significantly enough during the “Focus” period. I asked my manager what degree of engineers’ feedback factored into his decision. He said a lot of feedback came from other engineers. I asked if he could tell me what their feedback was (anonymously). He said no.

The Project Proposal for Pivot involves completing a workflow we have by adding 11 new steps to it before Sept 27. I asked if I could discuss the project it with an engineer, and he said “I don’t know.” He also told me frankly that he has put people on PIPs before and that this was a good severance offer; he also said it would be challenging for me to succeed at the Project Proposal.

Here are my questions:

1. What do I do this week? I have until Friday to make a decision. Do I:

   1. Keep talking to my manager to learn more about my situation, or does he just want me gone at this point?

   2. Move on and start looking for new opportunities asap?

   3. Talk to my teammates to ask their advice? (Don’t want to put them in a weird position)

   4. Keep going into the office and make the most of my last week, or stay home?

2. Is this a genuine pip, or is my manager just trying to hit a quota? (I read on the internet that sometimes managers get pressured to meet a quota and put a certain number of employees on PIP).

3. If I actually have deficiencies that prevented me from succeeding at Amazon, I want to know what they are before starting my next job! I still don’t completely believe the feedback I’ve been given because, while my stats are low, they’re not significantly behind or even the worst on the team, especially when you factor in that I’m the newest member. How would you go about trying to get the full picture? Who would you talk to and what would you ask? Or is it a fool’s errand to keep asking what I did wrong, and better to just move on?

4. Do I have anything to gain by accepting the project proposal and trying to stay at Amazon? Respect from my teammates? Genuine learning and getting better at software engineering? Pride at taking the bigger risk?

5) What should I know in general before making a decision, as someone who had never heard of Pivot until today and knows nothing about the politics at Amazon etc?

I will keep posting updates throughout this week as I learn more and get answers to these questions from Amazon employees. Currently, I think it’s more likely than not that I take the money and leave Amazon.