A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees.
Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews.
Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.
Ah, Goodhart's law. The conviction that measuring more produces more meritocracy, or even more accuracy, is a dangerous one.
If you're not careful with what data you collect, you get exactly this - perverse incentives discouraging risk-taking and incident prevention in favor of success at limited, unnecessary tasks.
> People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
Seems like most organizations I've worked at.
That and organizational volunteer work get you awards.
Shiny things and organizational volunteer work seem to become incresingly important as companies grow in size, the volume of internal projects increases, and thus it becomes a lot harder to gain consistent internal visibility. So working on a "shiny" project becomes your best (if not only) shot at getting noticed. The truly Machiavellian will recognize this environment for what it is, and just pitch shiny new projects if none are immediately available -- the necessity of those projects usually being a secondary consideration.
The problem often grows worse, not better, when you introduce concepts like top-down goal alignments and stack ranking. These can easily backfire by forcing savvy employees to scramble for maximum-impact projects and deprioritize all others. You end up with a handful of hero projects and a whole bunch of misfit toys that nobody wants to touch.
I'm not sure any company has ever truly solved this problem at scale. Obviously some company cultures are better at it than others. (I've never worked at Amazon, so I can't speak honestly or credibly to its culture.)
Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.
On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews. Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.