A former Amazon drone engineer is working with lawmakers to force companies to open up about their employee ranking systems.
The ex-staff member, Pat McGah, said he quit working for one of the biggest companies in the world after being told he was the “least effective” member of his team.
McGah told Bloomberg that he received cryptic feedback from a manager last year and when he asked why he was ranked so low, they wouldn’t give him any details.
After being told that he was effectively the worst employee, McGah was given the option to either submit a 30-day performance plan or accept severance. He chose severance because he didn’t understand what his manager meant when they said McGah needed to learn to create “structure in ambiguous situations”.
“What does that even mean?” McGah told Bloomberg, adding: “It sounds like a fortune cookie.”
McGah is now set to help Senator Patty Kuderer by giving testimony on Amazon’s employee ranking system.
The Senator introduced a bill in January 2021 that would make employers disclose employees personal files, including where they sit in internal rankings.
The Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg: “At Amazon, we work hard to ensure that all employees have the support they need to be successful in their roles and to develop themselves and their careers. We try to understand who our best performers are and to find ways to recognize those people. We also understand that there are people who aren’t meeting performance expectations.
“Like most companies, we offer coaching and other support to employees who are not meeting the bar to help them improve their performance. We regularly review our performance rating process and other people processes to ensure they are fair and effective for employees and managers and to find ways to improve them.”
Maybe it was just a case of a bad worker/manager relationship but either way, it doesn’t look great and Amazon are probably going to have to make some changes so that their employees stop talking absolute shit about the questionable company.
