Are the details of the renumeration of how many months that the amazon is liable to pay to employee as a part of severance, not mentioned in the terms of employment? or is not informed at all beforehand?

4 year tenure. $160K base salary. I know the calculation for PIP severance. Wondering what the severance would be for layoff

I was placed on Focus during the OLR cycle. I didn’t agree with the reasoning behind it, but I chose to follow the plan laid out for me in hopes of exiting Focus. I stayed late at the office, delivered everything according to the plan without delays, and even completed some tasks ahead of schedule. I worked with multiple teams and stakeholders, shipped meaningful features, and genuinely felt proud of what I accomplished. Still, I wasn’t taken off Focus—instead, it got extended. During the extension period, I hit the goals I was given again. But at the end of the extension, I was told I’d be moved to Pivot. From my perspective, this transition to Pivot felt largely unjustified. I realized I was being penalized for very minor issues—things that felt more like excuses than real concerns. In hindsight, I’ve come to believe that my manager was never on my side. It seems like I was simply part of some performance quota they needed to fulfill. It wasn’t a fair fight, and I now see that there was likely no outcome where I could have succeeded. I wasn’t being evaluated for growth—I was just helping someone meet a metric.

Does anyone in here have experience getting put on PiP, Fired or getting severance as an L4 A.M? Was it due to a specific situation or something over time? What department were you in? Did you see it coming or were you blindsided?

Is there anyone here who recently went through the pivot/PIP process and was offered the payout?

Can you drop in your base salary, tenure, and the amount they offered you?

Trying to calculate how much I’ll get when the inevitable happens :)

UPDATE - Already in the comments but bringing up here. Thank you u/MrHaVoC805!

Payout = 10 weeks of base pay + (basepay * 1%) * (tenure in months /12)

My example
Pivot Payment - Pre-Tax: $24,495.63
Base Annual: $88,600
Tenure: 8.42 years (101 months)

$88,600/52 = $1,703.85
$1,703.85 * 10 = $17,038.46
$88,600 x 0.01 = $886

$24,495.63 = $17,038.46 + ($886 x (101/12))

After taxes, I ended up with closer to $17.5k (absolute robbery) but that of course depends on your own tax deductions.

just got notified yesterday that ive been put on pip. i started amazon late 2023 as a new grad with a broken team that was brand new, 4 engineers in total (however 2 were m.i.a. and on leave, and the other was just way too busy) both my manager and skip manager quit within the first few months, reasons including my skip skip manager, which eventually became my new manager. since the team was new, there wasnt much built and strong lack of documentation. the new manager was pretty absent for a couple months, and all of a sudden started really investing time into the team. during this time i got assigned a project that was proposed to be small, but ended up taking me 6 months. i got put on pip because i missed the deadline (but with good reason), and lack of communication/updates (despite me becoming more communicative these past couple of weeks because he raised concern, manager even brought up not sending things when... i literally did). the pip expectations are quite hefty -- i do think i can do them, but at what cost? ive been working 9 am - 12 am almost everyday the past month, including weekends occasionally to finish my project (with no support from my team, despite requesting). ive experienced so much mental stress and pain, including health issues from the pressure recently. i admit i had a slow start, but i genuinely believe i did the best i could with the circumstances i was given.

i want to take the severance, but is it a good idea? especially with this job market? would i even be able to apply for sde 2 roles or do i just resort to sde 1. even if i do take pip, will i be considered for promotion ever?

What happens if you don’t sign? I understand if you sign you’re not allowed to work at Amazon for five years but what happens if you don’t sign and just walk out?

I signed the severance offer 2.5 weeks ago. My termination date was 1.5 weeks ago. When can I expect to get the severance payout?

Also where can I access the PIP severance offer document that I signed. I do not see it in the alum.docs.amazon.com page.

So yeah, after having been with the company for some time, I got the short end of the stick. I kind of felt that it would happen sooner or later with all the other recent layoffs. Anyways, I'm looking at what is required of me, and honestly, it's a lot of stuff in a short amount of time where I'm already engaged in some heavy work. Pretty much seems they want me out. After some emotional outbursts and some crying sessions, I had a talk with my siblings. They initially said to try and tough it out, but as time went on, they changed their opinion, that I should just take the money and go. At least I felt better after talking with them.

Even with 5 business days to think about it, I could have signed it today to leave now, but I got stocks vesting in a few days, so I definitely want to wait until they vest before the signing. I had looked up a few things regarding my other benefits and such, and while I get paid for all the unused vacation time I have, I don't for PTO, Sick, etc. I do feel like just using PTO this week until my stocks vest, then signing to get the severance and heading out, but I also don't want to feel like a jerk to my teammates because we're currently in some major projects. Still, I'm already on my way out by Amazon's placement of me on PIP. If I use my PTO now, I technically get paid for it and won't get additional stress, but then I sort of end up screwing people over that did nothing to me.

If I were to use my PTO like this, could they make a case where they could cancel those stocks soon to be vested? And is there anything else I should look into before signing?

I got put on focus 1 month ago. The task involved customer facing change and expectation was to take it to prod. Having almost delivered the task, I was expecting good remark from my manager but was surprised to hear their opinion (they aren’t happy with my delivery). My 6weeks of focus will be done soon and afaik, I’ll be offered with either pip or severance. How do I go about telling my manager that I want severance instead?

How much severance do people get btw?

... at Amazon. God damn this new "Big 4" thread rule

Backstory summary:

• Post 1 - Oct 2015 - Got an offer from Microsoft, was wondering if I should leave Amazon for it. My manager at the time was saying that I was under performing.

• Post 2 - a week later - Decided to turn down Microsoft offer to stick around at Amazon and try to improve performance.

• Post 3 - Feb 2016 - Bailed on that team to join another team at Amazon with a manager I felt was more willing to work with me.

And now for the update over a year later.

I switched teams around February last year after finding a manager that was understanding of my situation and was willing to work with me to get to SDE II. I really thought that manager was going to be on my side. He was more or less, but the problem was that he ended up hiring another manager in between me and him about a month after I started on the new team. This manager was brand new to managing and brand new to Amazon as well. I told the manager that brought me onto the team that I was worried about the ability of the new manager to help me through this situation and the hiring manager told me not to worry about it and that the new manager was on the same page as him as far as career development of his direct reports goes.

The annual performance reviews came out around April, so a couple months after I switched teams and right after the new manager came on. The performance reviews are for the previous calendar year, so it was entirely from my previous team that I under performed on. It was an awful review. My previous manager had nothing good to say about me and my peers just raked me over the coals. The result of this was that my new managers had to put me on a development plan. Apparently at Amazon this is the first step in correcting poor performance. There are other names for it that managers refer to it as, like "coaching", and there's a company wide list that all managers can see that you're on that is I think referred to as the "dev list". Basically the manager enters monthly goals into a tool and tracks your progress against those goals.

What this ended up being in my case was just a chance for the manager to document every single one of my mistakes. Every month we'd set goals around delivering something that was on our roadmap for our sprints. Unfortunately, the goals have to be set at the beginning of the month, and the two-week sprints can go in a completely different direction. If I happened to pick a task that was decided against picking up for a sprint it would count against me for not completing it, even though the manager shifted priorities after my goals were set. It got really ridiculous. I'd try to hit his moving target and each month it was always something like "I'm not sure I have enough data here to convince HR to take you off of the dev list". He wanted me to focus on tasks that were mostly coding so that he would have enough "data" to show in the tool that I was delivering results. Of course I was still on the on-call rotation and nothing I did during those weeks of on-call was helping me get off the dev list in his eyes. Because of my manager's desire to have me complete coding tasks specifically, I was super picky on picking up sprint tasks and ended up pigeon-holing myself onto certain parts of our systems that basically required just maintenance. I didn't end up working on any of our new projects because they were design-heavy at the beginning and wouldn't have given me what he wanted me to complete for the dev list.

This went on for about 3 or 4 months. The worst part about this time was that any time off I took (which I had accrued and would lose if I didn't use) was criticized hard. I would always tell my manager a couple weeks before that I would take off time and he would try to convince me not to. I was planning on taking off a week with my family for summer vacation and he said it would be better if I could just stick around and finish tasks instead. He would bring it up all the time afterwards, too, by saying "I really think if you didn't take that week off in July that we could have gotten off this list then." Even when I said I'd just take a Friday and Monday off for an extended weekend he gave me shit about it. "Do you really think it's a good idea to take this vacation right now?" He vehemently denied discouraging taking any vacation when I complained to his manager (the one that brought me on the team) and HR later.

After those 3 or 4 months at his suggestion I took on a large project that I could complete from beginning to end to finally get me off the list and set me up for promotion. I worked closely with the SDE III on our team and came up with the design for the project. The whole team reviewed the design and gave feedback. Then we split up the tasks and all worked on it in parallel. During this time my manager was on vacation for about 3-4 weeks. The funny thing was that while he was gone, the team worked better than they had since he had joined. It was the first sprint since he joined that we actually completed all of our tasks, about half of which were for my project. I pointed this out and everybody thought it was just kind of funny. It was, but it also showed how terrible of a manager this guy was.

As with any large project, this one ran into complications. We got something like 80% of the project done and then ran into complications. The remaining 20% were edge cases nobody had foreseen and weird bugs that were hard to diagnose. For any other project, this would have been accepted as normal and everybody would have just continued on and gotten it done. In fact, my skip-level manager (the one that brought me on to the team) was telling me all this around this time. "Oh don't worry about that, that's just how these things go, you're doing fine."

However, I was getting a totally different message from my direct manager. Since this was part of my dev plan, all of these mistakes were being heavily scrutinized. I missed delivering the whole thing by the established deadline. Every time we had a delay or a bug pop up, it was noted and documented. This was the most stressful time of my life and it was taking its toll on me. I started looking for other jobs around this time, but I think the stress of everything piling up was holding me back because I did a lot of interviews and didn't get any offers. I probably would have taken anything at this time just to get out of the situation.

My manager suggested going to a formal PIP around this time and I pushed back hard. I told him and HR that I didn't agree with his assessment and that I was being treated unfairly. The decision was to give me a little more time to try to get off the dev plan. I had some personal reasons for trying to delay the inevitable. I wanted to be sure I had Amazon benefits until a certain time, and I was just a couple months away from my next stock vest. I figured that I would stick it out at least for the stock vest (it had tripled in value since I joined) and try to focus on my personal life to de-stress for more interviews later.

After about a month or two of basically doing the bare minimum at Amazon and doing as much as I could to de-stress at home, I got an email from a recruiter at another company that sounded interesting and I decided to take the interview. I was constantly getting emails from recruiters at Microsoft, too this whole time so I decided to take their interview again. Microsoft was interesting because every time I talked to them, they would always ask why I turned down their previous offer. I had the phone screen with Microsoft and then never heard back from them at all. I followed up a week later and the recruiter said he would check with the interviewer if they had any feedback. Oh well.

I did end up getting an offer from the other company that contacted me. I basically was going to take it no matter what the numbers were because the company was alright and I was so done with my current situation. Their offer ended up being a nice step up from what I was getting at Amazon anyway, so it worked out well.

Right before I got their offer, my manager said that he would start the PIP in a couple of weeks. I had heard on this sub about a new program that Amazon launched this year called Pivot, which would give employees facing a PIP a couple different options. The first option was to go through the PIP like normal. The second was to formally appeal the manager's decision. If you chose that option, you would present your case to HR and they would compare what you say with your manager. If they decided that there was a legitimate conflict here (meaning you shouldn't be put on a PIP), you could transfer to another team. The third option was to pay out a severance and have you leave immediately. I was hoping to get that severance.

Once I had the offer from the other company, I basically pushed my manager to start the process for the PIP right away. I was telling him that I just wanted to get it over with since it had been almost a year of going through the dev plan. I accepted the offer without telling my manager and gave the new company a start date that was a little more than a month out. It took some prodding of my manager to get him to get things going. It turns out that the whole PIP process is a TON of paperwork for the manager. Hence why I think they decided to start giving severance packages for having employees just avoid that altogether. To formally start the Pivot/PIP process, my manager had to write up a paper of why he thought a PIP was necessary. This was where I saw it was obvious that he had just been documenting every little failure I had. He basically had two pages of "on this date, this guy failed to deliver this task/on this date he released a bug to prod/on this date he took too long to respond to a ticket that was open while he was on call". It was ridiculous. Every thing on that list was something everybody else on my team had done at one point or another during the same time, but they weren't on a dev plan so it wasn't being documented. Seriously, there were guys on my team that caused huge outages or that had projects go months past their expected deadline, but they got promotions and raises because they weren't already on a dev plan from a previous team.

The severance they offered me was a little more than 20% of my annual salary. I know there is a document on the intraweb at Amazon that's part of the "manager's toolkit" called the "severance calculator". The severances they offer as part of the Pivot program are calculated based on the employee's tenure and salary. Of course I took the severance and then told them that I had another offer and would leave in two weeks. That's where I am now, finishing out this week and then moving on to my new job.

Overall it worked out alright. I was able to get my next stock vest, I got a nice payout from Amazon to leave, and I've got a new job lined up for more money and an overall better quality of life (at least that's the expectation). It was the most stressful time of my life by far, but at least it's over.

My advice to anyone that might be in a similar situation would be to just find another job. At least at Amazon, once you start on a dev plan or a PIP, I feel like it's just an excuse to gather enough evidence to fire you. I've heard others say that they survived a PIP and are better for it. I was even told by people at Amazon that there were SDE's that got put on a PIP and were promoted on the next cycle. That's a whole lot of stress to deal with, though. I would have been much better off mentally if I had jumped shipped when my manager on my previous team told me I was starting to under perform. Financially and career-wise, I'm better off after going through the last year. My new job is in the same space that this team that I'm leaving is working in (which I found I actually really like - just didn't like the manager).

As for my opinion of Amazon, I'll echo what most people say here in that it really depends on your direct manager. I had two terrible managers and a bad manager at Amazon can really make things awful. It's a big company and there are lots of interesting things to work on there, but there's also a lot of crap to deal with. If you're on the fence about joining Amazon, I'd say take something else if you have a similar offer, otherwise, it's not too bad if you can find a good manager.

Holy crap, that's a lot of text. Sorry. Hopefully this is useful to somebody.

I was recently told that I was put on a 60 days PIP however was given a choice for a 7.8k severance with additional 2 month pay on top of my unused vacation days.

My manager said that if I take the pip, I will not be qualified for this particular severance package if I fail. She said there might still be another severance pay if I fail PIP, but it wont be as big and isn't 100% sure. She said, PIP is not the end and I could pass it if I do well which will allow me to stay. What should I choose?

Will I still be eligible for unemployment benefits?

Goodbye Amazon! I started as a delivery driver then jumped to L4 AM (university hire) been with the company 5 years and just left as an L5.

Had the biggest smile walking out the door after turning badge in.

Moving on to a better gig with a $20k pay bump and a $17k severance package from Amazon. My departure was perfectly calculated with a little bit of luck.

Happy holidays and best of luck to everyone in here! Y’all have made me laugh over the last few years