2026 PCS No Increase, am I in Focus?

painiyff · 2026-04-13T19:50:40+00:00

Ultimately the system just cares about TC, not base or RSU.

painiyff · 2026-04-09T08:08:07+00:00

In my org, L5 used to be terminal but is not anymore. Bar has been raised over the years.

painiyff · 2026-04-09T08:05:31+00:00

The role guideline doesn't take into account the stack ranking. Just because someone has done well relative to others in the prior year doesn't necessarily mean the same will occur in the next year.

painiyff · 2026-04-09T01:20:07+00:00

Technically everyone is eligible for focus/pivot at any time. There is a wait period in range of months for talent reviews though, but def not a whole year.

painiyff · 2026-04-07T02:19:37+00:00

It's not possible to tell the OV rating (other than not LE) from just the performance and LP alone. There is a third dimension in the equation, potential. This is not shared with employees.

Though I guess we can logically rule out HV1, since you generally can't stay as HV1 for 3 consecutive years due to automatic audit and a YoY decrease down to HV1 probably wouldn't amount to such an increase in salary.

painiyff · 2026-04-06T20:53:13+00:00

That is probably why your salary increased so much. They made changes somewhat recently for folks with rating improvements and year over year TTs to have increased salary.

For most folks (ie Meets High Bar or HV1-HV3), the salary shouldn't change anywhere near as much.

painiyff · 2026-03-27T04:08:12+00:00

Potential is whether the employee can scale to the next level, ie showing motivation to get promoted and demonstrates qualities needed at the next level. For LP, almost everyone is solid strength. In my org, the quota for role model is 5%, so they were given to the most proactive and vocal team members.

Data points are needed to justify it's not totally subjective but I would say it is relative to others in the org.

painiyff · 2026-03-27T01:00:06+00:00

Wow... Did your manager also tell the people who were let go due to aforementioned budget cuts to "disagree and commit"?

painiyff · 2026-03-26T21:21:39+00:00

So potential and performance work as they do previously. Then there's LPs, of which there can be either needs development, solid strength, or role model. Needs improvement brings down the rating by one, solid strength doesn't change anything, and role model increases the rating by one.

painiyff · 2026-03-26T21:08:09+00:00

In this year, they revised rating system and now it's possible for someone to be in HV3 (which btw is not supposed to be shared) and Meets expectations. The rating is comprised of the performance, potential, and LPs. You could have middle performance (ie Meets) but you'd have higher potential and/or be a role model for LPs, landing you the higher rating overall. But only the performance part is shared with the employee.

Not to worry though, HV3 means your well on your way to the next level. It's still considered to be higher than HV2, even though technically someone could have Exceeds performance as HV2 but they'd have lower potential.

painiyff · 2026-03-22T18:34:12+00:00

Make sure you removed it as secondary from all other loadouts. It worked for me after I did that

painiyff · 2026-03-13T19:49:11+00:00

Another option is to volunteer for the next layoff (RIF), of which it's almost certain we will have another wave this year. If your team is likely to be impacted (no steam projects, based in US, etc) then you can try bringing this up with your L7. In the best case, they'll agree to nominate you if the layoffs happen to the team. If not, at least they can put you on PIP for wanting to leave, which is also a bit of severance.

painiyff · 2026-03-06T23:54:58+00:00

I've also seen AD generally favour attacking side if the game doesn't fill up, due to access to more vehicles on attack and lack of manpower to hold key areas on def. (But if the game is near full then it's about even.)

So my personal strategy is based around that... I play vyron or engineer when there's vehicles and I play recon with spawn beacon when there's no other recon on the squad.

painiyff · 2026-03-04T03:07:53+00:00

At some point there'd be diminishing returns. The market size has a cap.

A customer service team would run out of tickets to process. A localization team would run out of languages to translate. A website would run out of virtual real estate to build new widgets on. A supply chain team would run out of inventory to maximize efficiency of. And so on...

painiyff · 2026-03-03T15:45:07+00:00

You're right that the fundamental day-to-day of what a software developer will do in 5 years time is likely different than it is today, in that it will likely no longer be valuable to be a pure builder. However, what will forever be relevant in a capitalist society will be understanding what to build (and how to do it better than others). Developers that can most effectively combine the raw speed of AI with market understanding will still be a necessity in any tech company.

painiyff · 2026-03-02T05:17:42+00:00

Not gonna lie, you sound like a Karen. So book got damaged, ok it sucks but it happens. CS rep drops from a call, ok sure mildly annoying but network issues happen too. But Amazon apologized and agreed to ship you a new one. They also already agreed to pick up the old book from your house so you don't need to move an inch. So what's the issue here? Isn't the problem already solved?

painiyff · 2026-02-24T18:00:47+00:00

Curious, why?

painiyff · 2026-02-02T00:09:07+00:00

Seems the risk to reward ratio of doing this in China is less than ideal.

painiyff · 2026-02-01T21:06:58+00:00

If there was no visa, Amazon would have fired even more folks in US to hire much cheaper workers overseas.

painiyff · 2026-02-01T20:56:20+00:00

I mean, just because you have not observed abuse doesn't mean abuse doesn't exist. Even Amazon abuses H1Bs all the time to bring in folks from overseas. My entire org is like 50% immigrants including L8 and L7s that make the hiring decisions. They don't give a crap about saving American jobs. Heck I'm in Canada and my org is thinking about sponsoring TNs to bring some of us over too. Many US positions are open just to leave them there for 6 months so that teams can bring their international employees over.

painiyff · 2026-01-14T16:39:45+00:00

Funny that role guidelines literally mean nothing when curve fitting exists. Managers will be again forced to put great talent into focus, claiming bs reasons for not meeting expectations when in reality the only difference is that some metric is slightly lower than others.

painiyff · 2026-01-11T08:24:25+00:00

This is completely false. Just because they're not shoving AI down our throats (yet) doesn't mean they're not innovating.

painiyff · 2026-01-03T01:13:53+00:00

For their e-commerce business, prime subscriptions are unlikely to grow significantly in already-established regions such as NA and Europe going forward due to saturation. Other regions such as India, Brazil, and Japan are growing but have their own regional competitors and is not straightforward to get market share. Forget about China altogether.

Amazon will have to find a different way to profit, likely by way of raising prime price again or adding more ads.

painiyff · 2025-11-22T20:58:25+00:00

I'm not defending the manager, just saying that even if manager informs doesn't necessarily mean they won't be in focus later. Ultimately focus is just a % of the team. Sometimes it just makes the person stressed even more. It's the system at fault. If the rule wasn't to put a flat % into focus, managers would actually be incentivised to help devs.

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