A former Amazon drone engineer who quit over the company's opaque employee-ranking system is working with lawmakers to crack it open

• An Amazon engineer said he quit after hearing he was among the "least effective" members of his team.
• He told Bloomberg he received cryptic feedback from a manager that sounded "like a fortune cookie."

A former Amazon drone engineer who said he quit after being told he was among the worst-performing members of his team is working with lawmakers who want to force companies to open up their employee-ranking systems.

Pat McGah told Bloomberg that last February, managers told him he was one of the "least effective" members of his team. When McGah asked the managers why he was ranked so low, they didn't provide details, he said.

McGah, who had worked at Amazon for 18 months, said he was told he could either submit a 30-day performance plan or accept severance. McGah told Bloomberg he chose severance because he didn't understand the feedback from his manager, who'd suggested McGah learn to create "structure in ambiguous situations," among other things.

"What does that even mean?" McGah told Bloomberg, adding, "It sounds like a fortune cookie."

McGah is now planning to give testimony on Amazon's employee-ranking system to lawmakers in Amazon's home state of Washington. State Sen. Patty Kuderer introduced a bill last January that would force employers to disclose employees' personnel files, including details of where they sit in internal rankings.

McGah told Bloomberg that when he requested his personnel records from Amazon, the company refused.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company provided McGah "with their personnel file along with other documents, as required by applicable law."

McGah's online petition urging Washington's Legislature to pass the bill had attracted 120 signatures as of Tuesday.

The bill is stalled, but several tech workers, including McGah, are planning to testify on it in the upcoming legislative session, Bloomberg reported.

The Amazon spokesperson said: "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."

The spokesperson continued: "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."

Insider's Eugene Kim and Ashley Stewart found through reporting on Amazon's complex employee-ranking system last year that the company expected managers to rank 5% of employees at the lowest performance tier.

They also reported that Amazon used a metric called "unregretted attrition rate," or URA, to describe employees it's happy to see leave the company. Some managers including senior executives had URA targets of about 6%, the report said.

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