I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
hibikir · 5h ago
Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book.
All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished.
You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.
neilv · 52m ago
> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization.
This has the ring of truth.
Has anyone solved this problem?
Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)
marcus_holmes · 3m ago
Valve? Though I have no idea how they're going now with the anarchy-as-an-organisational-structure thing these days.
Aurornis · 4h ago
The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s.
Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.
It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.
As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.
Muromec · 3h ago
> Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision.
If it’s good for the company to operate like that, it can’t be bad for an employee, right?
Moral corruption started from the top and once it reaches bottom, it’s all about proverbal catalytic converters off the company truck.
Then the whole thing collapses of course
lazide · 4h ago
Like a good soldier being conscripted into a shit army, life ain’t fair. Always brutal to see, though.
cperciva · 6h ago
The Leadership Principles are less "principles" and more "operational guidelines". Aside from maybe "Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer" (which is a recent addition) they're not saying what Amazon wants to achieve; they're recommendations for effective ways to get things done.
throwaway439080 · 2h ago
"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started.
(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)
TrainedMonkey · 1h ago
In many ways they are the best employer, just for shareholders and not employees.
pzmarzly · 4h ago
If they are just recommendations, perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes :)
monkeydreams · 2h ago
> perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes
They are selecting for people who will "play the game" or, even better, will believe proactively.
No one with a lick of sense would believe that Amazon strive to be the best employer in the world. But someone who is capable of doing, for e.g., a highly skilled coding job and who believes that Amazon actually strives to be the best employer, is a rare beast who will likely not unionize at the drop of a hat.
gtowey · 4h ago
Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda.
My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.
Muromec · 3h ago
It makes sense. When leadership speaks topdown in principles, they want some kind of change to happen, so whatever being communicated can be presumed to not be there before.
cyanydeez · 6h ago
We're witnessing in real time, in the USA, that what matters is the coherent mesh of individual principles, and not some words on a page somewhere.
OrvalWintermute · 4h ago
I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra……….
Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up
iLoveOncall · 6h ago
Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.
ignoramous · 5h ago
Using principles (as stick and a carrot) is not the same as following it. That said, I do get what you're trying to say: Leadership Principles are inescapable at Amazon, whether or not you want to progress in your career, whether you know how to game it or not, those commandments are set in stone.
apparent · 5h ago
The "leaders are owners" bit is a great idea from the shareholders' perspective, but a bit of a raw deal for the employees. That is, every owner wants the employees to act as if he has as much skin in the game as an owner does. But the employees simply do not. They might have some equity, but at Amazon it would only be the tiniest sliver. If you can convince such employees to act as if they are owners, then good for you I guess. But savvy employees would only act as owners to the extent that they are given upside potential to match.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 4h ago
I don't understand how slivers of stock is supposed to incentivize anyone to do anything.
Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Say that it's a completely fair co-op and I have a 1-in-1.5-millionth share of the whole company. Their market cap is about 2.5T, so this is about 1.6 million USD in stock that I own. (By amazing coincidence, their market cap in USD is about the square of the employee headcount)
But if I'm a rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level.
For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock.
I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money
I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?
plantain · 3h ago
The real purpose of equity grants is to fudge the OpEx accounting costs on non-GAAP reports.
cperciva · 17m ago
Isn't there also a difference in tax treatment.
Muromec · 3h ago
You are overlooking the part where you affect more than just your own behavior, but that of your colleagues. You also assume a linear function of productivity and stock price.
apparent · 3h ago
Yeah I think it only really makes sense for people who are very high up (and are given a lot of stock) and for the purpose of creating an environment where "we all work really hard" (and slackers are looked down on). I think Amazon's leadership principle is going for the latter: create social costs for not working hard.
jodrellblank · 4h ago
I’m not going to strongly defend it but this “doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right?” isn’t true; if your work scales or you are managing people, you could move the needle more - say you launch a new service from scratch.
crossbody · 3h ago
You need to multiple it by the probability of that new service actually succeeding, which is low.
And even then, do you expect it to move stock price by more than 10%? Otherwise it's not going to meaningfully impact your RSU compensation
Muromec · 3h ago
You are correct with regards to amazon. In earlier stage companies, your rsu can 3x overnight once you ship
JustExAWS · 2h ago
In early stage companies - ie private companies - your RSUs are Monopoly money that will statistically be worthless. In a public company, my RSUs are immediately available to liquidate (which I did).
mikert89 · 6h ago
Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding.
There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems
harshs08 · 5h ago
please don't turn this into another blind/reddit forum. I suggest refraining from making broad claims like "80% of corporate workers are visa workers" without actual data.
mikert89 · 4h ago
the article is a misrepresentation of amazon work culture, what do you want me to say
mvdtnz · 3h ago
Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?
Muromec · 3h ago
It’s captured audience who will not push back as hard as they maybe should. That and depressing wages of course
JustExAWS · 1h ago
I saw this myself. When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”.
For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will), your severance amount is decreased to a third of the original.
But you can appeal the failed pip and if your appeal is denied, that gets cut to another 1/2.
So $40K would have quickly become less than $7K.
All of my coworkers on H1B were scared shitless it would happen to them. I was doing my 40 hours a week during my focus, refusing extra work, going on vacations and of course putting feelers out to all of my former clients (working in AWS’s consulting department) and former coworkers.
I had already paid off all of our debt, built up savings, sold all of my AMZN stock, and moved to state tax free Florida.
I knew someone would give me a job or a contract. H1B visa holders can’t work contracts and maintain their status.
brcmthrowaway · 5h ago
Whats the next amazon?
la64710 · 5h ago
That’s bullshit … just another scaremongering post against employees with some kind of visa. Leadership depends upon individuals not upon their immigration status. From direct experience I can say there are leaders and non leaders on bothe sides. BTW ec2 was first conceived and made in South Africa.
bendbro · 4h ago
H1Bs risk deportation when they are fired. It is inconceivable for this to not impact their performance and behavior. Combine that with Amazon's Jack Welch style stack rank and firing of the bottom and it becomes even worse
la64710 · 1h ago
Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there. And this actually happens all the time. Folks in Amazon move around as needed across border. The idea of h1-b servitude does not hold much relevance for companies like Amazon who have built massive offshore centers in the last few years.
Supermancho · 20m ago
> Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there
Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened? It's a big company so I assume it's something that's demonstrable. I happen to think that it's unlikely that Amazon leadership would adapt by making allowance, rather than replace.
petalmind · 6h ago
The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.
x2tyfi · 6h ago
This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.
dh2022 · 5h ago
I left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.
htrp · 7m ago
And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012
oncallthrow · 6h ago
In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer.
bmitc · 1h ago
In what way?
No comments yet
diskzero · 3h ago
I worked at Amazon before the two newest principles were added, so I can't comment on Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. I was asked about the principles during my interview(s) and they were discussed extensively during my onboarding process. I found there were groups of peeple who were very sincere about them and groups that were quite cynical. Some co-workers had no opinion and just wanted to survive their current pager duty. I frequently used some combination of principles as support for an argument for or against some technical or business decision. It was nice to have them written down and the entire company accepting them as the basis of how the business should operate. This was quite different from my time at Apple, where the principles were somewhat fuzzy other than Do the Right Thing, Do What Steve Wants or Put the User First.
The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share. There certainly could be cases I don't know about. I found many of the principles helped create a good environment to make technical decisions and maintain some technical autonomy across groups. Yes, working at Amazon is a grind and there many ways working there can suck the joy out of your life. I never found the principles used as a weapon against me, my team or customers. I know Amazon has a lot of faults, but I am not sure they are are directly correlated to the principles. A thought experiment would be to wonder what Amazon would be like if it didn't have any principles at all?
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
All organisations have principles. Beyond a certain size - and sometimes long before then - they're never the stated ones.
And while you may have used the stated principles to create a good environment, there's nothing in Amazon's principles that prevents someone else using them to create a bad environment.
For example - conspicuously absent from them is any concept of worker welfare.
VaedaStrike · 5h ago
This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?
phantomathkg · 18m ago
Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime.
Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.
losvedir · 5h ago
My favorite one is leaders "Are Right, a Lot". The others are all generally "meta" about deciding what to do and how to do it, but that one actually calls out the concrete results of actions. It feels pretty meaty, and actually is a way to grade leaders. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as a team lead, who recently very much was not right about something. But fortunately it's "a lot" and not "always".
dh2022 · 5h ago
When I was working at Amazon I did not like this principle. In my experience it led to people arguing: because whoever did not “win” the argument would not be a leader.
diskzero · 3h ago
There was a lot of "arguing" at Amazon, or you could call is strenuous discussions. Another principle was Disagree and Commit. I found this principle lacking at other companies. People would disgres and then sabatoge. The Amazon way was to agree to disagree and commit to sincerely work in the direction of the decision. Winning the initial argument did not make you the leader. You became the leader once your solution shipped, gained signifcant market share and some other succcess metric. This was not always the case!
sangeeth96 · 3h ago
This is good feedback that ideally, Amazonians should read and reflect on but I worry the machine is too big at the moment for anyone there to care. Would take a big event and a reset for things to change.
My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises. "Disagree and commit", "Bias for Action" were popular amongst some of the management I knew.
There are very detailed internal wiki pages written with examples on the right ways to interpret them but I doubt many bothered to go through all that beyond the material presented during onboarding — which is also not always completed. It was frustrating to see LPs overused by employees in every meeting, document and discussions without much thought as to what they were meant to convey.
That said, there were a _handful_ of teams and individuals I met who exemplified these but it was a rare occurrence during my time unfortunately. And even in the moments where someone went above and beyond w.r.t channeling the LPs and the internal process to bring forth a proposal (e.g. famous corp-wide one was the push against RTO), I saw them get shot down unceremoniously while low-effort work and planning with a dusting of LPs got the go-ahead.
I hence echo what a few folk here have already said — don't always expect the work environment to reflect the values and principles you read on the about page. Reality is often (sadly) disappointing.
diskzero · 3h ago
I wonder if overall team size has something to do with how the principles are dealt with? Mobile Shopping is huge. Some teams are tiny, experiencing massive growth or winding down. If a team has a super mature code base or market, and the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? How can it really always be Day One?
sangeeth96 · 2h ago
> the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them?
During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads.
> How can it really always be Day One?
I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.
ryandrake · 6h ago
> Amazonians talk about "one-way doors" and "two-way doors", and it is quite true that many decisions are can be reversed... but that doesn't always mean that there is no cost associated with reversing a decision.
Not many companies get this right. They seem to be very polarized on this mentality: There are companies that are too cavalier about decision making, have this "do something, anything" attitude, try too many risks, and then end up breaking things that are hard to reverse or painting themselves into a corner. And then there are companies that just get paralyzed by every little decision they have to make and end up defaulting to doing nothing out of caution.
I think it's really rare to find a company that can consistently apply the right amount of caution and care, but still actually get things done. There's often no internal framework or thought about whether something is a "one way" or "two way" door, as the article puts it. It's just (for example) Product saying "let's do it" and Legal saying "no, don't do it" and nobody knows how to solve this without having a default decision or flipping a coin.
some_guy_nobel · 4h ago
Anyone taking these leadership principles serious is fooling themselves.
Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit.
Same happened again with mandated RTO.
And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries.
Why would any other leadership princples be different?
yalogin · 5h ago
I wonder how much emphasis they put on long term strategy over short term impact. I have seen in reality many companies always focus on the short term.
iLoveOncall · 6h ago
As someone who has been working at Amazon for not far from a decade, the author misunderstands some portions because of his focus on a very specific part of the description.
In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team.
Anyways, a lot of those actually exist only to silence the employees, not as real values (although they are used as values within teams). Like the single mention of "Ownership" being enough to legitimate not giving employees annual refreshers on stocks when they have dropped by 50% and so has everyone's compensation. Or "Disagree and commit" when people push back on the return to office.
cperciva · 6h ago
In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team.
Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
felixgallo · 5h ago
Amazon's staff is about the size of 1800s London. There's no way anyone could understand all of what's going on, so people have to use judgement to assess what they know, proxy what they don't know, and move forward.
mikert89 · 5h ago
leadership principles are relevant to high level amazon employees, L6 and below they are used as a control mechanism/justification to call out low performance
pvtmert · 4h ago
As a ~4 year tenured L5, I agree. There is annual performance review system called Forte. During forte, each person is rated in each leadership principles (LPs) by their peers and manager, possibly from away-team members.
As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is extremely limited. Citing Ownership (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently weaponised to limit promotions/pay-raises.
I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog. Then, when I go through my backlog, I prioritize these things according to their predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.
When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)
Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs
- Think-Big
- Ownership
- Bias-for-Action
Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.
It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.
Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!
master_crab · 11m ago
Forte isn’t used to withhold comp. It’s just a development tool. That’s why it was always held in January after end of year comp. If your manager told you otherwise, they are being passive-aggressive about your prospects.
Second, if you’re a fifth year L5, start interviewing now. L5 technically is a terminal level (is that still a thing there?) but you aren’t supposed to spend five years at that level.
dvdbloc · 2h ago
Can definitely relate. There is no correlation to work complexity and quality in performance reviews from what I’ve seen. It’s often how much you are selling something and your director happens to be buying…
scarface_74 · 1h ago
You don’t see the problem with being a “four year L5”? That’s not to insult your skillset - just the nature of Amazon. There is a 99% probability that you are getting paid much less than new L5 hires.
Why are you still there?
felixgallo · 6h ago
I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better. AWS is particularly well-placed for this because its mission is to give the people what they want in exchange for money, rather than to sell the people to other people or radicalize grandma for clicks, so it doesn't have some of the suspicious ethical positions that burden other places in the space.
I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives.
As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer.
It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.
lifeisstillgood · 6h ago
“Paxos as a service”
Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work …
Definitely coming back to that
cperciva · 6h ago
To be clear, I'm not saying it has to be literally Paxos as a service. There's a bunch of ways you can take operations from different sources in a distributed system and produce a consensus view of what happened first. But aside from trivial and low-performance options (e.g. everyone contends on a single DynamoDB item and uses conditional writes) Amazon hasn't made any of the possibilities available.
xmprt · 6h ago
Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this.
photochemsyn · 6h ago
The only way the corporate executives of a corporation will ever pay attention to pleas and heartfelt advice from employees - even high-level well-trusted long-term employees - is if those employees are the controlling shareholders who have real voting power over the makeup of the corporate board.
Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.
shermantanktop · 5h ago
Not sure how this is meant to relate to the article.
But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.
photochemsyn · 4h ago
Well this is what set me thinking:
> "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for."
I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."
Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.
CamperBob2 · 2h ago
Then there's the rather-hilarious tension between Amazon's "Climate Pledge" and "Yeeeah, forget that whole WFH thing. We're going to need you to sit in traffic for an hour a day so you can Zoom from the office rather than home."
tmsh · 4h ago
Very thoughtful. There’s also Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards, respectively.
smitty1e · 3h ago
"Bias for action" is fine, but, with age, the "measure twice, cut once" adage acquires some gravity.
Amazon is a cult, fullstop. My interview there was the most miserable, antagonistic one I have ever had. And even then they wanted you to regurgitate their principles as if the recruiter didn't over prep you on them.
All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished.
You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.
This has the ring of truth.
Has anyone solved this problem?
Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)
Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.
It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.
As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.
If it’s good for the company to operate like that, it can’t be bad for an employee, right?
Moral corruption started from the top and once it reaches bottom, it’s all about proverbal catalytic converters off the company truck.
Then the whole thing collapses of course
(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)
They are selecting for people who will "play the game" or, even better, will believe proactively.
No one with a lick of sense would believe that Amazon strive to be the best employer in the world. But someone who is capable of doing, for e.g., a highly skilled coding job and who believes that Amazon actually strives to be the best employer, is a rare beast who will likely not unionize at the drop of a hat.
My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.
Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up
Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Say that it's a completely fair co-op and I have a 1-in-1.5-millionth share of the whole company. Their market cap is about 2.5T, so this is about 1.6 million USD in stock that I own. (By amazing coincidence, their market cap in USD is about the square of the employee headcount)
But if I'm a rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level.
For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock.
I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money
I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?
And even then, do you expect it to move stock price by more than 10%? Otherwise it's not going to meaningfully impact your RSU compensation
There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems
For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will), your severance amount is decreased to a third of the original.
But you can appeal the failed pip and if your appeal is denied, that gets cut to another 1/2.
So $40K would have quickly become less than $7K.
All of my coworkers on H1B were scared shitless it would happen to them. I was doing my 40 hours a week during my focus, refusing extra work, going on vacations and of course putting feelers out to all of my former clients (working in AWS’s consulting department) and former coworkers.
I had already paid off all of our debt, built up savings, sold all of my AMZN stock, and moved to state tax free Florida.
I knew someone would give me a job or a contract. H1B visa holders can’t work contracts and maintain their status.
Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened? It's a big company so I assume it's something that's demonstrable. I happen to think that it's unlikely that Amazon leadership would adapt by making allowance, rather than replace.
No comments yet
The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share. There certainly could be cases I don't know about. I found many of the principles helped create a good environment to make technical decisions and maintain some technical autonomy across groups. Yes, working at Amazon is a grind and there many ways working there can suck the joy out of your life. I never found the principles used as a weapon against me, my team or customers. I know Amazon has a lot of faults, but I am not sure they are are directly correlated to the principles. A thought experiment would be to wonder what Amazon would be like if it didn't have any principles at all?
And while you may have used the stated principles to create a good environment, there's nothing in Amazon's principles that prevents someone else using them to create a bad environment.
For example - conspicuously absent from them is any concept of worker welfare.
Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.
My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises. "Disagree and commit", "Bias for Action" were popular amongst some of the management I knew.
There are very detailed internal wiki pages written with examples on the right ways to interpret them but I doubt many bothered to go through all that beyond the material presented during onboarding — which is also not always completed. It was frustrating to see LPs overused by employees in every meeting, document and discussions without much thought as to what they were meant to convey.
That said, there were a _handful_ of teams and individuals I met who exemplified these but it was a rare occurrence during my time unfortunately. And even in the moments where someone went above and beyond w.r.t channeling the LPs and the internal process to bring forth a proposal (e.g. famous corp-wide one was the push against RTO), I saw them get shot down unceremoniously while low-effort work and planning with a dusting of LPs got the go-ahead.
I hence echo what a few folk here have already said — don't always expect the work environment to reflect the values and principles you read on the about page. Reality is often (sadly) disappointing.
During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads.
> How can it really always be Day One?
I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.
Not many companies get this right. They seem to be very polarized on this mentality: There are companies that are too cavalier about decision making, have this "do something, anything" attitude, try too many risks, and then end up breaking things that are hard to reverse or painting themselves into a corner. And then there are companies that just get paralyzed by every little decision they have to make and end up defaulting to doing nothing out of caution.
I think it's really rare to find a company that can consistently apply the right amount of caution and care, but still actually get things done. There's often no internal framework or thought about whether something is a "one way" or "two way" door, as the article puts it. It's just (for example) Product saying "let's do it" and Legal saying "no, don't do it" and nobody knows how to solve this without having a default decision or flipping a coin.
Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit.
Same happened again with mandated RTO.
And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries.
Why would any other leadership princples be different?
In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team.
Anyways, a lot of those actually exist only to silence the employees, not as real values (although they are used as values within teams). Like the single mention of "Ownership" being enough to legitimate not giving employees annual refreshers on stocks when they have dropped by 50% and so has everyone's compensation. Or "Disagree and commit" when people push back on the return to office.
Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is extremely limited. Citing Ownership (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently weaponised to limit promotions/pay-raises.
I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog. Then, when I go through my backlog, I prioritize these things according to their predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.
When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)
Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action
Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.
It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.
Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!
Second, if you’re a fifth year L5, start interviewing now. L5 technically is a terminal level (is that still a thing there?) but you aren’t supposed to spend five years at that level.
Why are you still there?
I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives.
As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer.
It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.
Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work …
Definitely coming back to that
Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.
But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.
> "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for."
I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."
Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.
Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095603