alt Hacker NewsThoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
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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.
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
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?
The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.
This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?
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".
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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
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.
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."
Very thoughtful. There’s also Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards, respectively.
"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.
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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.