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Jeff Bezos explains the perfect way to make risky business decisions
- tbirrell 9y agoI read about all the crap Amazon employees have to deal with. So it's hard to view anything this guy does in a good light. IMO, anyway. I wonder how much this philosophy contributes to the horror stories we hear out here.
- mrslave 9y agoFunny, I've heard some of them too and they only made me want to apply there! I haven't given it too much thought but Jeff Bezos is probably one of the industry leaders I admire the most. ducks
- KaiP 9y agoThat seems more like a values thing than a process thing. I doubt that this process would produce terrible work conditions if Amazon actually cared about their employees well-being.
- branchless 9y agoCapitalism is a game of extracting as much labour surplus value as possible. By definition an article praising Bezos' success must have employees not realising anywhere near their value add. Bezos does not do the actual work, he facilitates the labour of others. And if he can do that and underpay them more than someone else would then we have a winner. This is the system.
- golergka 9y agoImplying that skillfully faciliating and organizing other's labour isn't work? Well, early on, soviet government and their 1918 predeccessors thought the same. They ended up with a lot of 'liberated' workers and farmers, and no managers and business owners. Strangely, they had to restore capitalist system and then to invite foreign specialists and managers to make the industry even a little bit operational. Turns out, there isn't much you can do with dumb labour alone.
- branchless 9y agoIt is work but workers are not in a position to bargain for their value added. Bezos keeps it. We should tax land not income and stop forcing people to under-sell their labour. Spare me the "Russia" extreme example. This isn't quantitative, we can dislike that extreme and also the extreme celebrated by the USA which fails so many.
- golergka 9y agoYou're saying that USA fails many as if it's a problem. Which implies that in your opinion, no one in a state should fail. Why?
- AndrewUnmuted 9y agoThe horror stories don't resemble anything that I experienced during my five years at Amazon. I think they're largely propagated by NYT and friends because Amazon out-competed them in their own space. Amazon is the best run company I ever worked for. By far.
- Terr_ 9y agoAny particular litmus-test items to distinguish good Amazon teams from bad ones?
- vaidhy 9y agoAsk them for the ticket count metrics - number of tickets, severity and age of open ones. Overly ambitious managers tend to build unstable systems that will break under load. I am going through my second stint at Amazon and I enjoy working there. However, it is not the best place for everyone.
- jrauser 9y agoThis is the correct answer. My advice for amazon SDEs is: either your manager puts operational excellence as their top priority or you need to find a new manager.
- Zombieball 9y agoJust to elaborate On the priority bit. Page count during on-call rotations is probably a huge metric to watch.
- donavanm 9y agoThat's one (important) aspect. When looking at a team or individual I check wiki contributions, design documents, commits, code review feedback provided to others, ticket queue depth/volume, "cm" volume, customer forums, broadcast sessions, and org role/level/tenure blend. Also for teams get a referral or just send a "cold" email to have coffee with an IC on the team. I'd hazard that most of those data sources work for most of the teams at Amazon.
- eclipxe 9y agoTake what you read with a grain of salt. Amazon can be an amazing place for some and horrible place for others. The horrible stories are more interesting to tell and stick with you but doesn't make them the rule.
- cwyers 9y agoGiven how much of success is luck, I try and play a game whenever I see successful people asked "how to be successful" where I try and 'spot the overfitting.' Is this really what made you successful? Or is this just what you wanted to do, and because you were successful, you think it has to be why you succeeded because of course your success was earned?
- WalterBright 9y agoWhen the odds of success are favorable if you keep playing, eventually you will win, even if each individual event is luck. For example, is it luck that the Vegas casinos make money on gambling? Nope, even though the outcome of each individual hand is luck. Many people who are successful went through repeated failures to get there. They never gave up.
- ouid 9y agoif you interview lottery winners, you're not going to get very good advice.
- jinjin2 9y agoNo, but if you interview casino owners (people who make decisions that means they regularly get a lucky outcome, even if they don't win all the time), you will probably get pretty good advice.
- ouid 9y agocasino owners compete with each other. Lots of casinos fail, but you don't get interviews with failed casino owners. (edit: I just realized that there is one, very notable exception to this) If the only difference between a successful casino strategy and an unsuccessful one is failure to control for some variable, then the variance in that variable will yield some very successful casinos, and some unsuccessful casinos, regardless of the actual expected value of the casino business.
- kitrose 9y agoThe lede really stuck out to me: "Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow" At what point is the information you have available for a key decision enough? You always want more. This exactly mirrors a MAJOR decision-making framework taught in the Marine Corps--we actually call it the "70% solution." All of our warfighting doctrine is built around the principle of rapid and decisive action, but the problem is you're in an uncertain, rapidly changing world where there are opposing actors operating around you and you never have all the answers. They emphasize in officer training that a key limiter is being paralyzed with uncertainty and wanting to wait until more information is available, and that you must actively counter this feeling. Indecision is a decision (and often the worst one). I have personally found this one of the most difficult and perpetual factors I've encountered in both military and civilian careers. It's interesting that Bezos espouses this principle.
- matwood 9y ago> They emphasize in officer training that a key limiter is being paralyzed with uncertainty and wanting to wait until more information is available, and that you must actively counter this feeling. Indecision is a decision (and often the worst one) Analysis paralysis happens frequently with analytic types of people.
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- AndrewKemendo 9y agoMy favorite must-memorize Patton quote that sums this all up is: "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."
- paganel 9y agoIt also helps if you've got superior firepower and human resources compared to your adversaries, because otherwise Operation Barbarossa was quite the violent plan executed at just the right time (there are many reports saying that the Soviets were also preparing to attack first) but which failed miserably in the end. Nobody quotes generals Model or Guderian, who were just as competent if not more compared to Patton. Survivor bias at its best.
- rrggrr 9y agoThe % of information missing versus the importance of the missing information... between the two I've learned the hard way that you wait for the right information. Perhaps Bezos way works well for capital rich companies, or it could be my instincts aren't great. I only know that every time I rush into a decision I pay more that I should and often have regrets.
- matwood 9y agoI don't see waiting for 70% rushing at all. The point is that there is always another piece of information, so if you're waiting for the impossible 100% you'll never get anything done.
- seibelj 9y agoLove the "disagree and commit" part. Perfectly encapsulates the situation where "I'm convinced this is a bad idea, but I'm going to trust you and support you."
- ardit33 9y agoAs I worked in amazon previously and know this first hand, you can translate it to: "Shut up, and do as be told". It is a very top down hierarchal type of company, and engineers usually have little influence in general, and often are kept in dark on key decisions. Disagreeing in general is seen as a nuisance. A lot of it would disappear if managers gave concrete details on why a decision was made, but it usually takes a skilled manager to do that, and Amazon, as a large company, has a combination of good managers and plenty of not-so good ones.
- ams6110 9y agohe [Bezos] notes, when you disagree and commit, it's not about holding an "I-told-you-so" over other people's heads. It's a chance for people to hear an opposing point of view but to move ahead with action I actually can't see it as anything other than a (potential) "I-told-you-so." Why are you specifically highlighting that you disagree, if you are then giving the go-ahead? You are the boss. If you approve something, ultimately it's your responsibility. If you really trusted the person you would give them full authority on the decision without dropping your own agreement or disagreement into the mix.
- leblancfg 9y agoI agree 100% with this. The 'disagree' part should at least come with some form of strings attached. Something like 'we need to be able to pull the plug early with this', 'you start with a limited budget', or similar. Otherwise it's useless to mention the fact that you disagree.
- tellingya 9y agoBezos might have got this from Colin Powell's 40/70 decision rule. http://integratedleader.com/articles/40-70rule.pdf http://integratedleader.com/articles/40-70rule.pdf
- hanswang2013 9y agoThis line got me pretty good. "If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” This also explained the concept of "disagree and commit". I was inspired.
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- bronz 9y agothis is some self-help guru type of bullshit.
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- dmitripopov 9y agoThe big problem is that the majority of people with 70% of information will go into f*ckup 100% certain. You need to have a talent of some sorts to make right decisions or at least reversible ones.
- vermontdevil 9y agoI thought of OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
- squozzer 9y agoIn principle, the ideas sound great. In practice, the biggest decisions seem to have high switching costs (e.g. home purchase), by design, to reduce flexibility. So it might prove useful to pursue courses of action that provide maximum flexibility.