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OH absolutely. They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time. Frugality means putting up with lousy hardwa

by aanm1988 9y ago

OH absolutely. They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time. Frugality means putting up with lousy hardware and cramming people into working environments to the point where people start bringing up OHSA w.r.t. number of toilets. Customer obsession means getting an email about a feature used by a couple percent of users and having to spend a week scrambling because the strategic decision you made (to drop the feature in a major release because you need to get it out) has now been declared wrong. Sev-S was a popular term (S-team being Jeff and his directs). Bias for action means break extremely important OS features that support multiple products because of pure incompetence. Note that this should really conflict with customer obsession and are right a lot, but oh well. One thing I found odd was that are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff. My less snarky response would be that they do spread this stuff around. It has some positive impacts around things like customer obsession, which Amazon is great at. Bias for action can be a good motivator for the right type of person, see something wrong and you go fix it. That said it's not problem free. Frugality is made fun of a lot, because it often goes from sensibly frugal to just cheap.

mabbo 9y ago
On almost all your points, I do agree with you. But for one: > are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff "Disagree and commit" means that when you don't agree with the decision being made, you make that clear, you state why, but then you commit to the decision that was made and work with your team to achieve the goals. It means you don't whine throughout the project that it wasn't done the right way, and you don't bullshit with "I told you so" later if you turn out to be correct. If your manager makes the call that it's going to be done in way X, you disagree with him politely, then you commit to doing it way X. What I find far more interesting about the leadership principles is that they recently dropped one: "Vocally self-critical". Oh, that's really just part of 'Earn Trust', apparently, but I'll bet in two more years that phrase isn't even part of the Earn Trust description anymore.
- Raphael 9y ago
  I always considered it "disagree and roll and over".

mabbo 9y ago

On almost all your points, I do agree with you. But for one: > are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff "Disagree and commit" means that when you don't agree with the decision being made, you make that clear, you state why, but then you commit to the decision that was made and work with your team to achieve the goals. It means you don't whine throughout the project that it wasn't done the right way, and you don't bullshit with "I told you so" later if you turn out to be correct. If your manager makes the call that it's going to be done in way X, you disagree with him politely, then you commit to doing it way X. What I find far more interesting about the leadership principles is that they recently dropped one: "Vocally self-critical". Oh, that's really just part of 'Earn Trust', apparently, but I'll bet in two more years that phrase isn't even part of the Earn Trust description anymore.

Raphael 9y ago
I always considered it "disagree and roll and over".