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Some of my favorite nuggets from this letter: "[H]igh standards are teachable...High standards are contagious" "You can consider yourself a person of high stan

Some of my favorite nuggets from this letter: "[H]igh standards are teachable...High standards are contagious" "You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots." "To achieve high standards...you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be..." "[A] culture of high standards is protective of all the 'invisible' but crucial work that goes on in every company...doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of what it means to be a professional."

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
staticautomatic 9y ago
If only Amazon as a whole had a culture of high standards...
- askafriend 9y ago
  What you and lots of other people (including me, until very recently) tend to miss is that high standards are one thing. High standards at scale are another. What precedent do we have for standards at such a large scale? How many examples of organizations that have achieved that size do we even have and what do standards across those orgs look like? This applies to software quality at unprecedented scale as well.
  - staticautomatic 9y ago
    I don't believe that high standards inhere in small scale. I have also not read or heard anyone articulate a reasonable explanation for why that is necessarily the case. Figuring out how to operate a business with high standards at scale is arguably the primary job of anyone who operates any business at scale.
    - askafriend 9y ago
      Let me draw an analogy that might be helpful. Let's look at manufacturing yield. It's easy to create a process that hits 99.99% yield when the absolute value of complex goods being produced is 10 items. Can you maintain 99.99% yield when producing 100,000,000 of those items? Almost certainly not. Does hitting 80% yield mean you have lowered your standards when every other manufacturer of similar scale can only hit 60%? No it doesn't. It means you have maintained high standards, it's just the context around you has changed and so the measurement of high standards has changed along with it (as it should). That's the core of what I was getting at.
      - staticautomatic 9y ago
        I couldn't disagree more. Standards are not relative. What you're describing in your example is an instance of lowering a standard. The standard does not change because one's tolerance for meeting it is lowered. You're simply accepting that you've failed to meet the standard. You can say whatever you like to excuse it, but it's an excuse nonetheless.
  - pranjalv123 9y ago
    Is stuff like "your workers shouldn't collapse of exhaustion because you don't want to air condition your warehouses" something so difficult to achieve at scale? Is it even a particularly high standard? Maybe before talking about high standards, we should start with low standards.
    - spelunkitjunket 9y ago
      People on HN like to talk trash about Amazon and that's fine. All that I ask is that you don't do an AMZN_warehouse_worker == AMZN_SDE / AMZN_SE kind of argument. Warehouse work is boring, it's low paid, at the end of the day you're tired and you're dirty, and you didn't make a lot. During the winter it's cold and during the summer it's going to be hot - logistics companies heat warehouses just enough to keep product from freezing. The closest thing to a computer is a hand-held wireless barcode scanner. Them's the breaks of being a box b for any large logistics / supply chain company. UPS, FedEX, DHL, or UP, none of them are tech companies so we don't talk about them but the reality is supply chain is very price sensitive, the industry is low margin and competitive, it's not romantic, and it's classist. No one turns down Stanford to work the graveyard shift unloading tires. The people there will be randomly drug tested and they will be checked on occasion when they're leaving. Argue there is honor to any job done well and I'll agree with you but stop with this Amazon Logistics goes out of it's way to be cruel narrative.
      - cornholio 9y ago
        While I agree with your underlying point, Amazon does deserve special attention because it tries to win hearts and minds, in fact it's the backbone of their branding operation. This letter is a perfect example. FedEx does not have the hearts and minds of customers, everybody expects their employees to piss in bottles and would switch to the first lower cost provider available. Amazon is turning into a larger and much more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass and is allowed to spout this bullshit with a straight face about how 500.000 bottle-wielding Amazonians are making the world a better place.
        adventured 9y ago
  - andrepd 9y ago
    That looks like a whole load of horseshit to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Reaping record-breaking profits while workers are mistreated and paid a pittance is not a "problem of scale" or whatever it is.
- sametmax 9y ago
  It does. The global amazon experience is imperfect, but amazing compared to what we had before it, unmached by competition and life changing enough that we use it for everything. You can't do that by being average. Don't confuse high standards and perfection.
  - freyir 9y ago
    Getting counterfeit merchandise from the factory to your doorstep faster than ever before. They are amazing In some areas, but have very low standards in others.
    - sametmax 9y ago
      > Getting counterfeit merchandise from the factory to your doorstep faster than ever before. Yep. I get bite at least once a year with that one.
    - glenneroo 9y ago
      Or if you're in Austria, you are conditioned to accept that delivery dates offered are 1-2 days off. The warning about "purchase within the next xx hours to receive it in 2 days" is absolute garbage. And the fact that I can select whether it's delivered on Saturday is bullshit, because no courier service here ever delivers anything on Saturday. Yet years later, my Prime packages are still being offered to be delivered on Saturday. I guess I shouldn't complain though, their estimated delivery times are still on par with every other eShop.
noobhacker 9y ago
I find it very hard to communicate about how hard things are going to be (heh). Whether a task is hard depends a lot on the ability of the person doing it. In addition, "hard" can have multiple dimensions: the sheer number of hours, the monotony, or the lack of purpose.
lliamander 9y ago
more succinctly: thinking something is easy is the enemy of high-standards. I really like that, and it's something I have to remind myself from. Along the lines of high standards, something I've realized is that, for people who have high personal standards, working in an environment of low expectations is actually more stressful than working in an environment of high expectations.
- reificator 9y ago
  > for people who have high personal standards, working in an environment of low expectations is actually more stressful than working in an environment of high expectations. I can't stress this enough. I was once chided for checking for nulls in places where nulls can clearly show up (ie, not repeated checks to the same value or anything like that) because "You Ain't Gonna Need It". Three days later, the application is crashing on end users' machines because of null pointer exceptions, generating chaos for a day while I try to wrangle the (lack of) a build/deploy process[0] to deploy an emergency patch. [0]: You guessed it, YAGNI. Visual Studio has a build option in the menu for a reason, you don't need to overcomplicate things to start the project. Or something like that.
blub 9y ago
One needs to be careful with high standards. You go higher and higher and before you know it you're peeing in bottles to reach your productivity goals.
- chmaynard 9y ago
  Snarky comments are often amusing and are always self-satisfying, but they degrade the conversation. (When I make comments like this on HN, they always get downvoted. I'm trying to do better.)
  - quakenul 9y ago
    I agree with your statement, but I don't see how it applies here. I did not consider the comment amusing. I do think putting the Bezos' ideas about high standards in the sobering context that Amazons provides for most of its workforce is right on point.
    - mjburgess 9y ago
      Satire is a perfectly valid form of communication. Commenting here is increasingly feeling like a policed academic conference, rather than a "tech salon" which seems closer to its ethos.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    This comment in no-way degraded the conversation. It added important context in a humorous manner.
  - opencl 9y ago
    How is it even snarky? There are workers peeing in bottles, probably right now, as a direct result of Bezos' obsession with optimizing productivity metrics at all costs.
    - francisofascii 9y ago
      Now the comment makes more sense. Guessing some here were not aware of that story. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have...
iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
This needs to be tempered hard with the "realistic beliefs". High standards can lead to heavy anxitety which will kill productivity.
- Madmallard 9y ago
  This happened to me.
- jgforbes 9y ago
  Bezos addresses this in the letter, mentioning that leaders have to accurately teach the "scope" of the high standards, where scope is a measure of the time required to achieve the set standards.
andrepd 9y ago
High standards? For what? I look at amazon and I see a sleazy money-making machine. Nothing about it screams high standards.
- Spare_account 9y ago
  Amazon's performance implies high standards internally perhaps?
- solarkraft 9y ago
  High standards making money. That may be the reason Bezos is the world's richest person.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

staticautomatic 9y ago

If only Amazon as a whole had a culture of high standards...

askafriend 9y ago
What you and lots of other people (including me, until very recently) tend to miss is that high standards are one thing. High standards at scale are another. What precedent do we have for standards at such a large scale? How many examples of organizations that have achieved that size do we even have and what do standards across those orgs look like? This applies to software quality at unprecedented scale as well.
- staticautomatic 9y ago
  I don't believe that high standards inhere in small scale. I have also not read or heard anyone articulate a reasonable explanation for why that is necessarily the case. Figuring out how to operate a business with high standards at scale is arguably the primary job of anyone who operates any business at scale.
  - askafriend 9y ago
    Let me draw an analogy that might be helpful. Let's look at manufacturing yield. It's easy to create a process that hits 99.99% yield when the absolute value of complex goods being produced is 10 items. Can you maintain 99.99% yield when producing 100,000,000 of those items? Almost certainly not. Does hitting 80% yield mean you have lowered your standards when every other manufacturer of similar scale can only hit 60%? No it doesn't. It means you have maintained high standards, it's just the context around you has changed and so the measurement of high standards has changed along with it (as it should). That's the core of what I was getting at.
    - staticautomatic 9y ago
      I couldn't disagree more. Standards are not relative. What you're describing in your example is an instance of lowering a standard. The standard does not change because one's tolerance for meeting it is lowered. You're simply accepting that you've failed to meet the standard. You can say whatever you like to excuse it, but it's an excuse nonetheless.
- pranjalv123 9y ago
  Is stuff like "your workers shouldn't collapse of exhaustion because you don't want to air condition your warehouses" something so difficult to achieve at scale? Is it even a particularly high standard? Maybe before talking about high standards, we should start with low standards.
  - spelunkitjunket 9y ago
    People on HN like to talk trash about Amazon and that's fine. All that I ask is that you don't do an AMZN_warehouse_worker == AMZN_SDE / AMZN_SE kind of argument. Warehouse work is boring, it's low paid, at the end of the day you're tired and you're dirty, and you didn't make a lot. During the winter it's cold and during the summer it's going to be hot - logistics companies heat warehouses just enough to keep product from freezing. The closest thing to a computer is a hand-held wireless barcode scanner. Them's the breaks of being a box b for any large logistics / supply chain company. UPS, FedEX, DHL, or UP, none of them are tech companies so we don't talk about them but the reality is supply chain is very price sensitive, the industry is low margin and competitive, it's not romantic, and it's classist. No one turns down Stanford to work the graveyard shift unloading tires. The people there will be randomly drug tested and they will be checked on occasion when they're leaving. Argue there is honor to any job done well and I'll agree with you but stop with this Amazon Logistics goes out of it's way to be cruel narrative.
    - cornholio 9y ago
      While I agree with your underlying point, Amazon does deserve special attention because it tries to win hearts and minds, in fact it's the backbone of their branding operation. This letter is a perfect example. FedEx does not have the hearts and minds of customers, everybody expects their employees to piss in bottles and would switch to the first lower cost provider available. Amazon is turning into a larger and much more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass and is allowed to spout this bullshit with a straight face about how 500.000 bottle-wielding Amazonians are making the world a better place.
      - adventured 9y ago
- andrepd 9y ago
  That looks like a whole load of horseshit to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Reaping record-breaking profits while workers are mistreated and paid a pittance is not a "problem of scale" or whatever it is.
sametmax 9y ago
It does. The global amazon experience is imperfect, but amazing compared to what we had before it, unmached by competition and life changing enough that we use it for everything. You can't do that by being average. Don't confuse high standards and perfection.
- freyir 9y ago
  Getting counterfeit merchandise from the factory to your doorstep faster than ever before. They are amazing In some areas, but have very low standards in others.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    > Getting counterfeit merchandise from the factory to your doorstep faster than ever before. Yep. I get bite at least once a year with that one.
  - glenneroo 9y ago
    Or if you're in Austria, you are conditioned to accept that delivery dates offered are 1-2 days off. The warning about "purchase within the next xx hours to receive it in 2 days" is absolute garbage. And the fact that I can select whether it's delivered on Saturday is bullshit, because no courier service here ever delivers anything on Saturday. Yet years later, my Prime packages are still being offered to be delivered on Saturday. I guess I shouldn't complain though, their estimated delivery times are still on par with every other eShop.

noobhacker 9y ago

I find it very hard to communicate about how hard things are going to be (heh). Whether a task is hard depends a lot on the ability of the person doing it. In addition, "hard" can have multiple dimensions: the sheer number of hours, the monotony, or the lack of purpose.

lliamander 9y ago

more succinctly: thinking something is easy is the enemy of high-standards. I really like that, and it's something I have to remind myself from. Along the lines of high standards, something I've realized is that, for people who have high personal standards, working in an environment of low expectations is actually more stressful than working in an environment of high expectations.

reificator 9y ago
> for people who have high personal standards, working in an environment of low expectations is actually more stressful than working in an environment of high expectations. I can't stress this enough. I was once chided for checking for nulls in places where nulls can clearly show up (ie, not repeated checks to the same value or anything like that) because "You Ain't Gonna Need It". Three days later, the application is crashing on end users' machines because of null pointer exceptions, generating chaos for a day while I try to wrangle the (lack of) a build/deploy process[0] to deploy an emergency patch. [0]: You guessed it, YAGNI. Visual Studio has a build option in the menu for a reason, you don't need to overcomplicate things to start the project. Or something like that.

blub 9y ago

One needs to be careful with high standards. You go higher and higher and before you know it you're peeing in bottles to reach your productivity goals.

chmaynard 9y ago
Snarky comments are often amusing and are always self-satisfying, but they degrade the conversation. (When I make comments like this on HN, they always get downvoted. I'm trying to do better.)
- quakenul 9y ago
  I agree with your statement, but I don't see how it applies here. I did not consider the comment amusing. I do think putting the Bezos' ideas about high standards in the sobering context that Amazons provides for most of its workforce is right on point.
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    Satire is a perfectly valid form of communication. Commenting here is increasingly feeling like a policed academic conference, rather than a "tech salon" which seems closer to its ethos.
- Angostura 9y ago
  This comment in no-way degraded the conversation. It added important context in a humorous manner.
- opencl 9y ago
  How is it even snarky? There are workers peeing in bottles, probably right now, as a direct result of Bezos' obsession with optimizing productivity metrics at all costs.
  - francisofascii 9y ago
    Now the comment makes more sense. Guessing some here were not aware of that story. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have...

iovrthoughtthis 9y ago

This needs to be tempered hard with the "realistic beliefs". High standards can lead to heavy anxitety which will kill productivity.

Madmallard 9y ago
This happened to me.
jgforbes 9y ago
Bezos addresses this in the letter, mentioning that leaders have to accurately teach the "scope" of the high standards, where scope is a measure of the time required to achieve the set standards.

andrepd 9y ago

High standards? For what? I look at amazon and I see a sleazy money-making machine. Nothing about it screams high standards.

Spare_account 9y ago
Amazon's performance implies high standards internally perhaps?
solarkraft 9y ago
High standards making money. That may be the reason Bezos is the world's richest person.