10 ms·

Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

70 points by wallflower 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
0zymandias 7y ago
What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Who will do this at Amazon?
- remarkEon 7y ago
  Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.
  - jariel 7y ago
    There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price. Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era. Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore. The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc.. That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow, Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did. My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture. Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-revenue-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/stock-price-history https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
    - pmart123 7y ago
      From my recollection, Ballmer continually overpaid for random acquisitions that screamed “in the moment hot thing” versus well-thought, strategic. From an outsiders view, the whole we must take over the world syndrome manifested into trying to buy a way into everything that could be big versus fit well with Microsoft.
      - jariel 7y ago
        You mean like Google's $3.2 B acquisition of Nest, which has nothing to do with their core offer and is losing money? Or FitBit, another money losing entity for $2B? Or Alphalbet's other substantial moonshot investments none of which have panned out? They're all 'strategic' but that's what all bad investments are pinned as. I think your statement might be driven by narrative (which is my point about Ballmer's public perception) because if you have a look at the acquisitions, I don't think MS comes out looking bad at all next to G. Have a look at G's acquisitions [1] , and MS [2] MSFT looks actually a little more tame by the numbers. Satya will have to do much more than amp up all the products and services that Gates and Ballmer launched in order to keep the reputation he has right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
        pmart123 7y ago
        I completely agree on Alphabet as of late. Maybe they can justify having a hardware division for phones as a necessary cost center in order to facilitate R&D developments for Android. I’d even give Veerily the benefit of the doubt as it seems to relate to cloud offerings for healthcare. Ballmer’s Microsoft era was similar to Google from 2014 onward.
    - omikun 7y ago
      Selective memory? Google made this thing called Android. What was Microsoft doing?
- bestnameever 7y ago
  > Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Is Amazon really stagnating? They still seem to be making a ton of moves from my casual observation.
- paxys 7y ago
  Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?
  - neffy 7y ago
    The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade. The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews. It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China. Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms. What a wonderful world.
    - paxys 7y ago
      Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.
      - iudqnolq 7y ago
        Except the search page has changed, just well. Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter. https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com
      - dgemm 7y ago
        Google does this constantly with Gmail, calendar, Android, and so on.
      - blululu 7y ago
        Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.
- joegahona 7y ago
  > Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. Where did Jeff Bezos say this?
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    Jeff didn't say Amazon is at Day 2, but he did outline what that would look like: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-sha... Employees frequently use that framework to discuss how they think Amazon (or the org they work in) is truly done for.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  Prime, Prime Now, Prime video with exclusive content, Audible, Amazon Go, Kindle, Amazon Lockers, 1 day shipping, Whole Foods, their own delivery services, supposedly drone delivery, market leading Cloud services, etc. My husband and I invested north of $200K in Amazon back in 2014. Their stock alone has performed tremendously for me. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I haven’t cashed out. I’m betting on Papa Bezos for the long term. One thing I respect about Amazon is how they figure out stuff that isn’t working and kill it. Amazon Restaurants is now gone. I work at another big tech company - I’m in Kirkland ;) My employer pays me better than Amazon pays for a similar role, so I get best of both worlds... I do have friends at Amazon as well.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.
  - ng12 7y ago
    > to perfect execution Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".
    - shantly 7y ago
      They're simply ignoring massive rates of fraud in their store so they can profit from it, and have been for... what, over half of their existence, at this point? ("oh but we're trying, no really we are, but it's just soooooo hard" uh how about you shut off the features that enable massive amounts of fraud until you can fix it, then, and if you can't fix it I guess you'll have to leave them off? Oh, right, you're making mountains of money from it, I forgot) I frankly can't believe the way the operate is anywhere near legal.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now. As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.
      - ng12 7y ago
        > Even with occasional 3rd-party product issues The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory. Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.
dchichkov 7y ago
I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies. And funny thing, it sometimes is a success.
- naravara 7y ago
  > I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summary of the habits of alumni from management consulting firms.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
batt4good 7y ago
As someone who left Amazon, I'd never want to deal with that garbage culture ever again in any form or permutation. It gives me a headache that founders who previously worked at Amazon would want to promote the "culture" dissonance of Amazon at their own companies.
- dang 7y ago
  Rather than just denouncing something without explaining it, it would be better if you described what your experience was and how you arrived at these conclusions. That would gratify curiosity more. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ignoramous 7y ago
> Amazon’s hard-driving company culture has come in for its share of criticism... Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]? > Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly. AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this. > Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance. This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10]. -- [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc [1] https://oxide.computer/principles/ https://oxide.computer/principles/ [2] Marc Brooker, Amazon's approach to building resilient services, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44 [3] Peter Ramensky, Amazon's approach to high-availability deployment, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4 [4] Andy Troutman, Amazon's approach to running service-oriented teams, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000 [5] Colm MacCarthaigh, Amazon's approach to security during development, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ [6] Becky Weiss, Amazon's approach to failing successfully, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU [7] Thomas Blood, Amazon's culture of innovation, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE [8] Andy Warfield and Seth Markle, Lessons from Amazon S3's culture of durability, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0 [9] Colm MacCarthaigh, Lessons from Amazon's highest available data-planes, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526
taurath 7y ago
Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.
- throwawaya2z 7y ago
  Throwaway account because I don’t want my primary account to be associated with my career in any way. I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means that place won’t be around very long. Given the number of people Amazon employs, I’m sure some people aren’t the most flattering, but to say we’re conditioning anyone to be assholes isn’t based on reality at all. Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pm90 7y ago
    > Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along. I was nodding along until this line. The fact that you would phrase it this way makes it hard for me to trust whatever you said earlier.
    - hitekker 7y ago
      A throwaway proclaims, without evidence, that their employer is a paragon of virtue and its victims are liars, miscreants, criminals etc. A predictable pattern.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        This would be a cynical baseless insult, if not for the fact that Amazon has engaged in exactly such underhanded whitewashing behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695
logicallee 7y ago
I was just reading here on HN how Amazon recently quietly replicated and replaced UPS and FedEx with their own fleet. These companies are $82.92 billion and $65.45 billion companies respectively so I was pretty impressed.
- m-ee 7y ago
  I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "Hi I have not received my package which says it was delivered at a time when I was home" "Let me check the tracking, sir it shows that you have received the package" "I have not, no delivery was attempted" "Yes you are right you will receive your package shortly"
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    I now get photos of my package when it was delivered.
    - m-ee 7y ago
      I gave up and moved entirely to using the lockers when I order from amazon now. Curiously they still managed to lose a package between the last distribution center and their locker. But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring more workers, giving more reasonable workloads, and providing incentives to actual get the job done right instead of lying to try and meet their numbers.
      - recursivecaveat 7y ago
        I had a package shipped to a locker. Delivery date comes and I get a notification that the driver couldn't complete the delivery because the location was inaccessible. Perhaps I "locked out the mailbox" the email says. I call them up to ask how I supposedly locked them out of their own locker, which is in the middle of a public mall. They assure me the driver will "try again" tomorrow. The status goes back to in-progress, then "location inaccessible" again, and finally "package damaged" a couple hours after. I don't know whether it was always damaged, or it got damaged in the process of not delivering it, but neither is a good look. Amazon automatically refunds me, presumably so I stop messing with the delivery time average. How its possible to screw up what's essentially an internal shipment so bad I don't know. I went to buy it from the manufacturer's website instead. Ships without trouble right to my apartment, and I don't have to worry if I'm buying damaged goods, a knock-off, or some garbage. Someone is doing some terrible Pinto-style calculations, shaving pennies here and there while losing pounds building a delivery network that gets 'most' packages 'somewhere', 'most' of the time.
jerkstate 7y ago
Asshole managers who copy Jeff Bezos are just this tech generation's version of asshole managers who copied Steve Jobs that we had to deal with 20 years ago.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Was it cool to copy Jobs 20 years ago, after NeXT but before OS X, iPod, and iPhone? I don't think so. Was it cool to copy his asshole traits before he was kicked out the first time? I would have been too young to know. I am not sure how widely they were publicized. Anyway, I am not the biggest Amazon fan, but if what they are imitating are things like "customer focus" as claimed in the article and it's not a euphemism or lip service then that sounds good. Seems like they could do that without being jerks too.
  - jerkstate 7y ago
    I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story and Jobs had been Acqui-hired back by Apple. OS X, iPod, and iPhone are far from his first successes. Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along. One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      I think some of this view of Jobs needs to be anchored to the subsequent successes. Imagine if he had rejoined in '96 [when Apple seemed doomed] but then didn't churn out a bunch of successful projects ... In 1999 the outcome wasn't clear yet. I totally believe you on terms like "bar raiser" and "accountability". (Never worked at Amazon but did have a stint in Seattle). These are tingling my "corporate bullshit" senses strongly. But I'll still say a term like "customer focus", if it's correctly applied, is very important.
kbos87 7y ago
I can appreciate the sentiment behind not saying that something “isn’t my job.” But that’s also a quick road to people shaming and guilting one another into doing work they think needs to be done, regardless of what the hierarchy thinks should be done. Simple answers usually aren’t the right ones.
echelon 7y ago
How do you beat Amazon.com? How do you beat AWS? How do you survive if Jeff Bezos has his eyes on your market? Could an antitrust case break them up?
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  > How do you beat Amazon.com? Trustworthy product reviews, higher quality products, fewer/zero counterfeits, reliable shipping (based on arrival), and/or secure and convenient pickup at more accessible locations. Subscription services (StitchFix, BarkBox, etc) and manufacturer direct (Drop.com, there are others) seem to be doing fine without 2day shipping on every product in existence. Probably because their customers are getting good products delivered reliably.

70 points by wallflower 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Who will do this at Amazon?

remarkEon 7y ago
Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.
- jariel 7y ago
  There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price. Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era. Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore. The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc.. That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow, Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did. My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture. Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-revenue-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/stock-price-history https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
  - pmart123 7y ago
    From my recollection, Ballmer continually overpaid for random acquisitions that screamed “in the moment hot thing” versus well-thought, strategic. From an outsiders view, the whole we must take over the world syndrome manifested into trying to buy a way into everything that could be big versus fit well with Microsoft.
    - jariel 7y ago
      You mean like Google's $3.2 B acquisition of Nest, which has nothing to do with their core offer and is losing money? Or FitBit, another money losing entity for $2B? Or Alphalbet's other substantial moonshot investments none of which have panned out? They're all 'strategic' but that's what all bad investments are pinned as. I think your statement might be driven by narrative (which is my point about Ballmer's public perception) because if you have a look at the acquisitions, I don't think MS comes out looking bad at all next to G. Have a look at G's acquisitions [1] , and MS [2] MSFT looks actually a little more tame by the numbers. Satya will have to do much more than amp up all the products and services that Gates and Ballmer launched in order to keep the reputation he has right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
      - pmart123 7y ago
        I completely agree on Alphabet as of late. Maybe they can justify having a hardware division for phones as a necessary cost center in order to facilitate R&D developments for Android. I’d even give Veerily the benefit of the doubt as it seems to relate to cloud offerings for healthcare. Ballmer’s Microsoft era was similar to Google from 2014 onward.
  - omikun 7y ago
    Selective memory? Google made this thing called Android. What was Microsoft doing?
bestnameever 7y ago
> Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Is Amazon really stagnating? They still seem to be making a ton of moves from my casual observation.
paxys 7y ago
Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?
- neffy 7y ago
  The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade. The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews. It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China. Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms. What a wonderful world.
  - paxys 7y ago
    Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      Except the search page has changed, just well. Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter. https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com
    - dgemm 7y ago
      Google does this constantly with Gmail, calendar, Android, and so on.
    - blululu 7y ago
      Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.
joegahona 7y ago
> Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. Where did Jeff Bezos say this?
- ignoramous 7y ago
  Jeff didn't say Amazon is at Day 2, but he did outline what that would look like: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-sha... Employees frequently use that framework to discuss how they think Amazon (or the org they work in) is truly done for.
tracer4201 7y ago
Prime, Prime Now, Prime video with exclusive content, Audible, Amazon Go, Kindle, Amazon Lockers, 1 day shipping, Whole Foods, their own delivery services, supposedly drone delivery, market leading Cloud services, etc. My husband and I invested north of $200K in Amazon back in 2014. Their stock alone has performed tremendously for me. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I haven’t cashed out. I’m betting on Papa Bezos for the long term. One thing I respect about Amazon is how they figure out stuff that isn’t working and kill it. Amazon Restaurants is now gone. I work at another big tech company - I’m in Kirkland ;) My employer pays me better than Amazon pays for a similar role, so I get best of both worlds... I do have friends at Amazon as well.
manigandham 7y ago
Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.
- ng12 7y ago
  > to perfect execution Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".
  - shantly 7y ago
    They're simply ignoring massive rates of fraud in their store so they can profit from it, and have been for... what, over half of their existence, at this point? ("oh but we're trying, no really we are, but it's just soooooo hard" uh how about you shut off the features that enable massive amounts of fraud until you can fix it, then, and if you can't fix it I guess you'll have to leave them off? Oh, right, you're making mountains of money from it, I forgot) I frankly can't believe the way the operate is anywhere near legal.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now. As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.
    - ng12 7y ago
      > Even with occasional 3rd-party product issues The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory. Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.

dchichkov 7y ago

I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies. And funny thing, it sometimes is a success.

naravara 7y ago
> I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summary of the habits of alumni from management consulting firms.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

batt4good 7y ago

As someone who left Amazon, I'd never want to deal with that garbage culture ever again in any form or permutation. It gives me a headache that founders who previously worked at Amazon would want to promote the "culture" dissonance of Amazon at their own companies.

dang 7y ago
Rather than just denouncing something without explaining it, it would be better if you described what your experience was and how you arrived at these conclusions. That would gratify curiosity more. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ignoramous 7y ago

> Amazon’s hard-driving company culture has come in for its share of criticism... Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]? > Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly. AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this. > Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance. This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10]. -- [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc [1] https://oxide.computer/principles/ https://oxide.computer/principles/ [2] Marc Brooker, Amazon's approach to building resilient services, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44 [3] Peter Ramensky, Amazon's approach to high-availability deployment, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4 [4] Andy Troutman, Amazon's approach to running service-oriented teams, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000 [5] Colm MacCarthaigh, Amazon's approach to security during development, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ [6] Becky Weiss, Amazon's approach to failing successfully, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU [7] Thomas Blood, Amazon's culture of innovation, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE [8] Andy Warfield and Seth Markle, Lessons from Amazon S3's culture of durability, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0 [9] Colm MacCarthaigh, Lessons from Amazon's highest available data-planes, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526

taurath 7y ago

Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.

throwawaya2z 7y ago
Throwaway account because I don’t want my primary account to be associated with my career in any way. I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means that place won’t be around very long. Given the number of people Amazon employs, I’m sure some people aren’t the most flattering, but to say we’re conditioning anyone to be assholes isn’t based on reality at all. Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pm90 7y ago
  > Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along. I was nodding along until this line. The fact that you would phrase it this way makes it hard for me to trust whatever you said earlier.
  - hitekker 7y ago
    A throwaway proclaims, without evidence, that their employer is a paragon of virtue and its victims are liars, miscreants, criminals etc. A predictable pattern.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      This would be a cynical baseless insult, if not for the fact that Amazon has engaged in exactly such underhanded whitewashing behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711695

logicallee 7y ago

I was just reading here on HN how Amazon recently quietly replicated and replaced UPS and FedEx with their own fleet. These companies are $82.92 billion and $65.45 billion companies respectively so I was pretty impressed.

m-ee 7y ago
I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "Hi I have not received my package which says it was delivered at a time when I was home" "Let me check the tracking, sir it shows that you have received the package" "I have not, no delivery was attempted" "Yes you are right you will receive your package shortly"
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  I now get photos of my package when it was delivered.
  - m-ee 7y ago
    I gave up and moved entirely to using the lockers when I order from amazon now. Curiously they still managed to lose a package between the last distribution center and their locker. But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring more workers, giving more reasonable workloads, and providing incentives to actual get the job done right instead of lying to try and meet their numbers.
    - recursivecaveat 7y ago
      I had a package shipped to a locker. Delivery date comes and I get a notification that the driver couldn't complete the delivery because the location was inaccessible. Perhaps I "locked out the mailbox" the email says. I call them up to ask how I supposedly locked them out of their own locker, which is in the middle of a public mall. They assure me the driver will "try again" tomorrow. The status goes back to in-progress, then "location inaccessible" again, and finally "package damaged" a couple hours after. I don't know whether it was always damaged, or it got damaged in the process of not delivering it, but neither is a good look. Amazon automatically refunds me, presumably so I stop messing with the delivery time average. How its possible to screw up what's essentially an internal shipment so bad I don't know. I went to buy it from the manufacturer's website instead. Ships without trouble right to my apartment, and I don't have to worry if I'm buying damaged goods, a knock-off, or some garbage. Someone is doing some terrible Pinto-style calculations, shaving pennies here and there while losing pounds building a delivery network that gets 'most' packages 'somewhere', 'most' of the time.

jerkstate 7y ago

Asshole managers who copy Jeff Bezos are just this tech generation's version of asshole managers who copied Steve Jobs that we had to deal with 20 years ago.

asveikau 7y ago
Was it cool to copy Jobs 20 years ago, after NeXT but before OS X, iPod, and iPhone? I don't think so. Was it cool to copy his asshole traits before he was kicked out the first time? I would have been too young to know. I am not sure how widely they were publicized. Anyway, I am not the biggest Amazon fan, but if what they are imitating are things like "customer focus" as claimed in the article and it's not a euphemism or lip service then that sounds good. Seems like they could do that without being jerks too.
- jerkstate 7y ago
  I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story and Jobs had been Acqui-hired back by Apple. OS X, iPod, and iPhone are far from his first successes. Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along. One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I think some of this view of Jobs needs to be anchored to the subsequent successes. Imagine if he had rejoined in '96 [when Apple seemed doomed] but then didn't churn out a bunch of successful projects ... In 1999 the outcome wasn't clear yet. I totally believe you on terms like "bar raiser" and "accountability". (Never worked at Amazon but did have a stint in Seattle). These are tingling my "corporate bullshit" senses strongly. But I'll still say a term like "customer focus", if it's correctly applied, is very important.

kbos87 7y ago

I can appreciate the sentiment behind not saying that something “isn’t my job.” But that’s also a quick road to people shaming and guilting one another into doing work they think needs to be done, regardless of what the hierarchy thinks should be done. Simple answers usually aren’t the right ones.

echelon 7y ago

How do you beat Amazon.com? How do you beat AWS? How do you survive if Jeff Bezos has his eyes on your market? Could an antitrust case break them up?

unlinked_dll 7y ago
> How do you beat Amazon.com? Trustworthy product reviews, higher quality products, fewer/zero counterfeits, reliable shipping (based on arrival), and/or secure and convenient pickup at more accessible locations. Subscription services (StitchFix, BarkBox, etc) and manufacturer direct (Drop.com, there are others) seem to be doing fine without 2day shipping on every product in existence. Probably because their customers are getting good products delivered reliably.