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Amazon announce two new leadership principles

124 points by dmkirwan 5y ago

dev_snd 5y ago
There's a great talk by Brian Cantrill about Leadership principles [0] which also includes a discussion of the Amazon Leadership principles. He argues that Amazon's leadership principles actually aren't helpful and don't make much sense and I tend to agree. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc (The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)
- nonfamous 5y ago
  The section on Uber, starting at 36:30, is also well worth watching. This was the talk that made me realize that a company’s principles, as shared, aren’t just PR bullshit. They really do have a profound effect on the culture and behavior of companies.
guruparan18 5y ago
So the new ones are? Interesting. * Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer * Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
- Yhippa 5y ago
  These sound overly broad and non-measurable.
  - deelowe 5y ago
    That's not the full definition. This is: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them. That said, these are not objectives. They are more like vision statements. I assume goals a measures are derived off of these and updated over time.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    Most principles are, no? They have goals and KPIs and reports and what not, these are the leadership principles. One would hope they revise their numbers as well to reflect these principles and correct for unintended consequences.
  - frumper 5y ago
    It can be very difficult what is best, but it is easy to measure that they are not the best in many ways. They can work on improving those.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  I'm going to strive to be a tyrannosaurus rex.
atlgator 5y ago
> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer The phrasing is interesting on this one. Amazon's leadership principles have historically been commandment-style edicts followed with unabashed zeal, but this new principle basically says "We'll try"
- itisit 5y ago
  Andy is going to be a different (i.e. kinder) leader compared to Jeff
- zoover2020 5y ago
  "We'll try not to PIP anyone"
- gonzo41 5y ago
  Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer at keeping our jack boot on the neck of the union movement. Nah, I'm.....probably joking
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gpt5 5y ago
  You could claim that it’s more humble. They acknowledge that they are not yet there. Also - Amazon has used similar wording with regards to their most famous principle (customer obsession). “ Our vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company”
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  You can measurably fail to be the world's best employer. There are annual reports and metrics and various ways to quantify the quality of an employer and rank them. You can't fail to try.
seumars 5y ago
"Leaders start with the customer and work backwards." So customers first, workers last?
- jhawk28 5y ago
  If you don't have a customer, can you have any workers? If you treat your workers poorly, will your customers be treated well? Just because one is the emphasis doesn't mean the other is not important either.
- WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  Amazon uses "leaders" when talking about self, for all "workers". Internally, others are often considered "customers".
- mypalmike 5y ago
  Working backwards: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-uses-a-secret-process-for-launching-new-ideas-and-it-can-transform-way-you-work.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-uses-a-secret-proce...
soared 5y ago
For those not familiar, the two new ones are below. I never worked at amazon, but throughout the (grueling) interview process you have to memorize these and every question you answer needs to intertwine some of these principles. They tell you to have 2-3 “stories” of how you exemplify each principle. IMO with how many they have it doesn’t make sense since you are bound to forget nearly all of them day-to-day. And honestly you can just think of anything you’ve done and slightly twist it to make it align with a principle. Meh. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
- ikiris 5y ago
  From what I've heard from their former employees (engineer / corporate, not warehouse), the best employer bit is laughable
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    I can recall horror stories from their engineers when I was in grad school (around 2004 or so). So I think it is well entrenched.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    To give intent the broadest benefit of the doubt, maybe that's why they wanted to encode the goal in a principle. Changing Amazon's corporate culture at this point has to be like relocating the Alps.
dmkirwan 5y ago
Apologies if the title seems click-baity. It would have been too long if I included the new principles in there. The new principles: * Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer * Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility I don't work at Amazon, but it's my understanding that they take their leadership principles seriously and use them as they make decisions every day. They do not live up to these two new principles today, but this does seem like a significant step.
- seumars 5y ago
  Ask amazon warehouse employees if they take these principles seriously.
jpxw 5y ago
> helps us relentlessly pursue our mission of being Earth’s most customer-centric company, best employer, and safest place to work. I think I’d have more respect for Amazon if they were just honest. It’s clear that they’re not the “best employer” in the world, and furthermore I don’t think they ever can be - their business relies on a fleet of low-paid workers doing manual labour.
- domador 5y ago
  I wonder how much of this goal will be considered "accomplished" just by not being direct employers for the people who actually do the grunt work at delivery centers under inhumane expectations. Amazon should fix those conditions first rather than spitting out more of these high-minded, virtue-signaling platitudes.
gameshot911 5y ago
As a whole, these are really good leadership principles. I strive to exemplify these in my own work, and can think of many cases where the leaders I admire exhibit these attributes. Separately, it makes me curious how individual Amazon managers, and the company as a whole, jive these principles with many of the public, consumer-facing concerns raised nowadays. Things like fake reviews and mixed, counterfeit stock. No doubt there ARE good reasons if one was privy to the whole view, and odds are there are very serious efforts (past and present) to improve things. It's just a good opportunity to reflect on how you can have an organization with great leaders, admirable stated values (that most employees probably take to heart), and still have fundamental, mission-critical issues at play that outwardly appear to be being ignored.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > and still have fundamental, mission-critical issues at play that outwardly appear to be being ignored. The only place I’ve seen anyone mention these “fundamental mission-critical issues” is HN. My family and friends are Prime subscribers, and I’ve not had an issue in 20 years of Amazon buying.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
My question is "how is the talk walked"? How does action relative to the 13 Leadership Principles translate to performance evaluation at Amazon? Is there a rubric, or are the principles a context for describing someone broadly? Is there an "L.P. metric" or somesuch for looking at strategic decision?
- lumost 5y ago
  Typically hiring, promotions, transfers, and annual performance reviews are written in a Pro/Con form across the different LPs. As an employee/candidate you need to demonstrate your abilities with respect to the leadership principals, and your peers will provide growth/strength feedback based on them as well.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
>> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer They have a long way to go on this one: 1) Many of the headquarters / office jobs require super long hours and are high stress. Employee turnover is high and mental health issues are common. 2) Warehouse and delivery jobs are known for demanding quotas that are practically unrealistic. Working conditions are terrible and management is unsympathetic. 3) In nearly all environments, employees are seen as a replaceable commodity to be exploited, pushed to the limit, and then replaced with new blood after burnout or turnover.
innagadadavida 5y ago
> Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere This basically authorizes firing of employees based on their performance or am I reading this wrong?
drewcoo 5y ago
They couldn't just write "Avoid Bad Press?" That seems to cover it more succinctly and it's externally visible, as opposed to the aspirational junk.
eplanit 5y ago
We're within days of Bezos' departure, and Amazon is immediately signalling traditional, boring "Mission Statements" (this one about 'leadership'). Oddly, the statements (which often refer to we, our) are signed by nobody -- no names at all to associate with the (banal and predictable) words. I'm no cult fan of Bezos (his personality seems annoying), but to become a truly faceless, nameless corporate monolith is...well, expected, I guess. It doesn't sound like an exciting place to work, overall.
- olliej 5y ago
  The change in leadership has nothing to do with that - by all accounts it's a miserable place to work.
mentos 5y ago
Great how about Amazon creates a single AWS page so I can see all of my resources currently in use with an easy way to cancel each and not be surprised by billing. If you want to build back trust start there.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  you cannot be the BEST employer if you force your workers to build one page where customers can see all their resources /s
aaronbrethorst 5y ago
This would feel less self-serving if they weren't making the changes in the midst of: 1. Being concerned about literally running out of people to hire. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-worker-shortage-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo... 2. A growing, bipartisan consensus in DC about the need for new anti-trust legislation, and also Amazon's concern about how 'mean' FTC Commissioner Lina Khan is (lol). https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557456/amazon-lina-khan-recusal-petition-federal-trade-commission-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557456/amazon-lina-khan...
- frumper 5y ago
  I would expect them to be self serving. Self-serving doesn't mean it only needs to benefit Amazon.
mushufasa 5y ago
In contrast, check out netflix's corporate culture principles. The first few slides call out that Enron's main 'corporate value' was integrity. https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf
- elteto 5y ago
  Wow, I’d never seen that deck. It’s incredibly honest and direct and does not read like typical corpo-speak. I don’t know if they practice what they preach at Netflix but they definitely got a bit more of respect from me.
  - EForEndeavour 5y ago
    I also LOVE the minimalist styling of these slides. Maybe that's because they're meant to be read rather than presented, but my god am I exhausted from prolonged exposure to professionally designed, image-heavy slide decks which seek to minimize the ratio of information to file size and consume so much human talent. Miss me with that stock-photo-of-impossibly-attractive-and-happy-people-white boarding shit.
  - Sr_developer 5y ago
    LOL!!!!! > In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average. In creative work, the best are 10x better than the average, so huge premium on creating effective teams of the best Pulled from their asses > Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues Well, NO. Having smart and competent colleagues is for sure desirable but it is just one trait (Maybe not the most important one) > Netflix Vacation Policy and Tracking “there is no policy or tracking” This is a huge huge red-flag.One of the reasons (among many) is that people tend to overestimate their contribution to team and underestimate their peers' .So when Susy takes 2 weeks off (deservedly according to her) you get pissed because you think you have done 2X as much as her and you only took one week off. And this is the tamest of the complications.Vacations should be like salaries, they need to be spelled out very clearly and not subject to ambiguous "rules". > Highly‐Aligned Loosely‐Coupled teamwork effectiveness is dependent on high performance people and good context. Goal is to be Big and Fast and Flexible. Thank God they were free of corporate mumbo-jumbo. Most of the slides are in a similar vein. They want to justify culling people indiscriminately (and they are withing their rights) but they are not being cool, innovative or different because of that. They are just another company which wants to extract as much value from their employees as possible while minimizing the cost.
usui 5y ago
Hahaha — not a sarcastic/malicious laugh. I went through the Amazon interviewing circuit and I remember these principles. I like them. The reason I found this funny is because the two new ones, 1. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer 2. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility seem really different in tone relative to the other ones. Everything else sounds like a directive that one cannot disobey, while the confident tone goes down in #1. It's like someone talking tough on certain things, but then in another topic lowers his/her voice and goes slightly quieter #2 doesn't exactly sound as much of a guiding principle. I can see how one could use it as one, but it sounds more like a fact—a piece of information that is just true regardless of it being a leadership principle or not I'm at least glad they recognize the issues and are trying to make a statement on it. Hoping that they act on it
- usui 5y ago
  link to the aboutamazon.com blog: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leader...
- savanaly 5y ago
  I agree. Why isn't #1 "Be Earth's Best Employer"? Amazon didn't get where they are by practicing the rule "Try to be obsessed with customers".
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  >I like them. I too liked them. >seem really different in tone relative to the other ones. Well the downfall of Amazon has started. Yes the 2 do stand out and in my opinion. >They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Fun at work? Which idiot came up with this? The definition of work is, what is _not_ fun. While it is critical to make work as tolerable as one can. Aiming to make it fun is either an exercise in naivety which will infantalize the workforce, or an act of insincerity.
trhoad 5y ago
Putting bullshit-bingo "principles" up on a website is easy. Tackling abhorrent amounts of waste and damage to the environment is difficult [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-faces-mps-scrutiny-after-destroying-laptops-tablets-and-books https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-fa...
- koboll 5y ago
  >Putting bullshit-bingo "principles" up on a website is easy. Have you worked at Amazon? They reference these constantly in meetings, structure performance reviews around them, there's a lot of edifice built around them. So adding new ones is a pretty big deal internally.
- markstos 5y ago
  At least having the principles published invites internal and external stakeholders to hold Amazon accountable to them.
deanclatworthy 5y ago
Could we take a step back from the scepticism and acknowledge that maybe this is a sign of a company that is trying to change. Unlike google which actively chose to be evil, maybe this a sign of change at Amazon leadership - realising the damage it's doing to their reputation. Amazon has huge issues to overcome in the near future. I have no doubt the quality issue with their products is going to reach boiling point in the same way it has with warehouse conditions. Let's see.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > Could we take a step back from the scepticism and acknowledge that maybe this is a sign of a company that is trying to change. Could we take a step back and realize this is pure PR/HR speak to select/attract certain kind of candidates?
  - browningstreet 5y ago
    I'm generally skeptical of Amazon, but it does have a new CEO who came from AWS, as opposed to.. say, the warehouse operation side of the business. Maybe, just maybe, the new CEO will care about higher principles just a little bit more than Jeff did.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Just like any non-founding CEO, this guy is on the ropes. If anything (numbers) slips he is gone immediately. So status quo and PR juking are the game. Jeff gets the praise for founding Amazon. This guy gets the blame if ANYTHING goes wrong. He may not even be able to control the company (see Jeff Immelt).
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      No, Jassy's AWS has been notorious for brutal software engineering conditions. Worse than the rest of Amazon, which is already bottom 5% of companies ratings by their internal employees.
  - lolsal 5y ago
tomrod 5y ago
Not meaning to make a koan. If this was the culture in place, would the core principles need elucidation?
- markstos 5y ago
  Written principles can be useful for organizations as they can outlast any particular people that work there.
slumdev 5y ago
So I need to rehearse two more stories if I want to interview there? Sign me up for that!
1B05H1N 5y ago
I am interested in how Amazon measures being the earths best employer.
turtle_san 5y ago
>>Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. Very smart of them to push for a diverse workforce, weak collective feeling so worse at labor organizing.
strife25 5y ago
"Are Right, A Lot" Does this value annoy anyone else? It screams to me that the only people whose opinions are respected are the ones in leadership positions.
- koboll 5y ago
  tbh this is one of the ones that is basically ignored by strained interpretations. i.e., there's a saying that "people who are right a lot are also wrong a lot" which... sort of undermines the plain text of the principle.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  I've always found it a bit odd. When is that determination made exactly? As an engineer the things I'm "right" about are often meaningless. When shit's started to really hit the fan and we're busy putting put production fires nobody cares. But for some perverse reason people still remember the architecture astronaut who devised said mess as being right. And I'm the one who's not a team player and just being difficult. I think this one's for the managers and "rockstar" engineers.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  lol. you don’t know the lore young padawan. great leaders frequently change their mind based on new information. so, by definition you are either right because you changed your mind or dumb for sticking with the wrong thing. that’s some revisionist BS right there, but can you trust someone that is not right? like a LOT!
- alttab 5y ago
  No, read it again. "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." Work to disconfirm their beliefs - this is the key. It shouldn't be "Are Right, A Lot" but more "Get's Right, Consistently." In practive, this means working to check your assumptions and actually ensure you're ... right.
ir123 5y ago
Amazon dropping some new theory
openasocket 5y ago
AWS employee here. If you aren't aware, Amazon Leadership Principles are a bit more than the usual wishy-washy "mission statements" you see at a lot of other companies. When I first started I thought they were kind of dumb, but what they do is they give a sort of shared vocabulary when talking to management. It lets you take a position in a way that managers and other employees will take seriously. I've seen people unironically invoke leadership principles in meetings. Saying "I'm going to disagree and commit here" to explain you think a particular decision needs more discussion. Saying we need to "bias for action" when you feel there's too much hesitancy or red tape in the way. And "Customer Obsession" tends to come up a lot when you want to prioritize new features or make improvements. I've personally used that one when people have tried to explain away a bug in a tool or service as you just not using it "properly". Yeah it's a bit silly, but sometimes they are really helpful.
- notacoward 5y ago
  Invoking principles like this can be healthy, but it also has a downside. At another FAANG, there was quite a discussion at one point about "weaponizing" such principles against other people - especially "assume good intent" when lack of same was clearly evident. My take is that these principles are things for people to apply to themselves and everyone should be very wary when they're imposed on others.
  - ramblerman 5y ago
    > these principles are things for people to apply to themselves and everyone should be very wary when they're imposed on others. I feel like this generalizes to a lot more than just amazon principles.
- adwn 5y ago
  > Saying "I'm going to disagree and commit here" to explain you think a particular decision needs more discussion. Doesn't "disagree and commit" mean the opposite? I.e., that further discussion is pointless, but a decision has to be made now, and one party budges in favor of the other party?
decafninja 5y ago
Putting aside all the known issues on the warehouse/blue-collar worker side of things, we've also been hearing about a ton of very, very, bad stuff on the office/SWE/white-collar side of the company too. Are we likely to see Amazon get evicted from the pantheon of FAANG? I remember 5? 10? years ago the term FAANG hadn't been coined yet. Instead the term being thrown around was "Big 4", referring to Google, Facebook, Amazon, and depending on who you ask, either Apple, Microsoft, or Twitter. Now Apple is a steady member of FAANG, Netflix joined out of left field, Microsoft got evicted (unless you use the extended FAANGMULA term that seems to be getting some steam), and Twitter seems to have been long left behind.
jakupovic 5y ago
Good step forward, or two as it may be. Going to need to see some metrics though, then we can set goals on them, isn't that how Amazon.com went from garage to world concerns ...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oumua_don17 5y ago
>> Frugality Should not be applied to employee salaries and benefits and work environment.
outside1234 5y ago
Everything is branded for what it is not. Quality Hotels Amazon as Earth's Best Employer
jellicle 5y ago
So if I wanted to be Earth's Best Employer, would that entail perhaps raising pay by, let's say, $1 per hour? No? Okay.
garrickvanburen 5y ago
16 principles to remember? 1. That’s just too many to remember, let alone navigate. 2. Seems to violate “invent & simplify”
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
If you've worked with Jeff Bezos (I did), you'll recognize this document as an attempt to publically document his conception of his own "best self".
- myroon5 5y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Not really. I think I said it all already. It's just a written version of "how to be like the best version of me by jeff bezos, ceo".
mbostleman 5y ago
Amazon has a lot of businesses, so I'm not really sure who their "customer" is without a specific context, but I can tell you that as a seller on Amazon, I am not the center of anything. My experience with this company is exactly what you'd expect from the rotting quality of a monopoly. I don't think any amount of "leadership principles" will help. I think that competition is the only cure.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I don't think suppliers (and that is basically what you are) are treated well anywhere in retail. My family used to be in private label food production. For all the flack Walmart gets, we considered them one of the best. Walmart. And what you hear about them grinding you to the bone and having strict delivery targets is true.
- potatoman22 5y ago
  Sellers are the product, not the customer.
- cle 5y ago
  On the retail side, increasingly their most important customers appear to be advertisers and sellers buying "sponsored" slots, since that junk is about all I see on Amazon these days as a buyer.
- prasenjit_pro 5y ago
  I completely agree with your comment. I am also a seller on Amazon. Every single decision about my brand have to be done in accordance to Amazon rules where I hardly make profit after trying to fight competitors will low pricing set by Amazon pricing rules, getting charged by Amazon on management fees, self ship on some products and moreover customer system exploitation. There has been several cases customers have returned wrong product and Amazon didn't do anything to look into it. Now some ask me why I use Amazon still then. My answer is to keep money rolling, advertise my brand and generate customer who can be targeted.
subsaharancoder 5y ago
I worked at AMZN for about 2 years and one thing that I found rather interesting and quite disturbing is how people regurgitate the leadership principles to drive points home and sometimes to bash someone into submission. It was not uncommon to hear someone literally use 2-3 principles in a sentence to emphasize something e.g. "Demonstrate your bias for action and earn the trust of the people you are working.." Funny thing is when I interview at other companies I always use the principles as a reference to answer the questions :-)
grillvogel 5y ago
there are way too many to be meaningful anymore. I work somewhere heavily "inspired" by the leadership principles, but you need to have the smaller core set of values so it is easy to reference them for decision making in your day to day stuff
EliRivers 5y ago
They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Who are their customers? Really? Pretty sure it's not Joe Nobody like me, just some random shopper (who, in my case, no longer buys anything except second-hand books on Amazon because of the counterfeiting and so on). Are their sellers the real customers? You hear so many stories about sellers being fucked over (like Cliff Stoll, recently fucked over) though. Is it the big sellers? Just who exactly are these customers they're so intent on being trusted by? Or is it that I can trust them; I can trust them to basically not give a fuck, up to and including (fortunately) refunding me when the box turns up broken or full of counterfeit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
datavirtue 5y ago
This is what they say but what do they signal to people in the day-to-day operations? Some companies howl endlessly about diversity (say) but the signal is very different when every single executive and manager is a white guy with the same privileged (not self made, parents paid their whole way) background.
erwinkle 5y ago
Well their Frugality principle certainly checks out according to the press. Who needs bathroom breaks when you can pee in bottles? "Frugality Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."
helen___keller 5y ago
I've heard that AWS is struggling to hire and retain, so I see this "Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" and "Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility" as attempts to reform their image as needed to bring in and retain employees. Best of luck to them. I'm considering new positions, but not with AWS: if I interview with AWS it'll just be for a stronger position negotiating with other employers. Too many red flags at Amazon.
ogn3rd 5y ago
"Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer". I can't laugh hard enough. So ironic and also, best for whom? The business? The shareholders? The employees? At current time it is currently the Earth's Best Employer for Shareholders. Will that change now that leadership has? As an ex-AWSer, I think not, but time will tell.
ALittleLight 5y ago
It's crunch time, need to hit a critical milestone, severe bug. We need to bring in the team over the weekend to get it done. "Well, I think that working over the weekend goes against 'World's Best Employer'". "Yeah, but success brings the responsibility to work over the weekend. Plus, being the best employer means helping employees grow, and you'll get plenty of time to grow Saturday." These sound like banal corporate platitudes to me. Maybe an attempt to put an imprint on post-Bezos culture.
gautamcgoel 5y ago
"Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume." What a strange thing to say in an official corporate document...
black_13 5y ago
Nothing they have to say has value
kadomony 5y ago
Maybe scrap the leadership principles and start over instead of thinking an additional amendment will but you good faith in the community of workers that your company habitually shits on and abuses.

124 points by dmkirwan 5y ago

There's a great talk by Brian Cantrill about Leadership principles [0] which also includes a discussion of the Amazon Leadership principles. He argues that Amazon's leadership principles actually aren't helpful and don't make much sense and I tend to agree. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc (The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)

nonfamous 5y ago
The section on Uber, starting at 36:30, is also well worth watching. This was the talk that made me realize that a company’s principles, as shared, aren’t just PR bullshit. They really do have a profound effect on the culture and behavior of companies.

guruparan18 5y ago

So the new ones are? Interesting. * Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer * Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Yhippa 5y ago
These sound overly broad and non-measurable.
- deelowe 5y ago
  That's not the full definition. This is: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them. That said, these are not objectives. They are more like vision statements. I assume goals a measures are derived off of these and updated over time.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Most principles are, no? They have goals and KPIs and reports and what not, these are the leadership principles. One would hope they revise their numbers as well to reflect these principles and correct for unintended consequences.
- frumper 5y ago
  It can be very difficult what is best, but it is easy to measure that they are not the best in many ways. They can work on improving those.
Y_Y 5y ago
I'm going to strive to be a tyrannosaurus rex.

atlgator 5y ago

> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer The phrasing is interesting on this one. Amazon's leadership principles have historically been commandment-style edicts followed with unabashed zeal, but this new principle basically says "We'll try"

itisit 5y ago
Andy is going to be a different (i.e. kinder) leader compared to Jeff
zoover2020 5y ago
"We'll try not to PIP anyone"
gonzo41 5y ago
Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer at keeping our jack boot on the neck of the union movement. Nah, I'm.....probably joking
deleted 5y ago
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gpt5 5y ago
You could claim that it’s more humble. They acknowledge that they are not yet there. Also - Amazon has used similar wording with regards to their most famous principle (customer obsession). “ Our vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company”
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
You can measurably fail to be the world's best employer. There are annual reports and metrics and various ways to quantify the quality of an employer and rank them. You can't fail to try.

seumars 5y ago

"Leaders start with the customer and work backwards." So customers first, workers last?

jhawk28 5y ago
If you don't have a customer, can you have any workers? If you treat your workers poorly, will your customers be treated well? Just because one is the emphasis doesn't mean the other is not important either.
WaitWaitWha 5y ago
Amazon uses "leaders" when talking about self, for all "workers". Internally, others are often considered "customers".
mypalmike 5y ago
Working backwards: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-uses-a-secret-process-for-launching-new-ideas-and-it-can-transform-way-you-work.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-uses-a-secret-proce...

soared 5y ago

For those not familiar, the two new ones are below. I never worked at amazon, but throughout the (grueling) interview process you have to memorize these and every question you answer needs to intertwine some of these principles. They tell you to have 2-3 “stories” of how you exemplify each principle. IMO with how many they have it doesn’t make sense since you are bound to forget nearly all of them day-to-day. And honestly you can just think of anything you’ve done and slightly twist it to make it align with a principle. Meh. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.

ikiris 5y ago
From what I've heard from their former employees (engineer / corporate, not warehouse), the best employer bit is laughable
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  I can recall horror stories from their engineers when I was in grad school (around 2004 or so). So I think it is well entrenched.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  To give intent the broadest benefit of the doubt, maybe that's why they wanted to encode the goal in a principle. Changing Amazon's corporate culture at this point has to be like relocating the Alps.

dmkirwan 5y ago

Apologies if the title seems click-baity. It would have been too long if I included the new principles in there. The new principles: * Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer * Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility I don't work at Amazon, but it's my understanding that they take their leadership principles seriously and use them as they make decisions every day. They do not live up to these two new principles today, but this does seem like a significant step.

seumars 5y ago
Ask amazon warehouse employees if they take these principles seriously.

jpxw 5y ago

> helps us relentlessly pursue our mission of being Earth’s most customer-centric company, best employer, and safest place to work. I think I’d have more respect for Amazon if they were just honest. It’s clear that they’re not the “best employer” in the world, and furthermore I don’t think they ever can be - their business relies on a fleet of low-paid workers doing manual labour.

domador 5y ago
I wonder how much of this goal will be considered "accomplished" just by not being direct employers for the people who actually do the grunt work at delivery centers under inhumane expectations. Amazon should fix those conditions first rather than spitting out more of these high-minded, virtue-signaling platitudes.

gameshot911 5y ago

As a whole, these are really good leadership principles. I strive to exemplify these in my own work, and can think of many cases where the leaders I admire exhibit these attributes. Separately, it makes me curious how individual Amazon managers, and the company as a whole, jive these principles with many of the public, consumer-facing concerns raised nowadays. Things like fake reviews and mixed, counterfeit stock. No doubt there ARE good reasons if one was privy to the whole view, and odds are there are very serious efforts (past and present) to improve things. It's just a good opportunity to reflect on how you can have an organization with great leaders, admirable stated values (that most employees probably take to heart), and still have fundamental, mission-critical issues at play that outwardly appear to be being ignored.

ctvo 5y ago
> and still have fundamental, mission-critical issues at play that outwardly appear to be being ignored. The only place I’ve seen anyone mention these “fundamental mission-critical issues” is HN. My family and friends are Prime subscribers, and I’ve not had an issue in 20 years of Amazon buying.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

My question is "how is the talk walked"? How does action relative to the 13 Leadership Principles translate to performance evaluation at Amazon? Is there a rubric, or are the principles a context for describing someone broadly? Is there an "L.P. metric" or somesuch for looking at strategic decision?

lumost 5y ago
Typically hiring, promotions, transfers, and annual performance reviews are written in a Pro/Con form across the different LPs. As an employee/candidate you need to demonstrate your abilities with respect to the leadership principals, and your peers will provide growth/strength feedback based on them as well.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

>> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer They have a long way to go on this one: 1) Many of the headquarters / office jobs require super long hours and are high stress. Employee turnover is high and mental health issues are common. 2) Warehouse and delivery jobs are known for demanding quotas that are practically unrealistic. Working conditions are terrible and management is unsympathetic. 3) In nearly all environments, employees are seen as a replaceable commodity to be exploited, pushed to the limit, and then replaced with new blood after burnout or turnover.

innagadadavida 5y ago

> Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere This basically authorizes firing of employees based on their performance or am I reading this wrong?

drewcoo 5y ago

They couldn't just write "Avoid Bad Press?" That seems to cover it more succinctly and it's externally visible, as opposed to the aspirational junk.

eplanit 5y ago

We're within days of Bezos' departure, and Amazon is immediately signalling traditional, boring "Mission Statements" (this one about 'leadership'). Oddly, the statements (which often refer to we, our) are signed by nobody -- no names at all to associate with the (banal and predictable) words. I'm no cult fan of Bezos (his personality seems annoying), but to become a truly faceless, nameless corporate monolith is...well, expected, I guess. It doesn't sound like an exciting place to work, overall.

olliej 5y ago
The change in leadership has nothing to do with that - by all accounts it's a miserable place to work.

mentos 5y ago

Great how about Amazon creates a single AWS page so I can see all of my resources currently in use with an easy way to cancel each and not be surprised by billing. If you want to build back trust start there.

rantwasp 5y ago
you cannot be the BEST employer if you force your workers to build one page where customers can see all their resources /s

aaronbrethorst 5y ago

This would feel less self-serving if they weren't making the changes in the midst of: 1. Being concerned about literally running out of people to hire. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-worker-shortage-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo... 2. A growing, bipartisan consensus in DC about the need for new anti-trust legislation, and also Amazon's concern about how 'mean' FTC Commissioner Lina Khan is (lol). https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557456/amazon-lina-khan-recusal-petition-federal-trade-commission-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557456/amazon-lina-khan...

frumper 5y ago
I would expect them to be self serving. Self-serving doesn't mean it only needs to benefit Amazon.

mushufasa 5y ago

In contrast, check out netflix's corporate culture principles. The first few slides call out that Enron's main 'corporate value' was integrity. https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf

elteto 5y ago
Wow, I’d never seen that deck. It’s incredibly honest and direct and does not read like typical corpo-speak. I don’t know if they practice what they preach at Netflix but they definitely got a bit more of respect from me.
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
  I also LOVE the minimalist styling of these slides. Maybe that's because they're meant to be read rather than presented, but my god am I exhausted from prolonged exposure to professionally designed, image-heavy slide decks which seek to minimize the ratio of information to file size and consume so much human talent. Miss me with that stock-photo-of-impossibly-attractive-and-happy-people-white boarding shit.
- Sr_developer 5y ago
  LOL!!!!! > In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average. In creative work, the best are 10x better than the average, so huge premium on creating effective teams of the best Pulled from their asses > Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues Well, NO. Having smart and competent colleagues is for sure desirable but it is just one trait (Maybe not the most important one) > Netflix Vacation Policy and Tracking “there is no policy or tracking” This is a huge huge red-flag.One of the reasons (among many) is that people tend to overestimate their contribution to team and underestimate their peers' .So when Susy takes 2 weeks off (deservedly according to her) you get pissed because you think you have done 2X as much as her and you only took one week off. And this is the tamest of the complications.Vacations should be like salaries, they need to be spelled out very clearly and not subject to ambiguous "rules". > Highly‐Aligned Loosely‐Coupled teamwork effectiveness is dependent on high performance people and good context. Goal is to be Big and Fast and Flexible. Thank God they were free of corporate mumbo-jumbo. Most of the slides are in a similar vein. They want to justify culling people indiscriminately (and they are withing their rights) but they are not being cool, innovative or different because of that. They are just another company which wants to extract as much value from their employees as possible while minimizing the cost.

usui 5y ago

Hahaha — not a sarcastic/malicious laugh. I went through the Amazon interviewing circuit and I remember these principles. I like them. The reason I found this funny is because the two new ones, 1. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer 2. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility seem really different in tone relative to the other ones. Everything else sounds like a directive that one cannot disobey, while the confident tone goes down in #1. It's like someone talking tough on certain things, but then in another topic lowers his/her voice and goes slightly quieter #2 doesn't exactly sound as much of a guiding principle. I can see how one could use it as one, but it sounds more like a fact—a piece of information that is just true regardless of it being a leadership principle or not I'm at least glad they recognize the issues and are trying to make a statement on it. Hoping that they act on it

usui 5y ago
link to the aboutamazon.com blog: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leader...
savanaly 5y ago
I agree. Why isn't #1 "Be Earth's Best Employer"? Amazon didn't get where they are by practicing the rule "Try to be obsessed with customers".
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>I like them. I too liked them. >seem really different in tone relative to the other ones. Well the downfall of Amazon has started. Yes the 2 do stand out and in my opinion. >They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Fun at work? Which idiot came up with this? The definition of work is, what is _not_ fun. While it is critical to make work as tolerable as one can. Aiming to make it fun is either an exercise in naivety which will infantalize the workforce, or an act of insincerity.

trhoad 5y ago

Putting bullshit-bingo "principles" up on a website is easy. Tackling abhorrent amounts of waste and damage to the environment is difficult [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-faces-mps-scrutiny-after-destroying-laptops-tablets-and-books https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-fa...

koboll 5y ago
>Putting bullshit-bingo "principles" up on a website is easy. Have you worked at Amazon? They reference these constantly in meetings, structure performance reviews around them, there's a lot of edifice built around them. So adding new ones is a pretty big deal internally.
markstos 5y ago
At least having the principles published invites internal and external stakeholders to hold Amazon accountable to them.

deanclatworthy 5y ago

Could we take a step back from the scepticism and acknowledge that maybe this is a sign of a company that is trying to change. Unlike google which actively chose to be evil, maybe this a sign of change at Amazon leadership - realising the damage it's doing to their reputation. Amazon has huge issues to overcome in the near future. I have no doubt the quality issue with their products is going to reach boiling point in the same way it has with warehouse conditions. Let's see.

ekianjo 5y ago
> Could we take a step back from the scepticism and acknowledge that maybe this is a sign of a company that is trying to change. Could we take a step back and realize this is pure PR/HR speak to select/attract certain kind of candidates?
- browningstreet 5y ago
  I'm generally skeptical of Amazon, but it does have a new CEO who came from AWS, as opposed to.. say, the warehouse operation side of the business. Maybe, just maybe, the new CEO will care about higher principles just a little bit more than Jeff did.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Just like any non-founding CEO, this guy is on the ropes. If anything (numbers) slips he is gone immediately. So status quo and PR juking are the game. Jeff gets the praise for founding Amazon. This guy gets the blame if ANYTHING goes wrong. He may not even be able to control the company (see Jeff Immelt).
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    No, Jassy's AWS has been notorious for brutal software engineering conditions. Worse than the rest of Amazon, which is already bottom 5% of companies ratings by their internal employees.
- lolsal 5y ago

tomrod 5y ago

Not meaning to make a koan. If this was the culture in place, would the core principles need elucidation?

markstos 5y ago
Written principles can be useful for organizations as they can outlast any particular people that work there.

slumdev 5y ago

So I need to rehearse two more stories if I want to interview there? Sign me up for that!

1B05H1N 5y ago

I am interested in how Amazon measures being the earths best employer.

turtle_san 5y ago

>>Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. Very smart of them to push for a diverse workforce, weak collective feeling so worse at labor organizing.

strife25 5y ago

"Are Right, A Lot" Does this value annoy anyone else? It screams to me that the only people whose opinions are respected are the ones in leadership positions.

koboll 5y ago
tbh this is one of the ones that is basically ignored by strained interpretations. i.e., there's a saying that "people who are right a lot are also wrong a lot" which... sort of undermines the plain text of the principle.
tjpnz 5y ago
I've always found it a bit odd. When is that determination made exactly? As an engineer the things I'm "right" about are often meaningless. When shit's started to really hit the fan and we're busy putting put production fires nobody cares. But for some perverse reason people still remember the architecture astronaut who devised said mess as being right. And I'm the one who's not a team player and just being difficult. I think this one's for the managers and "rockstar" engineers.
rantwasp 5y ago
lol. you don’t know the lore young padawan. great leaders frequently change their mind based on new information. so, by definition you are either right because you changed your mind or dumb for sticking with the wrong thing. that’s some revisionist BS right there, but can you trust someone that is not right? like a LOT!
alttab 5y ago
No, read it again. "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." Work to disconfirm their beliefs - this is the key. It shouldn't be "Are Right, A Lot" but more "Get's Right, Consistently." In practive, this means working to check your assumptions and actually ensure you're ... right.

ir123 5y ago

Amazon dropping some new theory

openasocket 5y ago

AWS employee here. If you aren't aware, Amazon Leadership Principles are a bit more than the usual wishy-washy "mission statements" you see at a lot of other companies. When I first started I thought they were kind of dumb, but what they do is they give a sort of shared vocabulary when talking to management. It lets you take a position in a way that managers and other employees will take seriously. I've seen people unironically invoke leadership principles in meetings. Saying "I'm going to disagree and commit here" to explain you think a particular decision needs more discussion. Saying we need to "bias for action" when you feel there's too much hesitancy or red tape in the way. And "Customer Obsession" tends to come up a lot when you want to prioritize new features or make improvements. I've personally used that one when people have tried to explain away a bug in a tool or service as you just not using it "properly". Yeah it's a bit silly, but sometimes they are really helpful.

notacoward 5y ago
Invoking principles like this can be healthy, but it also has a downside. At another FAANG, there was quite a discussion at one point about "weaponizing" such principles against other people - especially "assume good intent" when lack of same was clearly evident. My take is that these principles are things for people to apply to themselves and everyone should be very wary when they're imposed on others.
- ramblerman 5y ago
  > these principles are things for people to apply to themselves and everyone should be very wary when they're imposed on others. I feel like this generalizes to a lot more than just amazon principles.
adwn 5y ago
> Saying "I'm going to disagree and commit here" to explain you think a particular decision needs more discussion. Doesn't "disagree and commit" mean the opposite? I.e., that further discussion is pointless, but a decision has to be made now, and one party budges in favor of the other party?

decafninja 5y ago

Putting aside all the known issues on the warehouse/blue-collar worker side of things, we've also been hearing about a ton of very, very, bad stuff on the office/SWE/white-collar side of the company too. Are we likely to see Amazon get evicted from the pantheon of FAANG? I remember 5? 10? years ago the term FAANG hadn't been coined yet. Instead the term being thrown around was "Big 4", referring to Google, Facebook, Amazon, and depending on who you ask, either Apple, Microsoft, or Twitter. Now Apple is a steady member of FAANG, Netflix joined out of left field, Microsoft got evicted (unless you use the extended FAANGMULA term that seems to be getting some steam), and Twitter seems to have been long left behind.

jakupovic 5y ago

Good step forward, or two as it may be. Going to need to see some metrics though, then we can set goals on them, isn't that how Amazon.com went from garage to world concerns ...

deleted 5y ago

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oumua_don17 5y ago

>> Frugality Should not be applied to employee salaries and benefits and work environment.

outside1234 5y ago

Everything is branded for what it is not. Quality Hotels Amazon as Earth's Best Employer

jellicle 5y ago

So if I wanted to be Earth's Best Employer, would that entail perhaps raising pay by, let's say, $1 per hour? No? Okay.

garrickvanburen 5y ago

16 principles to remember? 1. That’s just too many to remember, let alone navigate. 2. Seems to violate “invent & simplify”

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

If you've worked with Jeff Bezos (I did), you'll recognize this document as an attempt to publically document his conception of his own "best self".

myroon5 5y ago
Can you elaborate?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Not really. I think I said it all already. It's just a written version of "how to be like the best version of me by jeff bezos, ceo".

mbostleman 5y ago

Amazon has a lot of businesses, so I'm not really sure who their "customer" is without a specific context, but I can tell you that as a seller on Amazon, I am not the center of anything. My experience with this company is exactly what you'd expect from the rotting quality of a monopoly. I don't think any amount of "leadership principles" will help. I think that competition is the only cure.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I don't think suppliers (and that is basically what you are) are treated well anywhere in retail. My family used to be in private label food production. For all the flack Walmart gets, we considered them one of the best. Walmart. And what you hear about them grinding you to the bone and having strict delivery targets is true.
potatoman22 5y ago
Sellers are the product, not the customer.
cle 5y ago
On the retail side, increasingly their most important customers appear to be advertisers and sellers buying "sponsored" slots, since that junk is about all I see on Amazon these days as a buyer.
prasenjit_pro 5y ago
I completely agree with your comment. I am also a seller on Amazon. Every single decision about my brand have to be done in accordance to Amazon rules where I hardly make profit after trying to fight competitors will low pricing set by Amazon pricing rules, getting charged by Amazon on management fees, self ship on some products and moreover customer system exploitation. There has been several cases customers have returned wrong product and Amazon didn't do anything to look into it. Now some ask me why I use Amazon still then. My answer is to keep money rolling, advertise my brand and generate customer who can be targeted.

subsaharancoder 5y ago

I worked at AMZN for about 2 years and one thing that I found rather interesting and quite disturbing is how people regurgitate the leadership principles to drive points home and sometimes to bash someone into submission. It was not uncommon to hear someone literally use 2-3 principles in a sentence to emphasize something e.g. "Demonstrate your bias for action and earn the trust of the people you are working.." Funny thing is when I interview at other companies I always use the principles as a reference to answer the questions :-)

grillvogel 5y ago

there are way too many to be meaningful anymore. I work somewhere heavily "inspired" by the leadership principles, but you need to have the smaller core set of values so it is easy to reference them for decision making in your day to day stuff

EliRivers 5y ago

They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Who are their customers? Really? Pretty sure it's not Joe Nobody like me, just some random shopper (who, in my case, no longer buys anything except second-hand books on Amazon because of the counterfeiting and so on). Are their sellers the real customers? You hear so many stories about sellers being fucked over (like Cliff Stoll, recently fucked over) though. Is it the big sellers? Just who exactly are these customers they're so intent on being trusted by? Or is it that I can trust them; I can trust them to basically not give a fuck, up to and including (fortunately) refunding me when the box turns up broken or full of counterfeit.

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datavirtue 5y ago

This is what they say but what do they signal to people in the day-to-day operations? Some companies howl endlessly about diversity (say) but the signal is very different when every single executive and manager is a white guy with the same privileged (not self made, parents paid their whole way) background.

erwinkle 5y ago

Well their Frugality principle certainly checks out according to the press. Who needs bathroom breaks when you can pee in bottles? "Frugality Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."

helen___keller 5y ago

I've heard that AWS is struggling to hire and retain, so I see this "Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" and "Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility" as attempts to reform their image as needed to bring in and retain employees. Best of luck to them. I'm considering new positions, but not with AWS: if I interview with AWS it'll just be for a stronger position negotiating with other employers. Too many red flags at Amazon.

ogn3rd 5y ago

"Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer". I can't laugh hard enough. So ironic and also, best for whom? The business? The shareholders? The employees? At current time it is currently the Earth's Best Employer for Shareholders. Will that change now that leadership has? As an ex-AWSer, I think not, but time will tell.

ALittleLight 5y ago

It's crunch time, need to hit a critical milestone, severe bug. We need to bring in the team over the weekend to get it done. "Well, I think that working over the weekend goes against 'World's Best Employer'". "Yeah, but success brings the responsibility to work over the weekend. Plus, being the best employer means helping employees grow, and you'll get plenty of time to grow Saturday." These sound like banal corporate platitudes to me. Maybe an attempt to put an imprint on post-Bezos culture.

gautamcgoel 5y ago

"Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume." What a strange thing to say in an official corporate document...

black_13 5y ago

Nothing they have to say has value

kadomony 5y ago

Maybe scrap the leadership principles and start over instead of thinking an additional amendment will but you good faith in the community of workers that your company habitually shits on and abuses.