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I think the more even-handed criticism of Amazon would be this: they're a highly process driven company. Practically the definition of "process over people".

I think the more even-handed criticism of Amazon would be this: they're a highly process driven company. Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills. Highly motivated people who always go the extra mile get exploited and burnt out. Kind people get their kindness taken advantage of and it sours their view of the world. At least that's what I've seen from the outside. The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them. Empathy is actually a disadvantage in this type of role and it selects for all sorts of what I would consider adverse behaviors among managers. The "leadership" principals relate to actual leadership as a jellyfish relates to Smucker's. Look up Google's project oxygen findings if you want a comparison. I personally doubt I'll ever hire someone who learned engineering management at Amazon unless they've been sufficiently detoxified in a different company.

candiddevmike 4y ago
I can't help but read your first paragraph and think of the show Severance. Convert everyone to simple worker bees without any agency.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  Digressing here, but... That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting. I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  It was difficult for me to watch severance because so many of the interactions among the employees reminded me of my time Amazon. I actually cried a little bit when the boss threw a coffee cup and then blamed her report for it.
opmelogy 4y ago
How'd you come about this understanding? Very little of what you wrote here reflects my experience there.
- throwaway9191aa 4y ago
  > Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills. That has been exactly my experience, after 5.5 years. My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week (there are 9 of us). It is way more important to try to plan out work than it is to actually do the work. > The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them. I did burn myself out trying to reduce operational load. I wasn't arguing for it the right way, so I ended up doing it myself. I was able to measure my results, but it didn't even count towards a promo because I didn't "harmonize discordant views"... instead I just did what needed to be done. Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. That is false. Try to find out how many of those folks have actually worked outside Amazon before taking their advice.
  - opmelogy 4y ago
    FYI: I think you responding to the wrong parent comment. :)
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t it be more important to plan out the work than to do the work? We’ve all seen the graph of how much more expensive things are to change the further down the process is.
    - throwaway9191aa 4y ago
      I absolutely think you should plan out how your customer will solve their problem with your product, including concrete examples, and make sure you are always headed towards that goal. I'm very waterfally that way. In this case I'm talking about the tasks in each sprint. I think 1 day of planning per sprint is a lot. We are supposed to be agile. If we missed a task, swap it with another. If something isn't actually important, bring in something new. We end up doing this anyway... so why all the upfront planning each sprint? Related back to the above comment, (my opinion) people really love to establish rules and processes and are not able to handle ambiguity. I spend a lot of time (remember the 4 hours a week) arguing whether a story is a mouse or a hedgehog. IMHO it's splitting hairs, let's just do the work and we estimated a little wrong it just isn't that important.
scarface74 4y ago
I’ve been working as a hands on developer [1] for over 25 years between 8 companies. I’ve worked for companies with 20 people all the way to AWS. I’ve always strived to “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). Why would I let a company “burn me out”? When the pay/bullshit ratio gets too low, I send my always updated resume out, review my “career document” to prepare for behavioral/informal interviews (I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews), talk to people in my network and I get another job. Before my current job, I was a dev lead and then the de facto “cloud architect” at smaller companies. My current job is much less stressful. [1] currently my official title is not “software developer”. But for all intents and purposes, I still develop user facing software along with a crap ton of yaml, HCL, diagrams and PowerPoint slides.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  > I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews Like, you refuse them or the positions you apply for don't require them?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The longer version of the story: I stayed at one company too long from the time I was 25 until I was 34. By the time I left, I was very much an “expert beginner” - I was doing old school VB6 in 2008 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC/COM programming (ask your kids). But at 34, I had developed soft skills and knew how to talk to business people. From 2008 - 2018, I both modernized my enterprise dev skills and learned how to solve business problems. I also got lucky and always seemed to get connected to managers, directors and CTOs who were new to their company and needed to solve business problems. Most of my “interviews” were casual semi-technical but mostly about process/development improvements even as I stayed hands on. By 2016, I belatedly discovered “the cloud” when the company I worked for as dev lead wanted to “move to the cloud” and they hired “consultants” who were really just a bunch of old school Net ops folks who knew how to do “lift and shifts” duplicating and on prem architecture to AWS and of course costing more. As I learned more about AWS, I knew I could bring a unique set of talents as someone who knew both the infrastructure side and the development. I found a job at another company where the then new CTO wanted to pivot the company to being “cloud native” and sell access to micro services to large health care companies. I talked through my proposals after listening to him and I led the effort over the next two years. Then at 46 a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I was not interested in being a software engineer at any large company, not interested in relocating “after Covid was over”, nor was I interested in doing the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance. She suggested I apply for a role in cloud consulting “application modernization” (really just software development + devops using cloud services) in Professional Services that was fully remote. I had the tech skills, the project leadership experience and the customer facing experience from working at small companies. My interview was all behavioral besides a little AWS techno trivia as part of the initial screening. So in reality, I just fell into a specialty where companies are more interested in my ability to solve business problems than reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard.
scarface74 4y ago
Why shouldn’t all employees of any for profit company “disassociate their professional lives from their personal lives”? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
MarathonSeeker 4y ago
jkingsbery 4y ago
Again, this is me speaking just my experience, and not for the company in any official capacity: Capital-P-Policies get followed. But there are a lot of lower-case-p-policies, more what you might call guidelines, that are not. Sometimes, for good reasons! There are examples of things Amazon does that try to encourage individual judgement, trusting the people in place. But there are also examples where we think we know what the right process is, but for whatever reason (prioritization, we haven't figured out the right way to enforce it, scaling challenges) it's not as strictly followed as outsiders might assume.

candiddevmike 4y ago

I can't help but read your first paragraph and think of the show Severance. Convert everyone to simple worker bees without any agency.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
Digressing here, but... That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting. I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
zwkrt 4y ago
It was difficult for me to watch severance because so many of the interactions among the employees reminded me of my time Amazon. I actually cried a little bit when the boss threw a coffee cup and then blamed her report for it.

opmelogy 4y ago

How'd you come about this understanding? Very little of what you wrote here reflects my experience there.

throwaway9191aa 4y ago
> Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills. That has been exactly my experience, after 5.5 years. My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week (there are 9 of us). It is way more important to try to plan out work than it is to actually do the work. > The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them. I did burn myself out trying to reduce operational load. I wasn't arguing for it the right way, so I ended up doing it myself. I was able to measure my results, but it didn't even count towards a promo because I didn't "harmonize discordant views"... instead I just did what needed to be done. Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. That is false. Try to find out how many of those folks have actually worked outside Amazon before taking their advice.
- opmelogy 4y ago
  FYI: I think you responding to the wrong parent comment. :)
- scarface74 4y ago
  Why wouldn’t it be more important to plan out the work than to do the work? We’ve all seen the graph of how much more expensive things are to change the further down the process is.
  - throwaway9191aa 4y ago
    I absolutely think you should plan out how your customer will solve their problem with your product, including concrete examples, and make sure you are always headed towards that goal. I'm very waterfally that way. In this case I'm talking about the tasks in each sprint. I think 1 day of planning per sprint is a lot. We are supposed to be agile. If we missed a task, swap it with another. If something isn't actually important, bring in something new. We end up doing this anyway... so why all the upfront planning each sprint? Related back to the above comment, (my opinion) people really love to establish rules and processes and are not able to handle ambiguity. I spend a lot of time (remember the 4 hours a week) arguing whether a story is a mouse or a hedgehog. IMHO it's splitting hairs, let's just do the work and we estimated a little wrong it just isn't that important.

scarface74 4y ago

I’ve been working as a hands on developer [1] for over 25 years between 8 companies. I’ve worked for companies with 20 people all the way to AWS. I’ve always strived to “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). Why would I let a company “burn me out”? When the pay/bullshit ratio gets too low, I send my always updated resume out, review my “career document” to prepare for behavioral/informal interviews (I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews), talk to people in my network and I get another job. Before my current job, I was a dev lead and then the de facto “cloud architect” at smaller companies. My current job is much less stressful. [1] currently my official title is not “software developer”. But for all intents and purposes, I still develop user facing software along with a crap ton of yaml, HCL, diagrams and PowerPoint slides.

waynesonfire 4y ago
> I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews Like, you refuse them or the positions you apply for don't require them?
- scarface74 4y ago
  The longer version of the story: I stayed at one company too long from the time I was 25 until I was 34. By the time I left, I was very much an “expert beginner” - I was doing old school VB6 in 2008 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC/COM programming (ask your kids). But at 34, I had developed soft skills and knew how to talk to business people. From 2008 - 2018, I both modernized my enterprise dev skills and learned how to solve business problems. I also got lucky and always seemed to get connected to managers, directors and CTOs who were new to their company and needed to solve business problems. Most of my “interviews” were casual semi-technical but mostly about process/development improvements even as I stayed hands on. By 2016, I belatedly discovered “the cloud” when the company I worked for as dev lead wanted to “move to the cloud” and they hired “consultants” who were really just a bunch of old school Net ops folks who knew how to do “lift and shifts” duplicating and on prem architecture to AWS and of course costing more. As I learned more about AWS, I knew I could bring a unique set of talents as someone who knew both the infrastructure side and the development. I found a job at another company where the then new CTO wanted to pivot the company to being “cloud native” and sell access to micro services to large health care companies. I talked through my proposals after listening to him and I led the effort over the next two years. Then at 46 a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I was not interested in being a software engineer at any large company, not interested in relocating “after Covid was over”, nor was I interested in doing the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance. She suggested I apply for a role in cloud consulting “application modernization” (really just software development + devops using cloud services) in Professional Services that was fully remote. I had the tech skills, the project leadership experience and the customer facing experience from working at small companies. My interview was all behavioral besides a little AWS techno trivia as part of the initial screening. So in reality, I just fell into a specialty where companies are more interested in my ability to solve business problems than reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard.

scarface74 4y ago

Why shouldn’t all employees of any for profit company “disassociate their professional lives from their personal lives”? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

MarathonSeeker 4y ago

jkingsbery 4y ago

Again, this is me speaking just my experience, and not for the company in any official capacity: Capital-P-Policies get followed. But there are a lot of lower-case-p-policies, more what you might call guidelines, that are not. Sometimes, for good reasons! There are examples of things Amazon does that try to encourage individual judgement, trusting the people in place. But there are also examples where we think we know what the right process is, but for whatever reason (prioritization, we haven't figured out the right way to enforce it, scaling challenges) it's not as strictly followed as outsiders might assume.