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I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not provid

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

iinnPP 4y ago
I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement. Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion using an undefined metric.
- malfist 4y ago
  It's also pretty standard for an engineer to say "Yeah, I could build that in a weekend" when talking about some super scaled website like twitter or facebook or whatnot. "Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're terrible at judging efforts involved.
andonisus 4y ago
Both of these things can be true. There is a lag time behind hiring someone, PIPing them, and terminating them. Amazon was on a hiring spree. They are almost certainly still be bloated even after these layoffs. Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side of retail.
andsoitis 4y ago
> This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight? If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them? So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there are "many low performers/bloat" are at odds.
- discopicante 4y ago
  Amazon is notorious for practicing _forced_ attrition e.g. forcing the relative low performers out of the org (who still might be performing at expectations, onboarding, etc.).
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Which, unfortunately, is only so much related performance. Feedback circles and cabals are a thing. Pkus some people are better at operating those cycles than others.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    > Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. A slight correction: An organizational unit larger than a 2 pizza team -- think 50 engineers, is expected to cut 5-10%. A team within that unit may lose 0 engineers, which is how high performing teams that meet all their goals stay intact.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Fair. But every manager must be prepared to put one of their people forward, even if they ultimately don't have to in the session. The pressure is still there.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
blue039 4y ago
It takes a while to stack rank people out of the company. It's not an efficient pipeline. Moreover, smart engineers know how to game the system. So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in a way that I am at all worried about.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they directly received 0 of it). Their stock price increased due to both performance during the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than PPP targeting mid-size businesses.
  - blue039 4y ago
    I also think I'm being interpreted as supporting stack ranking for some reason by some inept commenters passing by. I'm not sure how they're getting that.
- _rs 4y ago
  How is it possible to game a system like that? I thought by design it pushes more people out than even necessarily deserve it
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    There's no surefire way to game the system, and I would even say there is no way to game the system at all, but you just need to understand two things: 1. Your manager is the one putting you in PIP (firing plan). If you're friends with your manager, he won't put your name, even if your performance is below the bar. 2. This is applicable in every single avenue of life, but your reputation is everything. Work hard for the first few months after joining a team and impress your leadership and your colleagues on your first few tickets, then you can dial it down and still be 100% safe and be regarded as a top tier engineer. You will be "the guy that ramped us fast and executed well" for the rest of your time in that team. If you have setbacks, you won't even need to justify yourself, they will just know that "hey if this top guy is struggling it just means it's very hard". On the contrary, I have witnessed people being fired or looked down upon just for having a bad reputation, even when they were doing just fine or had legitimate roadblocks on some tasks. One of my good friends got fired because he was the party guy of our team, so nobody was ever taking him really seriously.
vaidhy 4y ago
You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless). The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load. From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load. Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.
- jsharf 4y ago
  I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate functionality. The requirements are usually never actually identical and when you try to merge them it results in services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and not even a bad thing. That being said, Google for comparison does have good code re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud, tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    I did not say it is bad. I just wanted to point out that N^2 communications are a big hit (of course we know them for long time) and people under-estimate the co-ordination effort and the fact that already running systems impose constraints that are not true for green-field efforts. I think I am regurgitating mythical man-month here and will shut up.
nkassis 4y ago
It's not necessarily individuals. From what I saw years ago there are tons of project kicked off to see if they pan out but are probably not going to succeed. The company has some core teams around retails, mobile and AWS that do the majority of the table stakes work. The rest is a lot of team doing things that may or may not have any value. My pessimistic view is that required teams are like 10% of the company leaving 90% of maybe useful. That isn't to say the 90% should be let go. If they did you'd see no growth but it's unclear how much of it is actually useful. In good times that's fine, in rougher time they have to reduce that extra a bit.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
It's because it does not talk about employee bloat, but rather product bloat. There are a lot of teams working on either useless or _duplicate_ products. Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you, despite both teams existing for years. My previous team found out that multiple of our products had equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent products made by other teams... And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.
__derek__ 4y ago
Another way to be "bloated" is to have a lot of teams working very hard on systems/projects that don't add value to the overall business. Those teams will still manage out their low-performers and run a ruthless environment, but the folks that remain continue to work hard without providing value. Add new systems/projects underneath because people want more scope and responsibility, repeat through a few cycles, and you arrive at the quoted line.
- LanceH 4y ago
  The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their domain. I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that already has all the people.
  - fdye 4y ago
    I used to see this occasionally and always see it as wasteful. However, there is another angle here. Imagine your a C-Suite or senior level manager and you have lots of resources at your disposal. Now you have identified a strategic widget you need to get to within some timeframe, say 2 years to lay into your grand strategic vision. Scenario A: Task a single team, staff them and let them do their thing. Cross your finger and hope they get it done. Scenario B: Look across offices, org groups, whatever, and task 2-3 (sometimes more) teams with your task. Let them start work on it and get regular demos and updates. Eventually, pick a winner. B looks very wasteful from the outside, until you realize that many software projects fail (like 50%). So more attempts give you a higher chance of success. Downside: Internal politics, waste, attrition from engineers throwing away code/busy work. A is great if you can do it, but you're putting all your eggs in one basket. A lot of times this is just bad org/bureaucracy though, but it can be done to great effect. Disclaimer: Worked for a CEO with a large outsourced engineering base and several offices. Would see multiple attempts at different offices all the time. Eventually, grudgingly acknowledged there was a method to that madness. Trump also is famous for this (although his seemed more madness).
axg11 4y ago
Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the investment anymore.
- ctvo 4y ago
  Unlike Facebook Alexa was somewhat successful. See Alexa microwaves, cars, TVs, etc.. It looks like Amazon also knows when to move on vs. Meta.
  - axg11 4y ago
    Success is relative. Voice didn't turn out to be "the next big computing platform". It's still mostly a command interface. Perhaps it still could become something bigger. Alexa isn't widely used on the iPhone/iOS/CarPlay or Android/Android Auto, the two most important places for voice. Alexa works well but doesn't have a clear technology advantage vs Google Assistant (admittedly, Siri is trash). Contrast that to VR, which is in a much earlier stage of its technology and adoption cycle: Meta has a strong technology advantage, currently has the best overall platform and _if_ VR becomes the next big computing platform, Meta is in a strong position to capture a significant proportion of market share. It's a big if! but at least there's still a chance.
    - pm90 4y ago
      Voice still has a lot of potential, especially with the advances in AI that we've been seeing recently. A robust voice-controlled interface would be immensely useful to consumers. I think the investment in Alexa voice is well worth it compared to whatever meta is doing atm.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
RobertDeNiro 4y ago
This is what happens when you optimize for a certain metric only. Yeah you might have someone's who's writing tons of high quality code, but if this code is just a duplication of another project or there is no business use for it, then it you probably would have been better off not writing it in the first place. People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?
time_to_smile 4y ago
I haven't worked at Amazon, but my experience with the world of "pip" culture is that it only really appears when value is difficult to define, which is strong evidence of bloat. Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly, they don't know how to avoid it. This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero problem identifying how they can create more value to the company: close more deals. But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is evidence of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.
- whatever1 4y ago
  You cannot put a dollar value to every bit of work that happens in a company. What is the value of managers? What is the value of research? What is the value of procurement/ hr? What is the value of IT and internal support tools? None of these individually provide value, but remove one and the company will collapse.
serioussecurity 4y ago
Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.
- jrd259 4y ago
  This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
  - rurp 4y ago
    > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers. :eyeroll: This reads like PR fluff and flies against the experiences shared by a lot of employees, current and former. Amazon is a huge company with a lot of variation between teams so I'm sure it's not a meat grinder for everyone, but they don't have this reputation for no reason.
  - serioussecurity 4y ago
    Done much crying at your desk recently? My boss at Amazon told me he was happy that his baby was born prematurely, because it meant he could be back at work in time for a launch.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers. I keep hearing this, but as a customer, I don't see it. Amazon retail experience is poor. The layout of the site sucks (so many clicks just to see all the reviews). They used to allow comments to reviews, which often were very useful (e.g. top review complaining about something not working, and the comments explain how to fix it). But reviewers weren't notified of the comments so they couldn't engage. And to top it all of, they recently removed all the comments. The reviews have been gamed, not very useful. They still let people make product pages with very different products as "formats", and that skews the reviews the wrong way. Lots of counterfeit product issues. Perhaps more common: Problems with comingling items. I know it doesn't happen often, but being burned once is bad enough. I recently bought a toy for my daughter's birthday. The box had creases. Upon opening it was clear this was a used item. Some of the items were out of their (sealed) packaging. Perhaps my mistake for not examining it before, but whenever I buy from Walmart or Target, I don't even have to think this will be a problem. Fixing it up with a great return policy is not a solution. Oh, and I couldn't return it. They recently made it hard to contact a human, and the automated return system on their web site wouldn't let me return if I had used it. I had to open it as we couldn't change her birth date. The search sucks. Way too many results that have nothing to do with what I searched. eBay, of all sites, is way better in this regard. I've also been an Amazon seller (FBA). The seller portal was crap.
whoknew1122 4y ago
I've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it. Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my time at Amazon.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  If only 0.1% of Amazon employees are very unhappy and vent their horror stories online, you will hear hundreds of bad stories. If 99.9 are "just fine" with it, you won't hear a single story...
- agentofoblivion 4y ago
  +1. I’ve been here almost 6 years and across 3 different teams. Never seen any of the horrors.
- lightbendover 4y ago
  There are absolutely quotas for every org over a certain size. If you’re not a manager and not on the chopping block, it would be hard to notice.
- Chamix 4y ago
  Oh my friend, there is a tool called Lift used in OLR/Talent Review by every single 50+ group at Amazon that quite literally will show your face up on a screen for everyone at the OLR meeting to discuss and rank vs your peers. If they don't have the Least Effective quota hit they will go through each face near the bottom to figure out who needs to be added. The most liberal definition possible of not stack ranking. The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to another company but who were in focus or pivot when they left. To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know: - Amazon requires 6% of employees who leave the company every year to be unregretted attrition aka URA - To be marked as URA an employee must be in Focus aka Devlist aka Devplan when they leave - Talent Review aka OLR must occur at least every 6 months for each leader with >=50 employees under him - Every employee is ranked from Least Effective - High Value 1-3 - Top Tier with quotas being 5:35:25:15:20 % respectively - The 5% rated LE must be entered into Focus - This effectively results in 10% of employees in Focus per year - Around half fail improvement plans in Focus and are presented with Pivot, which 90% results in firing. This is the oft discussed "Pip" - Rest either get out of Focus or leave themselves while on Focus and are still marked URA One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite working there.
lightbendover 4y ago
Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and it’s up to them to report up stacking within their remit and defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are made, it’s not always “fair” and varies greatly across orgs. All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org level based on value to the business. Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).
jrd259 4y ago
In eight years at Amazon (in the supply chain org as SDE and SDM) I have not encountered anything close to "ruthless". It is true that there is rough stack ranking, but only in large organizations where it is statistically meaningful.
masterof0 4y ago
I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.
- brewdad 4y ago
  What makes you think that isn't step two? Step one is finding the people and their stories then following up with the most promising/compelling ones.
  - masterof0 4y ago
    Sure, there is plenty of ways to get someone from that company's attention, Looking for trolls in Blind is not the best way really, anyone can say anything their one, and the reporter would have no way of verifying it, then will publish something that is false, which we all know have happened many times. But if you think BBC is a extremely reliable source, then, yeah, you are right.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  A reported doesn't need to even know who they're talking to in order to get leads on who should be pursued, but being wrong can lead to a lot of wasted hours.
ericmcer 4y ago
If the stack ranking works then yeah they would have no bloat, but teams are just trying to demonstrate their value to someone above them who is trying to assess their value while demonstrating their own. How valuable they actually are is pretty difficult to assess. There are probably many teams sucking up millions that have a net negative impact with their contributions but how do you measure that.
black_13 4y ago
zwkrt 4y ago
Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt immense pressure. These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side, as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular types of products. I think I recall there basically being a 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling shoes on the site, etc. I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were. IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of dynamodb for instance.
- Chamix 4y ago
  For fun, there are currently precisely 312 employees under DynamoDB directors/VPs that are categorized at "Software Development". Including systems engineers ups it to 348.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Do you realize how big and profitable DynamoDB is? How much data they manage?
    - ngc248 4y ago
      Also DynamoDB is indeed amazing. If your usecase matches the featureset of dynamodb, it works like a charm.
- aserafini 4y ago
  This is totally true, I worked at Amazon when it first launched Kindle. There were multiple software engineers 100% dedicated to ‘making the Kindle product page work’ at this time.
faangiq 4y ago
Easy answer: Management is very bloated but immune, code monkey scum get the wrath of PIP.
- ngc248 4y ago
  Exactly ... In modern big software orgs it does not even matter if you are delivering value/ All that matters is Perception, Image and Exposure (PIE). Product quality, features, technical depth none of that matters, as long as you can manage your PIE.
AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of the company, at least). This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly. That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.
washywashy 4y ago
At big companies with internal mobility, switching teams at the right time is a skill. This has positives but also the potential for bloat.

iinnPP 4y ago

I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement. Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion using an undefined metric.

malfist 4y ago
It's also pretty standard for an engineer to say "Yeah, I could build that in a weekend" when talking about some super scaled website like twitter or facebook or whatnot. "Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're terrible at judging efforts involved.

andonisus 4y ago

Both of these things can be true. There is a lag time behind hiring someone, PIPing them, and terminating them. Amazon was on a hiring spree. They are almost certainly still be bloated even after these layoffs. Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side of retail.

andsoitis 4y ago

> This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight? If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them? So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there are "many low performers/bloat" are at odds.

discopicante 4y ago
Amazon is notorious for practicing _forced_ attrition e.g. forcing the relative low performers out of the org (who still might be performing at expectations, onboarding, etc.).
socialismisok 4y ago
Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Which, unfortunately, is only so much related performance. Feedback circles and cabals are a thing. Pkus some people are better at operating those cycles than others.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. A slight correction: An organizational unit larger than a 2 pizza team -- think 50 engineers, is expected to cut 5-10%. A team within that unit may lose 0 engineers, which is how high performing teams that meet all their goals stay intact.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Fair. But every manager must be prepared to put one of their people forward, even if they ultimately don't have to in the session. The pressure is still there.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

blue039 4y ago

It takes a while to stack rank people out of the company. It's not an efficient pipeline. Moreover, smart engineers know how to game the system. So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in a way that I am at all worried about.

ctvo 4y ago
> They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they directly received 0 of it). Their stock price increased due to both performance during the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than PPP targeting mid-size businesses.
- blue039 4y ago
  I also think I'm being interpreted as supporting stack ranking for some reason by some inept commenters passing by. I'm not sure how they're getting that.
_rs 4y ago
How is it possible to game a system like that? I thought by design it pushes more people out than even necessarily deserve it
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  There's no surefire way to game the system, and I would even say there is no way to game the system at all, but you just need to understand two things: 1. Your manager is the one putting you in PIP (firing plan). If you're friends with your manager, he won't put your name, even if your performance is below the bar. 2. This is applicable in every single avenue of life, but your reputation is everything. Work hard for the first few months after joining a team and impress your leadership and your colleagues on your first few tickets, then you can dial it down and still be 100% safe and be regarded as a top tier engineer. You will be "the guy that ramped us fast and executed well" for the rest of your time in that team. If you have setbacks, you won't even need to justify yourself, they will just know that "hey if this top guy is struggling it just means it's very hard". On the contrary, I have witnessed people being fired or looked down upon just for having a bad reputation, even when they were doing just fine or had legitimate roadblocks on some tasks. One of my good friends got fired because he was the party guy of our team, so nobody was ever taking him really seriously.

vaidhy 4y ago

You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless). The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load. From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load. Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.

jsharf 4y ago
I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate functionality. The requirements are usually never actually identical and when you try to merge them it results in services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and not even a bad thing. That being said, Google for comparison does have good code re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud, tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.
- vaidhy 4y ago
  I did not say it is bad. I just wanted to point out that N^2 communications are a big hit (of course we know them for long time) and people under-estimate the co-ordination effort and the fact that already running systems impose constraints that are not true for green-field efforts. I think I am regurgitating mythical man-month here and will shut up.

nkassis 4y ago

It's not necessarily individuals. From what I saw years ago there are tons of project kicked off to see if they pan out but are probably not going to succeed. The company has some core teams around retails, mobile and AWS that do the majority of the table stakes work. The rest is a lot of team doing things that may or may not have any value. My pessimistic view is that required teams are like 10% of the company leaving 90% of maybe useful. That isn't to say the 90% should be let go. If they did you'd see no growth but it's unclear how much of it is actually useful. In good times that's fine, in rougher time they have to reduce that extra a bit.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

It's because it does not talk about employee bloat, but rather product bloat. There are a lot of teams working on either useless or _duplicate_ products. Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you, despite both teams existing for years. My previous team found out that multiple of our products had equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent products made by other teams... And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.

__derek__ 4y ago

Another way to be "bloated" is to have a lot of teams working very hard on systems/projects that don't add value to the overall business. Those teams will still manage out their low-performers and run a ruthless environment, but the folks that remain continue to work hard without providing value. Add new systems/projects underneath because people want more scope and responsibility, repeat through a few cycles, and you arrive at the quoted line.

LanceH 4y ago
The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their domain. I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that already has all the people.
- fdye 4y ago
  I used to see this occasionally and always see it as wasteful. However, there is another angle here. Imagine your a C-Suite or senior level manager and you have lots of resources at your disposal. Now you have identified a strategic widget you need to get to within some timeframe, say 2 years to lay into your grand strategic vision. Scenario A: Task a single team, staff them and let them do their thing. Cross your finger and hope they get it done. Scenario B: Look across offices, org groups, whatever, and task 2-3 (sometimes more) teams with your task. Let them start work on it and get regular demos and updates. Eventually, pick a winner. B looks very wasteful from the outside, until you realize that many software projects fail (like 50%). So more attempts give you a higher chance of success. Downside: Internal politics, waste, attrition from engineers throwing away code/busy work. A is great if you can do it, but you're putting all your eggs in one basket. A lot of times this is just bad org/bureaucracy though, but it can be done to great effect. Disclaimer: Worked for a CEO with a large outsourced engineering base and several offices. Would see multiple attempts at different offices all the time. Eventually, grudgingly acknowledged there was a method to that madness. Trump also is famous for this (although his seemed more madness).

axg11 4y ago

Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the investment anymore.

ctvo 4y ago
Unlike Facebook Alexa was somewhat successful. See Alexa microwaves, cars, TVs, etc.. It looks like Amazon also knows when to move on vs. Meta.
- axg11 4y ago
  Success is relative. Voice didn't turn out to be "the next big computing platform". It's still mostly a command interface. Perhaps it still could become something bigger. Alexa isn't widely used on the iPhone/iOS/CarPlay or Android/Android Auto, the two most important places for voice. Alexa works well but doesn't have a clear technology advantage vs Google Assistant (admittedly, Siri is trash). Contrast that to VR, which is in a much earlier stage of its technology and adoption cycle: Meta has a strong technology advantage, currently has the best overall platform and _if_ VR becomes the next big computing platform, Meta is in a strong position to capture a significant proportion of market share. It's a big if! but at least there's still a chance.
  - pm90 4y ago
    Voice still has a lot of potential, especially with the advances in AI that we've been seeing recently. A robust voice-controlled interface would be immensely useful to consumers. I think the investment in Alexa voice is well worth it compared to whatever meta is doing atm.
  - foobiekr 4y ago

RobertDeNiro 4y ago

This is what happens when you optimize for a certain metric only. Yeah you might have someone's who's writing tons of high quality code, but if this code is just a duplication of another project or there is no business use for it, then it you probably would have been better off not writing it in the first place. People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?

time_to_smile 4y ago

I haven't worked at Amazon, but my experience with the world of "pip" culture is that it only really appears when value is difficult to define, which is strong evidence of bloat. Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly, they don't know how to avoid it. This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero problem identifying how they can create more value to the company: close more deals. But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is evidence of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.

whatever1 4y ago
You cannot put a dollar value to every bit of work that happens in a company. What is the value of managers? What is the value of research? What is the value of procurement/ hr? What is the value of IT and internal support tools? None of these individually provide value, but remove one and the company will collapse.

serioussecurity 4y ago

Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.

jrd259 4y ago
This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.
- rurp 4y ago
  > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers. :eyeroll: This reads like PR fluff and flies against the experiences shared by a lot of employees, current and former. Amazon is a huge company with a lot of variation between teams so I'm sure it's not a meat grinder for everyone, but they don't have this reputation for no reason.
- serioussecurity 4y ago
  Done much crying at your desk recently? My boss at Amazon told me he was happy that his baby was born prematurely, because it meant he could be back at work in time for a launch.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > We hire people who want to obsess over their customers. I keep hearing this, but as a customer, I don't see it. Amazon retail experience is poor. The layout of the site sucks (so many clicks just to see all the reviews). They used to allow comments to reviews, which often were very useful (e.g. top review complaining about something not working, and the comments explain how to fix it). But reviewers weren't notified of the comments so they couldn't engage. And to top it all of, they recently removed all the comments. The reviews have been gamed, not very useful. They still let people make product pages with very different products as "formats", and that skews the reviews the wrong way. Lots of counterfeit product issues. Perhaps more common: Problems with comingling items. I know it doesn't happen often, but being burned once is bad enough. I recently bought a toy for my daughter's birthday. The box had creases. Upon opening it was clear this was a used item. Some of the items were out of their (sealed) packaging. Perhaps my mistake for not examining it before, but whenever I buy from Walmart or Target, I don't even have to think this will be a problem. Fixing it up with a great return policy is not a solution. Oh, and I couldn't return it. They recently made it hard to contact a human, and the automated return system on their web site wouldn't let me return if I had used it. I had to open it as we couldn't change her birth date. The search sucks. Way too many results that have nothing to do with what I searched. eBay, of all sites, is way better in this regard. I've also been an Amazon seller (FBA). The seller portal was crap.

whoknew1122 4y ago

I've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it. Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my time at Amazon.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
If only 0.1% of Amazon employees are very unhappy and vent their horror stories online, you will hear hundreds of bad stories. If 99.9 are "just fine" with it, you won't hear a single story...
agentofoblivion 4y ago
+1. I’ve been here almost 6 years and across 3 different teams. Never seen any of the horrors.
lightbendover 4y ago
There are absolutely quotas for every org over a certain size. If you’re not a manager and not on the chopping block, it would be hard to notice.
Chamix 4y ago
Oh my friend, there is a tool called Lift used in OLR/Talent Review by every single 50+ group at Amazon that quite literally will show your face up on a screen for everyone at the OLR meeting to discuss and rank vs your peers. If they don't have the Least Effective quota hit they will go through each face near the bottom to figure out who needs to be added. The most liberal definition possible of not stack ranking. The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to another company but who were in focus or pivot when they left. To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know: - Amazon requires 6% of employees who leave the company every year to be unregretted attrition aka URA - To be marked as URA an employee must be in Focus aka Devlist aka Devplan when they leave - Talent Review aka OLR must occur at least every 6 months for each leader with >=50 employees under him - Every employee is ranked from Least Effective - High Value 1-3 - Top Tier with quotas being 5:35:25:15:20 % respectively - The 5% rated LE must be entered into Focus - This effectively results in 10% of employees in Focus per year - Around half fail improvement plans in Focus and are presented with Pivot, which 90% results in firing. This is the oft discussed "Pip" - Rest either get out of Focus or leave themselves while on Focus and are still marked URA One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite working there.

lightbendover 4y ago

Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and it’s up to them to report up stacking within their remit and defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are made, it’s not always “fair” and varies greatly across orgs. All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org level based on value to the business. Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).

jrd259 4y ago

In eight years at Amazon (in the supply chain org as SDE and SDM) I have not encountered anything close to "ruthless". It is true that there is rough stack ranking, but only in large organizations where it is statistically meaningful.

masterof0 4y ago

I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.

brewdad 4y ago
What makes you think that isn't step two? Step one is finding the people and their stories then following up with the most promising/compelling ones.
- masterof0 4y ago
  Sure, there is plenty of ways to get someone from that company's attention, Looking for trolls in Blind is not the best way really, anyone can say anything their one, and the reporter would have no way of verifying it, then will publish something that is false, which we all know have happened many times. But if you think BBC is a extremely reliable source, then, yeah, you are right.
dsr_ 4y ago
A reported doesn't need to even know who they're talking to in order to get leads on who should be pursued, but being wrong can lead to a lot of wasted hours.

ericmcer 4y ago

If the stack ranking works then yeah they would have no bloat, but teams are just trying to demonstrate their value to someone above them who is trying to assess their value while demonstrating their own. How valuable they actually are is pretty difficult to assess. There are probably many teams sucking up millions that have a net negative impact with their contributions but how do you measure that.

black_13 4y ago

zwkrt 4y ago

Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt immense pressure. These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side, as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular types of products. I think I recall there basically being a 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling shoes on the site, etc. I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were. IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of dynamodb for instance.

Chamix 4y ago
For fun, there are currently precisely 312 employees under DynamoDB directors/VPs that are categorized at "Software Development". Including systems engineers ups it to 348.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Do you realize how big and profitable DynamoDB is? How much data they manage?
  - ngc248 4y ago
    Also DynamoDB is indeed amazing. If your usecase matches the featureset of dynamodb, it works like a charm.
aserafini 4y ago
This is totally true, I worked at Amazon when it first launched Kindle. There were multiple software engineers 100% dedicated to ‘making the Kindle product page work’ at this time.

faangiq 4y ago

Easy answer: Management is very bloated but immune, code monkey scum get the wrath of PIP.

ngc248 4y ago
Exactly ... In modern big software orgs it does not even matter if you are delivering value/ All that matters is Perception, Image and Exposure (PIE). Product quality, features, technical depth none of that matters, as long as you can manage your PIE.

AStellersSeaCow 4y ago

Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of the company, at least). This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly. That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.

washywashy 4y ago

At big companies with internal mobility, switching teams at the right time is a skill. This has positives but also the potential for bloat.