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I don't know the origins of the "disagree and commit" philosophy, but Jassy's use seems like a self-serving perversion of what is an attempt at dealing with dec

• tantalor 3y ago
  > decision deadlock Where's the deadlock? It sounds like there is consensus on the side of people making the decisions (management).
  • cornstalks 3y ago
    The deadlock isn’t here. GP is talking about how “disagree and commit” is used to avoid decision deadlock (when programming), and they’re saying it’s being misused here.
• sokoloff 3y ago
  That's exactly what it's intended to mean. Until a decision is made, feel free to express your disagreement and arguments in favor of your position. If your ideas/arguments are convincing enough (words that are doing a lot of work, I realize), then it will be chosen. Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it. Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?
  • hinkley 3y ago
    Why would you persist in disagreeing with an idea if you did not see real world consequences for the wrong solution in your future? If you're dealing with obstructionist people, surely there are other ways to detect and address it than 'disagree and commit'.
    • rhaway84773 3y ago
      Or maybe it’s not obstructionist people and you just have a difference in opinion. Or you might be wrong. Or you’re the obstructionist person. That’s the whole point of disagree and commit. Most decisions are not clear cut obvious decisions, otherwise it’s unlikely there would be disagreements about them. Disagree and commit allows everyone to contribute to their max capacity and move forward once deadlock has been reached.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        At some point, your objections are noted and we're just going to move on and it's not useful to anyone if you continue to complain about the decision at every opportunity. I've been on both sides of that fence. At some point, you buy in or move on--whatever that means.
      • hinkley 3y ago
        I've worked two places that had this rule, and both of them only needed it because they had profound issues elsewhere in their management practice that were leading to trust issues. One of them was almost certainly cargo culting Amazon. There's only one place I can think of that might have benefited from that rule, and there were other solutions that would have worked as well if not better. Like a boss with a backbone.
        • disgruntledphd2 3y ago
          The real trouble with disagree and commit comes where it's the manager/leadership pushing ideas that are gonna cause problems. Ultimately, if you need to exercise your management authority about stuff that your reports are doing that's a time-limited move, as too much of this will lead to reports just doing exactly what they're told, which is the kiss of death if you want to build good stuff quickly.
    • sokoloff 3y ago
      Why are people people? For nearly any policy change, you can probably find 20% or more of people who would not have made that same exact choice. Many of them, if left to their own devices, will persist in disagreeing, slow-rolling, being mildly obstructionist, or similar. If you don't have a clear (and enforced) principle that requires the implementation of made decisions and bars re-opening discussion absent material new information, you'll end up with an organization that lazily drifts towards the new decision instead of aggressively pivots towards it. That's clearly accepted in some companies; it doesn't seem to be accepted at Amazon.
  • ninthcat 3y ago
    The "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that Jassy can twist the meaning a bit.
    • vanjajaja1 3y ago
      In my experience as a bar raiser this is not correct. 'Disagree and commit' was about creating space disagreement/discussion, until a critical point where you need your team to align with upper level direction.
    • nickm12 3y ago
      I respectfully disagree. :) The leadership principle is agnostic to the roles—the point is that people should not go along with decisions due to social cohesion but should express their disagreements and make their case. However, once a decision is made, the team should commit to implementing it. Ultimately, the decision making power still resides in the management chain, though.
  • sidewndr46 3y ago
    But has it actually been communicated? In other words did Jassy email all Amazon employees globally and state that they must work from the office?
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  “Disagree and commit” only applies to the side on the lower side of the power dynamics.
  • salawat 3y ago
    Ain't it funny how that works?
• ghaff 3y ago
  Most commonly attributed to Andy Grove at Intel although also Scott McNealy at Sun.
• tiffanyh 3y ago
  > ”Disagree-and-commit when applied between superiors and reports could be rewritten as just ‘shut up and follow orders.’” The CEO isn’t just any superior, they are the highest superior. So literally everything coming from the CEO is “do X and follow orders”
  • TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
    In the particular case of Jassy, likely. But “STFU and do what I say” is a choice in management style, and not all CEOs choose that approach.
• ipython 3y ago
  Disagree and commit (more specifically have a backbone; disagree and commit) is one of the fourteen Amazon leadership principles which is why he’s probably using that specific language Ref. https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
  • Tommstein 3y ago
    Simultaneously telling you to have a backbone, and to bend over and take it. Hopefully that backbone is flexible.
• taurath 3y ago
  I was just disagreeing and committing is the new “just following orders”
  • rhaway84773 3y ago
    That’s a ridiculous comparison. “just following orders” is very much shorthand for following morally heinous decisions because you were asked to. In that case you disagree and quit. If you’re braver than most people you blow a whistle, etc. Just following orders is not about working arrangements in a corporation. And if you do find working arrangements morally heinous then you disagree and quit.
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      It's assumed that you follow orders up to a certain point. You'll be told every day to do something you don't totally agree with (but isn't criminal), and you should do it anyway without dwelling on it too much, which maybe sounds obvious but some people really dwell. Except, moving cities isn't a small decision you accept without considering quitting.
    • taurath 3y ago
      The power dynamics between a corporation and a person are very lopsided towards the corporation. Advice of “they should just quit” seems to assume opportunity elsewhere, and undermines the amount of pain and disruption to people’s lives at the whim of executives who can far more easily weather consequences. Having to have a Tesla instead of a Bugatti or a 24 foot boat is a lot different than someone worried about being able to make their mortgage payment, move their kids to different schools and a completely different social group, or face a multi hour commute. It gets a lot more dicey when someone will lose the roof over their head because someone decided to close a warehouse.
    • andrewjl 3y ago
      How would you describe the decision that kept their warehouses open and running despite dangerous heat levels?
  • smsm42 3y ago
• dekhn 3y ago
  I don't do disagree and commit. If I disagree and get asked to commit to something I don't agree with, I start my search for a new role immediately. This has been an option throughout my career, and I think many people simply don't have that option, especially early in their career.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    Tabs vs spaces, braces on the line above or a line by themselves, allowing implicit true/false vs requiring a leading 0 != in c/c++, function naming conventions, documentation system conventions, etc., etc. Sure, you could quit every time you disagreed with any of those decisions, but that seems like a lot of wasted effort and time. For all of those, I could disagree and commit to working collaboratively on the team that had made a decision other than the one I preferred.
    • dekhn 3y ago
      Disagree and commit isn't about minor style guide details. It's about making major strategic decisions that affect lots of people. (I should have thought this would be obvious from context)
      • sokoloff 3y ago
        Disagree and commit is ideally suited for something like the tabs vs spaces or other style guide debates where there's no obviously/universally best answer. It's more important that all devs in a given file (at least) are using the same convention and people have different opinions about it. Have the discussion (the time to disagree), make and publish a decision, expect everyone to commit to the made decision. Every time the style guide says something that you didn't like, that you argued against, and you vigorously comply anyway, you've just disagreed and committed. Like you're supposed to as a professional in minor matters.
        • stephenr 3y ago
          > something like the tabs vs spaces ... where there's no obviously/universally best answer. No there is, some people are just wrong.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  It's similar to "lead, follow, or get out of the way," but I prefer that version cause it's less confusing and doesn't sound like technical jargon.
  • oceanplexian 3y ago
    It’s got a good ring to it, but it sounds incredibly boneheaded. In any business endeavor there is no leader or follower, there are a number of stakeholders with varying interests and proficiencies. Is “lead follow or get out of the way” something you would be embarrassed to tell a customer? An investor? Because customers and investors are stakeholders as well. The real world doesn’t look like an infantry boot camp.
• vagab0nd 3y ago
  The Amazon LPs has to be the most blatant corporate brain-washing tool ever invented. Put aside the contradicting nature between the LPs themselves, they are almost exclusively used for the benefit of the company and at the expense of the employees. It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
  • cmpbl 3y ago
    (Former Amazon) Tenets in general, including the LPs, are valuable as a common decision-making framework. Amazon is a leader in laying those out there for all to read (including on their public website). People would frequently refer to the LPs in resolving difficult debates, and I valued them. Amazon is Amazon because it gets things done. Certainly many at Amazon circa 2000s thought AWS was an incredible boondoggle and risk. "We sell books, why the hell would we sink capital into renting servers." Surely those same people disagreed and committed. Others have probably disagreed and committed to ideas that did prove to be terrible. But you increase your success rate by increasing your attempt rate... and nothing interesting happens at a stand still.
    • vagab0nd 3y ago
      Sorry, I don't buy it. I don't doubt that Amazon is a great company. But if you are asserting that it got there because of the LPs I find it hard to believe. Are you suggesting that had those people "had backbone" and "were right, a lot", then AWS wouldn't have succeeded? That seems quite far-fetched. The LPs look good on paper. But it's a stretch to call it a decision-making framework because the LPs are so vague and open to interpretation. Furthermore, they are often used by those in power to exploit those who are not, as illustrated by the story. Then again, I don't work for Amazon so what do I know.