I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel tha

I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel that the 14 leadership principles offer a more balanced and actionable framework than Google's "do no evil", which unfortunately also gives a small number of activists room to do evil. An interesting observation is that Amazon used to promote slowly. A new grad would join Amazon as L4, and took more than 10 years or more to get promoted to L6. Making L6 used to be a big deal. L7 engineers were like demigods. In the early years, Amazon got most of its L7 through internal promotion, and gave them enormous power at the institutional level. Those old-timer L7s didn't give a shit about political pressures from their peer managers, so they held a really high bar on promotion. Interestingly, Amazon engineers were pretty cool with the promotion process, probably because the promotion anxiety came from comparing with one's coworkers. I heard the culture dilution accelerated in the past few years because, no surprise, Amazon hired and promoted faster. Many L7s were hired externally and could easily succumb to the pressure from peer managers. Going to the next level in three years or less has become a thing. The L8 is the new L7, yada yada yada.