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Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon

218 points by ecliptik 2y ago

lacoolj 2y ago
Time to sell all our $AMZN
- kkfx 2y ago
  Honestly? For what I see recently the 2023 report https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap... about a general "slowdown" seems to be more a nearby 1929... Automakers after exceptionally high profit while their volumes was lower and lower seems to be come to an end, the AI push, a clear bubble, seems ready to burst, most tech-centric projects from autonomous vehicles to smart cities show their bad outcome. Essentially in the west we seems to be still the best ONLY in PR and weapons. All others sectors are down. BTW just to show where we are here in EU a BYD Atto 3 costs for the basic version ~37.990€ while in Thailand (so imported as well from China) cost ~8750€ while our small power tools producer have started to produce only crap and hyper-expensive non-crappy tools, with even DRM in batteries locking the user out of the ability to switch the same battery from two same vendor devices, in China all batteries can be swapped from any vendor simply because they choose standard connectors. There are simple examples, but also good enough indicators how bad things are. We are still better in software, but with current management trends it will not last longer, and with current scholar reforms... Well... I doubt new generations can be less than mere incompetent than ever...
nerdo 2y ago
https://archive.ph/iDMXO https://archive.ph/iDMXO
- neonate 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240731161606/https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240731161606/https://fortune.c...
chipdart 2y ago
I don't think the people quoting leadership principles are coming from a place of knowledge or worse: honesty. Regardless of whether you think about the RTO mandate, internally Amazon leaves it quite clear that the whole point of these leadership principles is to reduce ambiguity, which means drive decision-making in the absence of a clear direction. This is absolutely not the case with RTO. There was a very clear and specific diktat from the very top of the organization. There was no ambiguity or void to fill in the decision-making process. For that, Amazon also has a leadership principle: disagree and commit. Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote work was the exception and not the norm. For example, L4s were explicitly barred from WFO, and L5s and above had to explicitly request an exception in order to work partially from home. It's ok to frame the debate on whether it's in the company's interest to enforce RTO. It's complete nonsense and utterly absurd to quote leadership principles to justify their position. Also, I should add that Amazon's RTO mandate was pushed when the company was trying to cull their workforce. The general feeling was always that RTO was designed to push people out without paying severance. Citing "hire and develop the best" when ignoring how the company was decimating teams doesn't build up the critic's credibility.
- gedy 2y ago
  > Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote work was the exception and not the norm. Sure - but I don't support the RTO order for people hired remote during pandemic without a totally unambiguous "this is just temporary" when hired. What was the situation for those hired 2020-2023?
  - anononaut 2y ago
    In my mind, the long term WFH for everybody at every company was temporary. To me that seems obvious. It was implicitly unambiguous.
    - digging 2y ago
      Is "implicitly unambiguous" anything but an oxymoron? Do you think all humans have access to your mental model of the world?
lupusreal 2y ago
> At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts. Just like most religious principles, these tenets are vague enough to leave incredible room for interpretation, managers can cite them to justify just about any policy. I have no doubt that the return to office was somehow justified with the same tenets that are cited in the objections. That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate club.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate club. I don't think you have a grasp on the subject. Leadership principles are decision-making guidelines. Instead of paralyzing teams because someone needs to make a call, amazonians are encouraged to simply act based on a set of guidelines. That's why "customer obsession" is the top principle, and everyone talks about "ownership". You're expected to show "bias for action" which means making decisions instead of waiting around for someone else to do or say something. Everyone needs to make decisions on a daily basis and if you have a clear guideline telling you that you need to do things a certain way or prioritize something, it's hard to justify doing the exact opposite just because you felt like it. That's the exact opposite of a theological debate, as there is a very clear actionable item and deliverable without requiring anyone to sit around debating nonsense.
  - rolfralf 2y ago
    Except you can invoke other leadership principles to counter that. You are not "waiting around for someone else". You are "being right, a lot" and "insisting on the highest standards". It's just about how able you are to use them in your favor. In a sense, it is all bullshit. Just like a theological debate.
    - ben0x539 2y ago
      I think, just like theological debate, it looks arbitrary from the outside trying to reconstruct the whole discipline from first(/leadership) principles and ignoring the scholarship that has been done in the past couple thousand years/implicit understanding that has been built in years of meetings.
htrp 2y ago
Welcome to Day 2.... the founder is off building yachts and spaceships.
- FredPret 2y ago
  It's not a spaceship until it reaches space!
acedTrex 2y ago
Amazon is a shit hole of a company, in all divisions from the very top. The reason they pay so much is that they literally could not hire a single soul otherwise.
- neofrommatrix 2y ago
  It’s still lower than other big tech. Plus, their fine print when it comes to benefits sucks. For example, three year vesting on 401k company contribution and the skewed stock vesting policy. There are others I have been personally affected by that I could mention. Amazon overall has been designed to burn out employees and throw them out.
  - ajhurliman 2y ago
    You get paid cash in lieu of RSUs to bring your early years' TC up to what you signed up for, you could just buy AMZN with you cash if you wanted to.
  - rybosworld 2y ago
    It's not a secret that many (most) teams in amazon churn through their engineers. But working at Amazon is seen as a way to pad the resume. That's why so many engineers are willing to spend 2-3 years. Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by joining Amazon.
    - gary_0 2y ago
      > Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by joining Amazon. I didn't at first, but the interview "process" was hilariously informative. I didn't pass the interview, but by that point I knew it was for the best. The best part was the "casual lunch" with a random team member in the middle of the day-long interview. This young man seethed, for what reason I couldn't guess. It was hard not to take it personally, but in retrospect the dark energy radiating off this individual was a profound and timely warning that one does not simply walk into Amazon.
- throwawaymeta01 2y ago
alephnerd 2y ago
From TFA: > The disruption caused by the pandemic, as well as the doubling of Amazon’s headcount in two years, was more to blame, they say. > Those who joined right before the pandemic, or during the madness of 2020 and 2021, had little time to learn and adapt. Learning through meeting interactions over videoconferencing, for example, was much less conducive to osmosis than in-person interactions, either planned or serendipitous run-ins, several sources said. Amazon's massive hiring spree during the pandemic seemed to be the biggest cause for the decline of it's culture internally, and it's something I've heard from friends as well.
- angarg12 2y ago
  Is it the case though? I mean, it's extremely convenient for leadership to say that of course it isn't the fault, it's the fault of new employees and WFH. But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault? they are the ones who allowed or enabled bloating and empire building, and they are the ones who didn't intervene when culture started deteriorating. Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly? TL;DR it's very rich for execs to blame rank and file employees, as if they are powerless to change anything.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault Pre-COVID Amazon was always an in-person culture company - there just wasn't the muscle needed to manage a fully remote organization. People really underestimate how difficult it is to convert a company that was almost entirely in-person and synchronous to a fully async culture. A company isn't just SDE1s and SDE2s writing code - it's also PMs communicating with Sales, Sales communicating with E-Staff, Support communicating with Eng, Eng Leadership communicating with other Eng Leadership, etc. The brass tacks are that in-person meetings are absolutely more synchronized and efficient, because not all communication can successfully occur over Zoom - you'll often need to meet other members to build consensus or have spontaneous conversations with peers or managers, and scheduling or doing those over Zoom or Slack is difficult. > Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly? Execs play a role, and clearly Amazon's execs have decided that being fully remote just didn't make sense with how they operated. Also, this kind of an argument absolves line level employees if we're being honest. A culture is the sum of it's parts, and if line level employees aren't working on propagating the culture they want, then it's on them too. If execs try to draconianly enforce culture, then the same people complaining about lack of culture will complain about the "corporate cult" (eg. HN complaining about Apple or Amazon pre-covid). This doesn't mean that companies can't be fully remote - they absolutely can. It just takes A LOT of effort and a massive cultural shift to become an async organization: a lot of documentation, touchpoints, and aggressive calendaring is required and you end up having to do on-sites every couple weeks anyhow to re-sync.
aw93jr4alw3j4 2y ago
[flagged]
codingwagie 2y ago
I'm a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago) The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets. If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions. AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
- gnz11 2y ago
  > I'm a long time Amazonian. > If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, ... Doesn't this include yourself as well then?
  - seizethecheese 2y ago
    Significant amount != all
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      Ah, so "everyone but me" type deal.
    - jcadam 2y ago
      And which ones do we keep? Which senior engineers are just coasting and which are among the few who are the final reservoir of institutional knowledge holding everything together? Does anyone know? Meh, let's just hand the task to HR and hope it all works out.
ajhurliman 2y ago
I really like Amazon's LPs, but I think they're often stretched to accommodate whatever opinion one has.
- belval 2y ago
  That's a misconception of what the LP are for though (in my opinion). They exist to provide a shared vocabulary that helps with meetings/interviews/reviews. "Deliver results/bias for action" are often at odds with "insist on the highest standards", same with "disagree and commit" and "ownership". The point is to get people to hash out the difference in opinions along 12 (the other 2 are atrocities) axis that give a direction to the discussion. I've heard "I think this decision is not customer obsessed and we need to do better" in a lot of meetings. Make fun of the LPs all you want (I really get it), but they are definitely a net positive in the day-to-day.
  - ajhurliman 2y ago
    I’m not making fun of them, I really like them. I also appreciate the shared vocabulary; in conversations with good actors they’re very beneficial. However, I stand by my statement that they’re abused for propagating one’s own agenda. Like you said there are adversarial LPs, and sometimes there is a clear winner but the opposing side can masquerade behind the opposing LP and make it seem like they’re in good faith. They’re a net benefit for sure, but it really works best when you don’t have bad actors (I guess that’s probably true for all paradigms though).
matrix87 2y ago
this is completely unrelated but amazon quality has gone significantly down over the past couple months 3 out of the 4 times I've ordered something from them it either didn't show up or the wrong thing showed up most of these sellers seem to just be dropshippers with chinese goods employing "reputation management" tactics. can't say I trust the average amazon seller at this point
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  There's a comment to this effect on every thread even tangentially related to Amazon's marketplace for the past 5+ years, all with timeframes that are much shorter (like your "a few months") - much shorter than the timelines that are implied by how long those comments have existed. There has been some gradual decline, but realistically you just had a string of bad luck with Amazon fulfillment and it's not indicative of any particular recent change.
  - rybosworld 2y ago
    The same thing was said about google search for a while - that it was declining in quality. Some people noticed and others didn't. You'd see threads with one person claiming google search is worse. Another person chimes in with a comment similar to yours; that is: "your experience has just been uniquely unlucky". Then almost overnight, the search quality reached a point where most people took notice and agreed: "yeah the search quality really is worse". I'm not saying this is what's going on with Amazon, but this pattern is a typical part of enshittification.
    - LordDragonfang 2y ago
      While I agree that it can be a pattern of enshittification, I don't think it's one that Amazon is actually currently going through, at least with regards to fulfillment. If anything, I think they probably had a drop in quality a little over 5 years ago that has long since plateaued. I order lots of items from Amazon (50+ in the past month alone) across a lot of categories (non-perishable food, fun clothing for myself and my partner, office supplies, lots of little fun trinkets, etc) and I can only remember one in the past several months (easily >100 items) that failed to arrive (An obscure limited edition flavor of lemon kitkats specifically not fulfilled by amazon), and even that was something that they notified me of. And I literally can't remember the last time I received an actually "wrong" item. I think people showing up with stories of 3/4 of their orders being messed up are the kind of extreme outliers you get from a product used by tens of millions of people - and by the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people who read HN. It's just something that happens sometimes in the global supply chain. Hell, I personally have experience with that from one of my few significant purchases from a brick-and-mortar: the mattress topper they were supposed to get me in a week was delayed by 3 months because the delivery truck was stolen, in Texas That said, it's ironic that you bring up search, because I think Amazon's search is the part of the storefront that is actually undergoing active enshittification right now.
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
> There’s also a rabid attention on so-called “input” metrics of a certain business—think selection or price—rather than output metrics such as revenue. Anyone wanna comment on the distinction? Why are input metrics any more important than output metrics? In fact I'm not even sure I understand why price is characterized as "input" and revenue as "output". Input and output to what exactly?
- dastbe 2y ago
  goals. taking a different example, you might have a goal to lower outage minutes by 50%, so your output metric is “outage minutes”. in order to change the output, you need to identify what projects/mechanisms you can use to change the output. More often i’ve seen these be referred to as input goals (increase test coverage, adopt feature flagging, etc.) but you could always associate a metric to them.
  - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    Ok but "outage minutes" is itself an input to something else, like customer satisfaction or whatever. So that label isn't really clarifying anything.
    - dastbe 2y ago
      What you're saying sounds the same as "The output of one service is the input to another, so the label isn't really clarifying anything". There's plenty of value in breaking apart all of the interactions between various parts of the system and looking at their outputs and how they intend to change those outputs through which inputs.
- ben0x539 2y ago
  I think the idea is that input is things that you absolutely, directly control, and output is more like "outcomes". You can control the price and certainly you can impact revenue by setting a price and, like, doing the whole rest of your job, but you still don't directly set the revenue. My understanding of why they make this distinction is that if you focus on output metrics and you don't meet the target, you can be rationalize it as "well, we did a really good job but we failed to meet the goal because of circumstances beyond our control/market conditions/...", but if you focus on an input metric you're more directly accountable on whether you did what you said you'd do, and you come up with more actionable steps on how to fix it if not.
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
The article mentions LPs being used punitively. That reminds me of the idea that "when a measurement becomes a target, it creates to become a good measurement". What's happening is that LPs started out a guidelines on how to make good decisions. It was explained to employees that LPs should be taken seriously and show that that people who genuinely apply the LPs get promoted more. Therefore, displaying LPs became an easier way to get promoted than actually making good decisions.
theGnuMe 2y ago
Amazon's retail problem is that it is failing the customer by using 3rd party sellers. And in places where Walmart+ or Target circle are available I bet they are losing sales. I actually prefer Walmart+ and Target now.. but I am only N=1. I may do the whole foods delivery when it becomes available though so that would bring me back in to the Amazon fold.
- jlund-molfese 2y ago
  Walmart+ InHome in particular is a great experience compared to Amazon Fresh. You can get regular Walmart+ deliveries for $98/year, but for another $40/year, you get unlimited deliveries by a Walmart employee who doesn't accept tips and makes sure they're delivering to the right address. My only worry is that Walmart might be subsidizing the service, because as a customer I'm paying less and I'm happier compared to the gig worker version.
- The-Bus 2y ago
  Walmart also uses 3rd Party Sellers; I don't believe Target does. There's enough commentary about false/bootleg products on Amazon that it's no longer my primary destination for any purchases I need delivered.
  - theGnuMe 2y ago
    They do but they are easier to avoid buying from. It's usually the same folks crossed listed across amazon, walmart, target, ebay etc...
- avnfish 2y ago
  Amazon 1st party is and continues to be a loss leader. If they got rid of their 3rd party sellers tomorrow, the company would go bankrupt from the loss of B2B commission, fulfilment and ads revenue
ralferoo 2y ago
> the two-pizza rule: teams focused on a specific goal or project should be lean enough that two pies could suffice as a team meal. Today I learned that teams in Amazon should contain no more than 2 people.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  I think that’s actually true if you need more than 8 people things start to break down fast
- deanCommie 2y ago
  Tell me you're Italian without telling me you're Italian lol. The Amazon "2 pizzas" are Two Large American pizzas. Something with 8-12 slices where 2 slices is enough for a meal.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    I think they were bragging about how much they eat.
    - ycombinatrix 2y ago
      "bragging"
- klyrs 2y ago
  No more than two managers. Pizza is withheld from developers for performance reasons.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Dangle the slice just out of reach...
- linuxlizard 2y ago
  > the two-pizza rule: Or just me.
georgeecollins 2y ago
They should stop making a cargo cult of Amazon's idiosyncratic management techniques and adopt the "GE Way" that is proven to be the best way to run a company by business school professors all over the world.
- jessepasley 2y ago
  This bring laughter to my life
- downrightmike 2y ago
  Neutron Jack is the worst person to look to for management advice. He only got lucky, but not because he did the right things.
bilater 2y ago
"I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt," Jeff Bezos. One of the most surprising things in my brief experience at Amazon was how much of a shitshow it was. The two-pizza rule and self-sustainability for each team led to huge overlaps, with teams doing the same thing. With such a huge organization, you had to go through 15 different stakeholders to get a single thing done, and there was an ingrained middle management whose only function was to connect you to the right person. Just figuring out who was responsible for what and how to get things done was a challenge in itself. Despite all this, Amazon still succeeds, and their process of PR/FAQ, leadership principles, and one-pagers is one of the best I've ever seen. But I wonder if at some point, like with any philosophy and just like Bezos predicted, it will become too much and the whole thing will cave in on itself.
- bilater 2y ago
  Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything...which sounds great but that includes basic software like their own Github. They had this monstrosity called Code Commit that I saw recently is getting canned. Good riddance. What an ugly pos.
  - xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
    > Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything This is false. Otherwise I'd be interested in any reliable sources. As far as I can tell this is some sort of urban myth since AWS first stepped onto the scene.
    - zbentley 2y ago
      I believe it's based on Steve Yegge's original microservices rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 I don't think that's myth, though I've heard it criticized variously as outdated, or just one person's take.
      - xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
        There's nothing in Yegge's rant that implies Amazon must dog food AWS. AWS as we know it, was, if anything, a byproduct of the efforts described by the rant. Amazon certainly uses AWS but I think it's foolish to think they use every product (they obviously do not) nor that they must. For the foundational pieces -- EC2, SNS, S3 -- sure, of course. They spent a long time migrating workloads. I don't expect that with every new service they launch that they have already widely adopted it by then. Maybe after their customers widely adopt it, if ever.
jedberg 2y ago
> Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos (“6-pagers,” in Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a contributor to Amazon’s world-beating success as any blockbuster product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself. I have said many times, and will continue to say: Amazon is a 2 trillion dollar company despite their policies, not because of them.
- asynchronous 2y ago
  A lot of people that work at Amazon drink the koolaid though, and come out thinking like they’re the best people on the face of the planet for working at Amazon.
EricE 2y ago
50 years is about the right age for any human organization. After that, dark patterns start to irreparably corrupt them. Also stumbled on this yesterday which has had me really pondering a lot of my thoughts and assumptions too: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392 https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392
smarm52 2y ago
Amazon management ethos is famous. I've always wondered if it's actually effective. Traditionally, power follow these rules: De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D. (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press. Which is echoed in the article: > One current Amazon senior manager said they’ve consistently observed bosses new to the company use the principles “as weapons to put those who aren’t favorites in their place,” while employing other principles to build up their favorites. I'd assume that the older management style that the article points out (from Bezos) was similar, but with different words; As these rules about power are consistent from governments, to companies, to home owners associations, etc. But the article paints a rosy picture of them, so it's not clear if there's something novel there, or just a dressed up version of the same old rules.
wormlord 2y ago
Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles. I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding at Amazon. Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow, attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"? People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to being in the right place at the right time.
- dimmke 2y ago
  Thank you for saying this. If you look at Amazon's history, it's basically buying most of their competitors.
rdtsc 2y ago
> There are 16 Leadership Principles at Amazon. Any Amazon employee can recite most of them by heart (those who can’t won’t last very long). My friend urged me to apply to Amazon, I didn't want to but thought what the heck, let's sacrifice a day of vacation to give it whirl. But it was very bizarre experience. It felt like some communist party meeting having to learn the tenants and repeating them back and sing praises to the great Jeff. No doubt, most of those are good principles, but the cult-like attitude seemed strange. > “Sometimes I’ll hear, ‘It’s amazing you had this ‘bias for action’…and other times when I believe I’ve had ‘bias for action,’ they will say you weren’t data-driven (from the leadership principle ‘Dive deep’) enough.” That's brilliant. They've converged to selective enforcement one of the central pillars of corruption and control. Introduce just slightly contradictory rules, and with 16, that's already enough, and you can use them for anything.
- asynchronous 2y ago
  Yeah I don’t think I can swallow my brain long enough to deal with nonsense like that. Most companies have dumb principals but they don’t force you to memorize them.
eigenvalue 2y ago
I still can't get over how bad Alexa is, how it barely even works to do the simplest tasks, gets so confused so easily, etc. They have spent so much money. They have so many developers. They have so much compute available. The technology to make it way better is just lying around and open source now, and has been for the past 1.5 years at least. If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working. It's just mind boggling how poorly managed the whole thing has been, and I think it's a real indictment of top management for letting it get so bad after so much effort and money.
- textlapse 2y ago
  OTOH, it's the most perfect device for our household. I have tried other devices - they all do gimmicky stuff and slow down the primary use-case because someone arbitrarily decided what I should ask (or worse, they ask for feedback after getting everything wrong - like I am a free human training sample to their massive dataset) My use cases are: play songs via bluetooth, turn on/off things (it's almost scary how fast it is), and set kitchen timers. It's perfect, fast and gets to the point (just says 'Okay' as a response). No gimmicky answers to stuff like 'meaning of life, universe and everything' or 'how many tennis balls would cover the surface of Mars etc'. Just. Gets. The. Job. Done. No need for fancy LLMs here.
  - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
    I've got some of the Google ones, and I quite like them, but it weirds me out how many common things they just can't do. For me (and for other people, I suspect), the #1 use case for these things is kitchen timers, and they can do that, and they have fun custom animations for different and sounds for different things I'm timing, but then I ask for it to take a minute off the timer, and it can't, or I ask to rename a timer, and it can't.
- weezin 2y ago
  >If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working This is literally what they are doing lol.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Consider Amazon's home assistant business - Alexa. Its hard for me to imagine that customers are the focus of these products. It appears that Amazon's commercial interests are the focus of Alexa. Alexa could be awesome but its just not.
strivingtobe 2y ago
The article brings up the two new LPs that were added, one being "Strive to be the world's best employer". The biggest slap in the face about this LP is that the word "strive" used to be a bad word at Amazon. If you ever said you were going to "strive" to do something, you would be told that's not good enough. If you put it in a doc, you would be told to remove it. "Strive" was a weasel word. We never accepted "striving" as part of our tenets or our goals. Our goals never were to "strive to build a good service", our goal was just "build a good service"! And then they went and made the new LP "Strive to be the world's best employer". Why isn't it just "Be the world's best employer"? It may seem like a small thing, but it's an example of the ethos that has been chipped away inside Amazon. That particular LP has always been the butt of jokes because it's been clear over the last 5 years that leadership isn't actually serious about it, but the use of the weasel word "strive" really just put the cherry on top.
- mlwiese 2y ago
  There is no try, only do. -Yoda
- rty32 2y ago
  I mean, everybody knows LPs are BS when they put "Strive to be the world's best employer". Anyone who either works/worked at Amazon or knows someone working there understand what the work culture is like there. And of course, everybody understands there is no way you can force people back into office -- many people commute over an hour a day -- and also be "best employer" at the same time. That's just obvious.
nibab 2y ago
As a former Amazonian (2017-2020) I was a big believer in the leadership principles partly due to how often they were referenced during my time there and partly due to the business world's obsession with Amazon's secret sauce. The company does a very good job at indoctrinating everyone by using them extensively throughout the hiring/performance management lifecycle. In fact, during the interview loop each interviewer is tasked with evaluating whether the candidate exhibits a specific leadership principle. As many have pointed out, with time you notice the principles being used in all sorts of ways against you depending on the context. The management class is conditioned to tell you that "principles are deliberately in contention with one another"...which gives everyone the necessary cover to spin a particular guiding principle in whichever way suits them in that moment. Or you could buy the kool-aid and pretend that whoever architected these principles was so linguistically adept that they truly figured out the perfect way of articulating a set of contentious principles that taken together distill the exact cultural nuance that Amazon is all about. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave. In their current state, the leadership principles are simply a way of defining the lingo for work conversations and providing some sort of framework for decision making (emphasis on framework)...which still has a bounding effect on how things are done at Amazon, albeit in a very very limited way. I do think most people would have trouble coming up with their own decision-making framework if they had to, never-mind articulating or communicating it to their peers. However, it would be preposterous to claim that the Amazon principles have any significant cultural value, at least in the narrow definition that most people commonly ascribe to "business culture" (ie language is also culture, but in this context its more about unique behavior specific to a company). What drives the culture more than anything at Amazon is the insane growth that the company has seen in the past couple of decades. People there have felt it very deeply and have the battle scars to prove it. Everyone that has been at the company long enough will point to the often counter-intuitive things that one should do to succeed at sustaining this type of growth. Bear in mind this is a different type of business than the other high growth behemoths of the industry and Amazon has its own peculiar aspects.. As far as the article goes, I think that the most important aspect that the author gets right is that. the decline is probably due to the influx of people in middle management that don't have any idea about what it really took to build Amazon into what it is today.
loldk 2y ago
[dead]

218 points by ecliptik 2y ago

lacoolj 2y ago

Time to sell all our $AMZN

kkfx 2y ago
Honestly? For what I see recently the 2023 report https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap... about a general "slowdown" seems to be more a nearby 1929... Automakers after exceptionally high profit while their volumes was lower and lower seems to be come to an end, the AI push, a clear bubble, seems ready to burst, most tech-centric projects from autonomous vehicles to smart cities show their bad outcome. Essentially in the west we seems to be still the best ONLY in PR and weapons. All others sectors are down. BTW just to show where we are here in EU a BYD Atto 3 costs for the basic version ~37.990€ while in Thailand (so imported as well from China) cost ~8750€ while our small power tools producer have started to produce only crap and hyper-expensive non-crappy tools, with even DRM in batteries locking the user out of the ability to switch the same battery from two same vendor devices, in China all batteries can be swapped from any vendor simply because they choose standard connectors. There are simple examples, but also good enough indicators how bad things are. We are still better in software, but with current management trends it will not last longer, and with current scholar reforms... Well... I doubt new generations can be less than mere incompetent than ever...

nerdo 2y ago

https://archive.ph/iDMXO https://archive.ph/iDMXO

neonate 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240731161606/https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240731161606/https://fortune.c...

chipdart 2y ago

I don't think the people quoting leadership principles are coming from a place of knowledge or worse: honesty. Regardless of whether you think about the RTO mandate, internally Amazon leaves it quite clear that the whole point of these leadership principles is to reduce ambiguity, which means drive decision-making in the absence of a clear direction. This is absolutely not the case with RTO. There was a very clear and specific diktat from the very top of the organization. There was no ambiguity or void to fill in the decision-making process. For that, Amazon also has a leadership principle: disagree and commit. Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote work was the exception and not the norm. For example, L4s were explicitly barred from WFO, and L5s and above had to explicitly request an exception in order to work partially from home. It's ok to frame the debate on whether it's in the company's interest to enforce RTO. It's complete nonsense and utterly absurd to quote leadership principles to justify their position. Also, I should add that Amazon's RTO mandate was pushed when the company was trying to cull their workforce. The general feeling was always that RTO was designed to push people out without paying severance. Citing "hire and develop the best" when ignoring how the company was decimating teams doesn't build up the critic's credibility.

gedy 2y ago
> Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote work was the exception and not the norm. Sure - but I don't support the RTO order for people hired remote during pandemic without a totally unambiguous "this is just temporary" when hired. What was the situation for those hired 2020-2023?
- anononaut 2y ago
  In my mind, the long term WFH for everybody at every company was temporary. To me that seems obvious. It was implicitly unambiguous.
  - digging 2y ago
    Is "implicitly unambiguous" anything but an oxymoron? Do you think all humans have access to your mental model of the world?

lupusreal 2y ago

> At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts. Just like most religious principles, these tenets are vague enough to leave incredible room for interpretation, managers can cite them to justify just about any policy. I have no doubt that the return to office was somehow justified with the same tenets that are cited in the objections. That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate club.

chipdart 2y ago
> That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate club. I don't think you have a grasp on the subject. Leadership principles are decision-making guidelines. Instead of paralyzing teams because someone needs to make a call, amazonians are encouraged to simply act based on a set of guidelines. That's why "customer obsession" is the top principle, and everyone talks about "ownership". You're expected to show "bias for action" which means making decisions instead of waiting around for someone else to do or say something. Everyone needs to make decisions on a daily basis and if you have a clear guideline telling you that you need to do things a certain way or prioritize something, it's hard to justify doing the exact opposite just because you felt like it. That's the exact opposite of a theological debate, as there is a very clear actionable item and deliverable without requiring anyone to sit around debating nonsense.
- rolfralf 2y ago
  Except you can invoke other leadership principles to counter that. You are not "waiting around for someone else". You are "being right, a lot" and "insisting on the highest standards". It's just about how able you are to use them in your favor. In a sense, it is all bullshit. Just like a theological debate.
  - ben0x539 2y ago
    I think, just like theological debate, it looks arbitrary from the outside trying to reconstruct the whole discipline from first(/leadership) principles and ignoring the scholarship that has been done in the past couple thousand years/implicit understanding that has been built in years of meetings.

htrp 2y ago

Welcome to Day 2.... the founder is off building yachts and spaceships.

FredPret 2y ago
It's not a spaceship until it reaches space!

acedTrex 2y ago

Amazon is a shit hole of a company, in all divisions from the very top. The reason they pay so much is that they literally could not hire a single soul otherwise.

neofrommatrix 2y ago
It’s still lower than other big tech. Plus, their fine print when it comes to benefits sucks. For example, three year vesting on 401k company contribution and the skewed stock vesting policy. There are others I have been personally affected by that I could mention. Amazon overall has been designed to burn out employees and throw them out.
- ajhurliman 2y ago
  You get paid cash in lieu of RSUs to bring your early years' TC up to what you signed up for, you could just buy AMZN with you cash if you wanted to.
- rybosworld 2y ago
  It's not a secret that many (most) teams in amazon churn through their engineers. But working at Amazon is seen as a way to pad the resume. That's why so many engineers are willing to spend 2-3 years. Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by joining Amazon.
  - gary_0 2y ago
    > Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by joining Amazon. I didn't at first, but the interview "process" was hilariously informative. I didn't pass the interview, but by that point I knew it was for the best. The best part was the "casual lunch" with a random team member in the middle of the day-long interview. This young man seethed, for what reason I couldn't guess. It was hard not to take it personally, but in retrospect the dark energy radiating off this individual was a profound and timely warning that one does not simply walk into Amazon.
throwawaymeta01 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago

From TFA: > The disruption caused by the pandemic, as well as the doubling of Amazon’s headcount in two years, was more to blame, they say. > Those who joined right before the pandemic, or during the madness of 2020 and 2021, had little time to learn and adapt. Learning through meeting interactions over videoconferencing, for example, was much less conducive to osmosis than in-person interactions, either planned or serendipitous run-ins, several sources said. Amazon's massive hiring spree during the pandemic seemed to be the biggest cause for the decline of it's culture internally, and it's something I've heard from friends as well.

angarg12 2y ago
Is it the case though? I mean, it's extremely convenient for leadership to say that of course it isn't the fault, it's the fault of new employees and WFH. But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault? they are the ones who allowed or enabled bloating and empire building, and they are the ones who didn't intervene when culture started deteriorating. Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly? TL;DR it's very rich for execs to blame rank and file employees, as if they are powerless to change anything.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault Pre-COVID Amazon was always an in-person culture company - there just wasn't the muscle needed to manage a fully remote organization. People really underestimate how difficult it is to convert a company that was almost entirely in-person and synchronous to a fully async culture. A company isn't just SDE1s and SDE2s writing code - it's also PMs communicating with Sales, Sales communicating with E-Staff, Support communicating with Eng, Eng Leadership communicating with other Eng Leadership, etc. The brass tacks are that in-person meetings are absolutely more synchronized and efficient, because not all communication can successfully occur over Zoom - you'll often need to meet other members to build consensus or have spontaneous conversations with peers or managers, and scheduling or doing those over Zoom or Slack is difficult. > Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly? Execs play a role, and clearly Amazon's execs have decided that being fully remote just didn't make sense with how they operated. Also, this kind of an argument absolves line level employees if we're being honest. A culture is the sum of it's parts, and if line level employees aren't working on propagating the culture they want, then it's on them too. If execs try to draconianly enforce culture, then the same people complaining about lack of culture will complain about the "corporate cult" (eg. HN complaining about Apple or Amazon pre-covid). This doesn't mean that companies can't be fully remote - they absolutely can. It just takes A LOT of effort and a massive cultural shift to become an async organization: a lot of documentation, touchpoints, and aggressive calendaring is required and you end up having to do on-sites every couple weeks anyhow to re-sync.

aw93jr4alw3j4 2y ago

[flagged]

codingwagie 2y ago

I'm a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago) The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets. If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions. AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time

gnz11 2y ago
> I'm a long time Amazonian. > If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, ... Doesn't this include yourself as well then?
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  Significant amount != all
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    Ah, so "everyone but me" type deal.
  - jcadam 2y ago
    And which ones do we keep? Which senior engineers are just coasting and which are among the few who are the final reservoir of institutional knowledge holding everything together? Does anyone know? Meh, let's just hand the task to HR and hope it all works out.

ajhurliman 2y ago

I really like Amazon's LPs, but I think they're often stretched to accommodate whatever opinion one has.

belval 2y ago
That's a misconception of what the LP are for though (in my opinion). They exist to provide a shared vocabulary that helps with meetings/interviews/reviews. "Deliver results/bias for action" are often at odds with "insist on the highest standards", same with "disagree and commit" and "ownership". The point is to get people to hash out the difference in opinions along 12 (the other 2 are atrocities) axis that give a direction to the discussion. I've heard "I think this decision is not customer obsessed and we need to do better" in a lot of meetings. Make fun of the LPs all you want (I really get it), but they are definitely a net positive in the day-to-day.
- ajhurliman 2y ago
  I’m not making fun of them, I really like them. I also appreciate the shared vocabulary; in conversations with good actors they’re very beneficial. However, I stand by my statement that they’re abused for propagating one’s own agenda. Like you said there are adversarial LPs, and sometimes there is a clear winner but the opposing side can masquerade behind the opposing LP and make it seem like they’re in good faith. They’re a net benefit for sure, but it really works best when you don’t have bad actors (I guess that’s probably true for all paradigms though).

matrix87 2y ago

this is completely unrelated but amazon quality has gone significantly down over the past couple months 3 out of the 4 times I've ordered something from them it either didn't show up or the wrong thing showed up most of these sellers seem to just be dropshippers with chinese goods employing "reputation management" tactics. can't say I trust the average amazon seller at this point

LordDragonfang 2y ago
There's a comment to this effect on every thread even tangentially related to Amazon's marketplace for the past 5+ years, all with timeframes that are much shorter (like your "a few months") - much shorter than the timelines that are implied by how long those comments have existed. There has been some gradual decline, but realistically you just had a string of bad luck with Amazon fulfillment and it's not indicative of any particular recent change.
- rybosworld 2y ago
  The same thing was said about google search for a while - that it was declining in quality. Some people noticed and others didn't. You'd see threads with one person claiming google search is worse. Another person chimes in with a comment similar to yours; that is: "your experience has just been uniquely unlucky". Then almost overnight, the search quality reached a point where most people took notice and agreed: "yeah the search quality really is worse". I'm not saying this is what's going on with Amazon, but this pattern is a typical part of enshittification.
  - LordDragonfang 2y ago
    While I agree that it can be a pattern of enshittification, I don't think it's one that Amazon is actually currently going through, at least with regards to fulfillment. If anything, I think they probably had a drop in quality a little over 5 years ago that has long since plateaued. I order lots of items from Amazon (50+ in the past month alone) across a lot of categories (non-perishable food, fun clothing for myself and my partner, office supplies, lots of little fun trinkets, etc) and I can only remember one in the past several months (easily >100 items) that failed to arrive (An obscure limited edition flavor of lemon kitkats specifically not fulfilled by amazon), and even that was something that they notified me of. And I literally can't remember the last time I received an actually "wrong" item. I think people showing up with stories of 3/4 of their orders being messed up are the kind of extreme outliers you get from a product used by tens of millions of people - and by the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people who read HN. It's just something that happens sometimes in the global supply chain. Hell, I personally have experience with that from one of my few significant purchases from a brick-and-mortar: the mattress topper they were supposed to get me in a week was delayed by 3 months because the delivery truck was stolen, in Texas That said, it's ironic that you bring up search, because I think Amazon's search is the part of the storefront that is actually undergoing active enshittification right now.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

> There’s also a rabid attention on so-called “input” metrics of a certain business—think selection or price—rather than output metrics such as revenue. Anyone wanna comment on the distinction? Why are input metrics any more important than output metrics? In fact I'm not even sure I understand why price is characterized as "input" and revenue as "output". Input and output to what exactly?

dastbe 2y ago
goals. taking a different example, you might have a goal to lower outage minutes by 50%, so your output metric is “outage minutes”. in order to change the output, you need to identify what projects/mechanisms you can use to change the output. More often i’ve seen these be referred to as input goals (increase test coverage, adopt feature flagging, etc.) but you could always associate a metric to them.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  Ok but "outage minutes" is itself an input to something else, like customer satisfaction or whatever. So that label isn't really clarifying anything.
  - dastbe 2y ago
    What you're saying sounds the same as "The output of one service is the input to another, so the label isn't really clarifying anything". There's plenty of value in breaking apart all of the interactions between various parts of the system and looking at their outputs and how they intend to change those outputs through which inputs.
ben0x539 2y ago
I think the idea is that input is things that you absolutely, directly control, and output is more like "outcomes". You can control the price and certainly you can impact revenue by setting a price and, like, doing the whole rest of your job, but you still don't directly set the revenue. My understanding of why they make this distinction is that if you focus on output metrics and you don't meet the target, you can be rationalize it as "well, we did a really good job but we failed to meet the goal because of circumstances beyond our control/market conditions/...", but if you focus on an input metric you're more directly accountable on whether you did what you said you'd do, and you come up with more actionable steps on how to fix it if not.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

The article mentions LPs being used punitively. That reminds me of the idea that "when a measurement becomes a target, it creates to become a good measurement". What's happening is that LPs started out a guidelines on how to make good decisions. It was explained to employees that LPs should be taken seriously and show that that people who genuinely apply the LPs get promoted more. Therefore, displaying LPs became an easier way to get promoted than actually making good decisions.

theGnuMe 2y ago

Amazon's retail problem is that it is failing the customer by using 3rd party sellers. And in places where Walmart+ or Target circle are available I bet they are losing sales. I actually prefer Walmart+ and Target now.. but I am only N=1. I may do the whole foods delivery when it becomes available though so that would bring me back in to the Amazon fold.

jlund-molfese 2y ago
Walmart+ InHome in particular is a great experience compared to Amazon Fresh. You can get regular Walmart+ deliveries for $98/year, but for another $40/year, you get unlimited deliveries by a Walmart employee who doesn't accept tips and makes sure they're delivering to the right address. My only worry is that Walmart might be subsidizing the service, because as a customer I'm paying less and I'm happier compared to the gig worker version.
The-Bus 2y ago
Walmart also uses 3rd Party Sellers; I don't believe Target does. There's enough commentary about false/bootleg products on Amazon that it's no longer my primary destination for any purchases I need delivered.
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  They do but they are easier to avoid buying from. It's usually the same folks crossed listed across amazon, walmart, target, ebay etc...
avnfish 2y ago
Amazon 1st party is and continues to be a loss leader. If they got rid of their 3rd party sellers tomorrow, the company would go bankrupt from the loss of B2B commission, fulfilment and ads revenue

ralferoo 2y ago

> the two-pizza rule: teams focused on a specific goal or project should be lean enough that two pies could suffice as a team meal. Today I learned that teams in Amazon should contain no more than 2 people.

nothercastle 2y ago
I think that’s actually true if you need more than 8 people things start to break down fast
deanCommie 2y ago
Tell me you're Italian without telling me you're Italian lol. The Amazon "2 pizzas" are Two Large American pizzas. Something with 8-12 slices where 2 slices is enough for a meal.
- triceratops 2y ago
  I think they were bragging about how much they eat.
  - ycombinatrix 2y ago
    "bragging"
klyrs 2y ago
No more than two managers. Pizza is withheld from developers for performance reasons.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Dangle the slice just out of reach...
linuxlizard 2y ago
> the two-pizza rule: Or just me.

georgeecollins 2y ago

They should stop making a cargo cult of Amazon's idiosyncratic management techniques and adopt the "GE Way" that is proven to be the best way to run a company by business school professors all over the world.

jessepasley 2y ago
This bring laughter to my life
downrightmike 2y ago
Neutron Jack is the worst person to look to for management advice. He only got lucky, but not because he did the right things.

bilater 2y ago

"I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt," Jeff Bezos. One of the most surprising things in my brief experience at Amazon was how much of a shitshow it was. The two-pizza rule and self-sustainability for each team led to huge overlaps, with teams doing the same thing. With such a huge organization, you had to go through 15 different stakeholders to get a single thing done, and there was an ingrained middle management whose only function was to connect you to the right person. Just figuring out who was responsible for what and how to get things done was a challenge in itself. Despite all this, Amazon still succeeds, and their process of PR/FAQ, leadership principles, and one-pagers is one of the best I've ever seen. But I wonder if at some point, like with any philosophy and just like Bezos predicted, it will become too much and the whole thing will cave in on itself.

bilater 2y ago
Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything...which sounds great but that includes basic software like their own Github. They had this monstrosity called Code Commit that I saw recently is getting canned. Good riddance. What an ugly pos.
- xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  > Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything This is false. Otherwise I'd be interested in any reliable sources. As far as I can tell this is some sort of urban myth since AWS first stepped onto the scene.
  - zbentley 2y ago
    I believe it's based on Steve Yegge's original microservices rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 I don't think that's myth, though I've heard it criticized variously as outdated, or just one person's take.
    - xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
      There's nothing in Yegge's rant that implies Amazon must dog food AWS. AWS as we know it, was, if anything, a byproduct of the efforts described by the rant. Amazon certainly uses AWS but I think it's foolish to think they use every product (they obviously do not) nor that they must. For the foundational pieces -- EC2, SNS, S3 -- sure, of course. They spent a long time migrating workloads. I don't expect that with every new service they launch that they have already widely adopted it by then. Maybe after their customers widely adopt it, if ever.

jedberg 2y ago

> Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos (“6-pagers,” in Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a contributor to Amazon’s world-beating success as any blockbuster product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself. I have said many times, and will continue to say: Amazon is a 2 trillion dollar company despite their policies, not because of them.

asynchronous 2y ago
A lot of people that work at Amazon drink the koolaid though, and come out thinking like they’re the best people on the face of the planet for working at Amazon.

EricE 2y ago

50 years is about the right age for any human organization. After that, dark patterns start to irreparably corrupt them. Also stumbled on this yesterday which has had me really pondering a lot of my thoughts and assumptions too: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392 https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392

smarm52 2y ago

Amazon management ethos is famous. I've always wondered if it's actually effective. Traditionally, power follow these rules: De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D. (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press. Which is echoed in the article: > One current Amazon senior manager said they’ve consistently observed bosses new to the company use the principles “as weapons to put those who aren’t favorites in their place,” while employing other principles to build up their favorites. I'd assume that the older management style that the article points out (from Bezos) was similar, but with different words; As these rules about power are consistent from governments, to companies, to home owners associations, etc. But the article paints a rosy picture of them, so it's not clear if there's something novel there, or just a dressed up version of the same old rules.

wormlord 2y ago

Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles. I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding at Amazon. Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow, attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"? People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to being in the right place at the right time.

dimmke 2y ago
Thank you for saying this. If you look at Amazon's history, it's basically buying most of their competitors.

rdtsc 2y ago

> There are 16 Leadership Principles at Amazon. Any Amazon employee can recite most of them by heart (those who can’t won’t last very long). My friend urged me to apply to Amazon, I didn't want to but thought what the heck, let's sacrifice a day of vacation to give it whirl. But it was very bizarre experience. It felt like some communist party meeting having to learn the tenants and repeating them back and sing praises to the great Jeff. No doubt, most of those are good principles, but the cult-like attitude seemed strange. > “Sometimes I’ll hear, ‘It’s amazing you had this ‘bias for action’…and other times when I believe I’ve had ‘bias for action,’ they will say you weren’t data-driven (from the leadership principle ‘Dive deep’) enough.” That's brilliant. They've converged to selective enforcement one of the central pillars of corruption and control. Introduce just slightly contradictory rules, and with 16, that's already enough, and you can use them for anything.

asynchronous 2y ago
Yeah I don’t think I can swallow my brain long enough to deal with nonsense like that. Most companies have dumb principals but they don’t force you to memorize them.

eigenvalue 2y ago

I still can't get over how bad Alexa is, how it barely even works to do the simplest tasks, gets so confused so easily, etc. They have spent so much money. They have so many developers. They have so much compute available. The technology to make it way better is just lying around and open source now, and has been for the past 1.5 years at least. If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working. It's just mind boggling how poorly managed the whole thing has been, and I think it's a real indictment of top management for letting it get so bad after so much effort and money.

textlapse 2y ago
OTOH, it's the most perfect device for our household. I have tried other devices - they all do gimmicky stuff and slow down the primary use-case because someone arbitrarily decided what I should ask (or worse, they ask for feedback after getting everything wrong - like I am a free human training sample to their massive dataset) My use cases are: play songs via bluetooth, turn on/off things (it's almost scary how fast it is), and set kitchen timers. It's perfect, fast and gets to the point (just says 'Okay' as a response). No gimmicky answers to stuff like 'meaning of life, universe and everything' or 'how many tennis balls would cover the surface of Mars etc'. Just. Gets. The. Job. Done. No need for fancy LLMs here.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  I've got some of the Google ones, and I quite like them, but it weirds me out how many common things they just can't do. For me (and for other people, I suspect), the #1 use case for these things is kitchen timers, and they can do that, and they have fun custom animations for different and sounds for different things I'm timing, but then I ask for it to take a minute off the timer, and it can't, or I ask to rename a timer, and it can't.
weezin 2y ago
>If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working This is literally what they are doing lol.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Consider Amazon's home assistant business - Alexa. Its hard for me to imagine that customers are the focus of these products. It appears that Amazon's commercial interests are the focus of Alexa. Alexa could be awesome but its just not.

strivingtobe 2y ago

The article brings up the two new LPs that were added, one being "Strive to be the world's best employer". The biggest slap in the face about this LP is that the word "strive" used to be a bad word at Amazon. If you ever said you were going to "strive" to do something, you would be told that's not good enough. If you put it in a doc, you would be told to remove it. "Strive" was a weasel word. We never accepted "striving" as part of our tenets or our goals. Our goals never were to "strive to build a good service", our goal was just "build a good service"! And then they went and made the new LP "Strive to be the world's best employer". Why isn't it just "Be the world's best employer"? It may seem like a small thing, but it's an example of the ethos that has been chipped away inside Amazon. That particular LP has always been the butt of jokes because it's been clear over the last 5 years that leadership isn't actually serious about it, but the use of the weasel word "strive" really just put the cherry on top.

mlwiese 2y ago
There is no try, only do. -Yoda
rty32 2y ago
I mean, everybody knows LPs are BS when they put "Strive to be the world's best employer". Anyone who either works/worked at Amazon or knows someone working there understand what the work culture is like there. And of course, everybody understands there is no way you can force people back into office -- many people commute over an hour a day -- and also be "best employer" at the same time. That's just obvious.

nibab 2y ago

As a former Amazonian (2017-2020) I was a big believer in the leadership principles partly due to how often they were referenced during my time there and partly due to the business world's obsession with Amazon's secret sauce. The company does a very good job at indoctrinating everyone by using them extensively throughout the hiring/performance management lifecycle. In fact, during the interview loop each interviewer is tasked with evaluating whether the candidate exhibits a specific leadership principle. As many have pointed out, with time you notice the principles being used in all sorts of ways against you depending on the context. The management class is conditioned to tell you that "principles are deliberately in contention with one another"...which gives everyone the necessary cover to spin a particular guiding principle in whichever way suits them in that moment. Or you could buy the kool-aid and pretend that whoever architected these principles was so linguistically adept that they truly figured out the perfect way of articulating a set of contentious principles that taken together distill the exact cultural nuance that Amazon is all about. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave. In their current state, the leadership principles are simply a way of defining the lingo for work conversations and providing some sort of framework for decision making (emphasis on framework)...which still has a bounding effect on how things are done at Amazon, albeit in a very very limited way. I do think most people would have trouble coming up with their own decision-making framework if they had to, never-mind articulating or communicating it to their peers. However, it would be preposterous to claim that the Amazon principles have any significant cultural value, at least in the narrow definition that most people commonly ascribe to "business culture" (ie language is also culture, but in this context its more about unique behavior specific to a company). What drives the culture more than anything at Amazon is the insane growth that the company has seen in the past couple of decades. People there have felt it very deeply and have the battle scars to prove it. Everyone that has been at the company long enough will point to the often counter-intuitive things that one should do to succeed at sustaining this type of growth. Bear in mind this is a different type of business than the other high growth behemoths of the industry and Amazon has its own peculiar aspects.. As far as the article goes, I think that the most important aspect that the author gets right is that. the decline is probably due to the influx of people in middle management that don't have any idea about what it really took to build Amazon into what it is today.

loldk 2y ago

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