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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 ma

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?
    - anononaut 2y ago
      I think if we work one way for centuries until something happens to disrupt that, we can assume an eventual return to the average rather than "new normal" nonsense.
      - asynchronous 2y ago
        Except tech has allowed WFH for almost 4 decades now? Teleworking has been a thing since the 60s, it’s us that are just now catching up to not needing an office.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    I don't think that was obvious. There were lots of executives praising lots of teams for keeping things running perfectly fine while remote. There is no obvious reason to RTO when everything was working fine with remote workers.
  - ben0x539 2y ago
    In my mind, it was to be temporary until the risk of infection at the office was back to pre-pandemic levels. I understand that at this point it's more likely that we'll define the problem away and normalize shifting that much more of a health risk onto employees, but going by the original "implicit" agreement we're still in that temporary period. Of course it's not serious to threat it as temporary because companies and people have made permanent adjustments that won't be rolled back. My (Amazon subsidiary!) employer at no point made anyone(†) go back to the office. I happily returned when vaccines were widely rolled out, but quickly realized people were still getting infected left and right and decided to minimize office visists while strictly masking. A good half of the team moved out of state and never came back, future hires were fully remote as often as not. I got hit by layoffs eventually but as far as I have heard the remaining team has not gotten any less distributed. I don't think it's reasonable to describe a forced move to full office attendance as an inevitable "return to normal", even if we back in March 2020 would have expected it to have happened by now. But now in 2024, the world has changed and it's an explicit employment policy decision that as a purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does thing aims to continue layoffs while paying less severance etc. († naturally from atop my ivory throne of tech-wrought hubris, I am discounting actual office staff like facilities and security as well as some portion of IT etc)
- chipdart 2y ago
  > 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. There was a totally unambiguous "this is just temporary" when hired that is as explicit as it gets: the contract.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Leadership principles are kool aid and PR. Culture is intentional and inherent. Which does Amazon care about more from an observation of their system in motion?
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Do you not think leadership principles are inputs (even weak ones) into culture...? Seems to me that'd be one of the first things that'd attract or deter a potential employee with optionality, which then of course does contribute to culture.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Actions are inputs, talk is cheap. Watch what people do, not what they say. Revealed intent. More reasonable to say "Our corporate culture is this, and we can demonstrate it in these ways." Edict vs observations. In my humble opinion, Amazon has jumped the shark and is a worker juicer pretending it is Zappos. It'll keep throwing off cash, because there are customers and aggregate demand for retail and cloud service, and a never ending supply of workers waiting to be juiced, but that doesn't mean those leadership principles are the reason for the outcomes. Lots of people buying from Temu too, are their leadership principles why?
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Sure actions are inputs, and so are words.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    IIRC Amazon has sixteen leadership principles, and people are meant to know them. They even have their "bar raisers" who participate in recruitment and such to evangelize this. I'd challenge most Amazonians to close their eyes, and see just how many of the sixteen principles they can recall. If you can't recall them all, how can you live them all? Not to mention, Amazon has a fairly smug, superior attitude to them. Some quotes from "bar raisers" talking about life at Amazon: > "We don't expect that you use leadership principles at your current job" > "more than any company I’ve worked with or heard about, we use those principles daily" > at other companies, employees don't "focus on the customer as their customer", instead "their customer is their boss ... and they're focused on doing what they're told". My favorite: > "I know I’ve certainly referenced a leadership principle or two while talking about parenting techniques." Wow. Not to mention you could question how much Amazon as a whole follows them. > "strive to be earth's best employer" May want to listen to complaints from your warehouse and delivery employees more, at the least. > "The thing we’re looking for is that you consider and care about the customer. We’ve regularly made decisions at Amazon which lowered profit/sales because it was the right thing to do for customers." I'd love to hear an example or two of these. > "Earn Trust" Sure, you can trust this WANGXIJGYA power adapter or this GHURBLSEYHI toaster oven, and no-one ever got counterfeit goods from Amazon as a result of us co-mingling products. (Separating out suppliers could be done, but it would reduce profits/efficiency... but I thought Amazon was okay with that if it was "for the customer...").
taeric 2y ago
I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many people. Consensus is not a goal, in itself. Not ignoring dissent, though, is. Make sure you know the criticisms, but don't wait until you have them all fully addressed. (Is why "bias for action" is a thing...)
- __alexs 2y ago
  The word consensus does not feature in the LPs.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Apologies, I don't have them in front of me anymore and should have just looked them up again. It wasn't consensus, but a lot of people took the disagree and commit one as a "you have to get commitment from the room." My read was it was your responsibility to commit in the room, not to get commitment. Make sure any failure is facts of your disagreement, if you have one. Not your lack of effort because you did disagree.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many people. Not true. The whole leadership principles thing is designed to not require or expect any form of consensus. What you are expected to do is act, and be accountable for your own actions. The whole "disagree and commit" leadership principle is specially relevant to manage push back. Everyone is expected to do what's best, but regardless of whether there's consensus pushing one way or the other, once a call is made you're expected to fall in line and work towards a goal. It the call was the right one or not, that's something to discuss during performance evaluation talks, because leaders are right, a lot. If you're not right a lot, or where it mattered, you might very well be promoted to customer.
  - taeric 2y ago
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
Grass isn’t any greener at the other tech companies fwiw. At Google they cut back office space and made every desk a shared desk for many Bay Area teams because hey you work from home now right? We’re not giving you a designated desk to work at anymore. At the exact same time they mandated RTO so you had to be in the office more than half the time. Essentially the policy is to share a desk that you and another person must both be at for more than half of the time each. You can probably see the stupidity in the policy pretty easily right? Sundar still hasn’t figured this out. You can’t divide a desk in a way that gives two people more than half. If you want us there the majority of the time give us a freaking desk already!
- ASinclair 2y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken the teams that share a desk are supposed to come in 2 days a week. For teams that don't do this desk sharing you have to come in 3 days a week. So there shouldn't be an issue of trying to have each person use the desk for more than half the week.
  - AnotherGoodName 2y ago
    They did eventually state 2 days a week for cloud although it’s still completely schitzophrenic. “You must all be in the office the majority of the time, the company can’t operate efficiently without this” “Oh we made it impossible people to be in the office the majority of the time? Ok for the people who our policies make it impossible to come into the office the majority of the time, which we previously required alongside statements that we need to do this we are now making an exception to this since it’s not actually needed and we also made the policy impossible to obey. For those not doing desk sharing though we totally still need you to come in 3days a week minimum because the company can’t operate efficiently even though we just said those guys over there can come in 2 days a week. Thanks for understanding our clear management practices everyone!”
- sswezey 2y ago
  Amazon did this too. No more assigned desks, come in 3+ days a week, and only have desks for 60% of people. Sterile desks that have to be cleaned off at the end of the day, fighting for desks because no one is actually coming in on Mondays or Fridays, and desks basically on top of each other.

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?
  - anononaut 2y ago
    I think if we work one way for centuries until something happens to disrupt that, we can assume an eventual return to the average rather than "new normal" nonsense.
    - asynchronous 2y ago
      Except tech has allowed WFH for almost 4 decades now? Teleworking has been a thing since the 60s, it’s us that are just now catching up to not needing an office.
- mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
  I don't think that was obvious. There were lots of executives praising lots of teams for keeping things running perfectly fine while remote. There is no obvious reason to RTO when everything was working fine with remote workers.
- ben0x539 2y ago
  In my mind, it was to be temporary until the risk of infection at the office was back to pre-pandemic levels. I understand that at this point it's more likely that we'll define the problem away and normalize shifting that much more of a health risk onto employees, but going by the original "implicit" agreement we're still in that temporary period. Of course it's not serious to threat it as temporary because companies and people have made permanent adjustments that won't be rolled back. My (Amazon subsidiary!) employer at no point made anyone(†) go back to the office. I happily returned when vaccines were widely rolled out, but quickly realized people were still getting infected left and right and decided to minimize office visists while strictly masking. A good half of the team moved out of state and never came back, future hires were fully remote as often as not. I got hit by layoffs eventually but as far as I have heard the remaining team has not gotten any less distributed. I don't think it's reasonable to describe a forced move to full office attendance as an inevitable "return to normal", even if we back in March 2020 would have expected it to have happened by now. But now in 2024, the world has changed and it's an explicit employment policy decision that as a purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does thing aims to continue layoffs while paying less severance etc. († naturally from atop my ivory throne of tech-wrought hubris, I am discounting actual office staff like facilities and security as well as some portion of IT etc)
chipdart 2y ago
> 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. There was a totally unambiguous "this is just temporary" when hired that is as explicit as it gets: the contract.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Leadership principles are kool aid and PR. Culture is intentional and inherent. Which does Amazon care about more from an observation of their system in motion?

llamaimperative 2y ago
Do you not think leadership principles are inputs (even weak ones) into culture...? Seems to me that'd be one of the first things that'd attract or deter a potential employee with optionality, which then of course does contribute to culture.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Actions are inputs, talk is cheap. Watch what people do, not what they say. Revealed intent. More reasonable to say "Our corporate culture is this, and we can demonstrate it in these ways." Edict vs observations. In my humble opinion, Amazon has jumped the shark and is a worker juicer pretending it is Zappos. It'll keep throwing off cash, because there are customers and aggregate demand for retail and cloud service, and a never ending supply of workers waiting to be juiced, but that doesn't mean those leadership principles are the reason for the outcomes. Lots of people buying from Temu too, are their leadership principles why?
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Sure actions are inputs, and so are words.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  IIRC Amazon has sixteen leadership principles, and people are meant to know them. They even have their "bar raisers" who participate in recruitment and such to evangelize this. I'd challenge most Amazonians to close their eyes, and see just how many of the sixteen principles they can recall. If you can't recall them all, how can you live them all? Not to mention, Amazon has a fairly smug, superior attitude to them. Some quotes from "bar raisers" talking about life at Amazon: > "We don't expect that you use leadership principles at your current job" > "more than any company I’ve worked with or heard about, we use those principles daily" > at other companies, employees don't "focus on the customer as their customer", instead "their customer is their boss ... and they're focused on doing what they're told". My favorite: > "I know I’ve certainly referenced a leadership principle or two while talking about parenting techniques." Wow. Not to mention you could question how much Amazon as a whole follows them. > "strive to be earth's best employer" May want to listen to complaints from your warehouse and delivery employees more, at the least. > "The thing we’re looking for is that you consider and care about the customer. We’ve regularly made decisions at Amazon which lowered profit/sales because it was the right thing to do for customers." I'd love to hear an example or two of these. > "Earn Trust" Sure, you can trust this WANGXIJGYA power adapter or this GHURBLSEYHI toaster oven, and no-one ever got counterfeit goods from Amazon as a result of us co-mingling products. (Separating out suppliers could be done, but it would reduce profits/efficiency... but I thought Amazon was okay with that if it was "for the customer...").

taeric 2y ago

I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many people. Consensus is not a goal, in itself. Not ignoring dissent, though, is. Make sure you know the criticisms, but don't wait until you have them all fully addressed. (Is why "bias for action" is a thing...)

__alexs 2y ago
The word consensus does not feature in the LPs.
- taeric 2y ago
  Apologies, I don't have them in front of me anymore and should have just looked them up again. It wasn't consensus, but a lot of people took the disagree and commit one as a "you have to get commitment from the room." My read was it was your responsibility to commit in the room, not to get commitment. Make sure any failure is facts of your disagreement, if you have one. Not your lack of effort because you did disagree.
chipdart 2y ago
> I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many people. Not true. The whole leadership principles thing is designed to not require or expect any form of consensus. What you are expected to do is act, and be accountable for your own actions. The whole "disagree and commit" leadership principle is specially relevant to manage push back. Everyone is expected to do what's best, but regardless of whether there's consensus pushing one way or the other, once a call is made you're expected to fall in line and work towards a goal. It the call was the right one or not, that's something to discuss during performance evaluation talks, because leaders are right, a lot. If you're not right a lot, or where it mattered, you might very well be promoted to customer.
- taeric 2y ago

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

Grass isn’t any greener at the other tech companies fwiw. At Google they cut back office space and made every desk a shared desk for many Bay Area teams because hey you work from home now right? We’re not giving you a designated desk to work at anymore. At the exact same time they mandated RTO so you had to be in the office more than half the time. Essentially the policy is to share a desk that you and another person must both be at for more than half of the time each. You can probably see the stupidity in the policy pretty easily right? Sundar still hasn’t figured this out. You can’t divide a desk in a way that gives two people more than half. If you want us there the majority of the time give us a freaking desk already!

ASinclair 2y ago
Unless I'm mistaken the teams that share a desk are supposed to come in 2 days a week. For teams that don't do this desk sharing you have to come in 3 days a week. So there shouldn't be an issue of trying to have each person use the desk for more than half the week.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  They did eventually state 2 days a week for cloud although it’s still completely schitzophrenic. “You must all be in the office the majority of the time, the company can’t operate efficiently without this” “Oh we made it impossible people to be in the office the majority of the time? Ok for the people who our policies make it impossible to come into the office the majority of the time, which we previously required alongside statements that we need to do this we are now making an exception to this since it’s not actually needed and we also made the policy impossible to obey. For those not doing desk sharing though we totally still need you to come in 3days a week minimum because the company can’t operate efficiently even though we just said those guys over there can come in 2 days a week. Thanks for understanding our clear management practices everyone!”
sswezey 2y ago
Amazon did this too. No more assigned desks, come in 3+ days a week, and only have desks for 60% of people. Sterile desks that have to be cleaned off at the end of the day, fighting for desks because no one is actually coming in on Mondays or Fridays, and desks basically on top of each other.