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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

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.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  What if it includes them? Doesn't seem like that would change anything.
- exe34 2y ago
  they could also be stuck under the manager of managers with no upward mobility.
- jcadam 2y ago
  Ah, the 'ol "workforce greening" where we get rid of all the expensive old farts and replace them with younger/smarter/cheaper devs right out of school. It's brilliant and it always works. There are no downsides whatsoever.
chipdart 2y ago
> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but if that's your take them either you haven't been paying attention or you're not in the company for that long. The whole org was designed so that all employees are ephemeral. Managers are encouraged to promote employees up and out. At each career level you're evaluated against your direct colleagues in the same level, and those lagging behind are bound for PIPs. Check out the old fart tool. The average tenure is below 3 years. Do you it screams upward mobility?
- codingwagie 2y ago
  Those are just churn and burn lower level employees. I am talking about at the L7+ level. L6 and below is almost a completely different company. I have worked on major tier 1 services in every major part of the company: Retail, Alexa, and AWS. I know many of the people running the important orgs
  - sillyfluke 2y ago
    The amazon people I know are purposely lounging at L6 because they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack.
    - chipdart 2y ago
      > (...) they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack. I have to call bullshit on this take. Last time I checked, less than 1% ever make it to L6, let alone L7. because it is extremely competitive. It takes a very special person with all the stars aligned to even be considered for a L7 position. We're talking about Principal Engineer/Senior Manager. Claiming they are not promoted to L7 because they don't want to screams of Aesop's the fox and the grapes.
      - sillyfluke 2y ago
        First of all, they were not making this comment in order to justify why they didn't get promoted. They were describing levels in amazon to people that were clueless about it. You also seem to be inadverdently supporting their point. If it takes "a special person" to be an L7, doesn't it also require "effort" to become that person? The person is simply saying that they are not even making the effort they think is necessary to be considered for an L7 since they think there is too little upside to justify that effort. To support their point they mentioned that another friend we hardly see anymore became an L7, their intense schedule and workload being the reason we don't see them anymore. It seemed pretty believable in that context.
nextworddev 2y ago
what's scary about Amazon is that - despite all this madness - it is still growing and better run than most other tech companies
- rapsey 2y ago
  All that matters is market position.
  - nextworddev 2y ago
    Yes
- hooverd 2y ago
  I got the impression that AWS and retail were two different beasts.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > it is still growing and better run what's the evidence that it's better run? continued growth could just as likely (or more likely) be a result of its dominant position
  - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    It's subjective, but many (most?) people who worked at Amazon agree that it's an extremely efficient and well-run business comparatively. I've worked at two other companies of similar size and they both were laughably incompetently run in comparison to AWS. They were way better to work for as an individual employee, but certainly bad if you cared about the business operations as a whole (I didn't)
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      How is it better run if most ex-employees and current think it's a place where to succeed you must hoard knowledge and play a crazy political game where your goal is to always have someone on the team ready to chop. If you don't know who that is on your team it's probably you. Your pay is equal to three card monty. You are promised something big when you get hired but it gets spread over 4 years and most of it only vests at the end. Then you find out most employees are pushed out within 2 years and you realize only 10-20% will ever survive to get the amount you expected when you joined. If you make it this far they do it again for more money. The odds of you staying are even less... While this is happening they give you 8 hours of meetings and expect 8 hours of development. You end up working 16 hours a day. You end up so tired and confused you keep going until you burn out. At that point they ppe you. The best way to survive at Amazon is find dirt on your boss. Hire a pi. Coast and use that information to keep you employed. Rinse and repeat for new bosses. It is not run well. Taking these practices and putting them on a regular business wouldn't work. Amazon (Google, Apple, Facebook..) will keep increasing in value regardless of management style (each one of those companies have different culture) because of factors outside of this. They could require everyone to be left handed.. or speak French or be able to ski and they would still succeed.
mcast 2y ago
I've always liked the SRE approach, where you can alleviate software engineers to build new features without burdening the team with 24/7 on call duties.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  SRE/Ops person here. SRE only works if SRE can look at software and go "Nope, it's not ready for production and I don't care how wanted this feature is." Almost no company is mature enough to allow that behavior.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Same. SRE is generally code for “we need cloud sysadmins but that’s not fashionable anymore.”
ilamont 2y ago
The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Thank you for saying this. I have interacted with various seller-facing Web software platforms (KDP, Ads, Advantage, Seller Central, Transparency, Brand Registry) for years. Hurriedly designed features, broken processes, false-positives, and kluged-together garbage are the norm. Automated support scripts, overwhelmed human CSRs, and the siloed nature of the company compound the problems. Here's one small example: Amazon forced many sellers in the US to start selling in Brazil. It was automated. People's accounts were enabled for Brazil by default. It was poorly communicated, including no easy way to opt out (redirecting links on the help page). Many sellers in a panic started requesting support to shut down their Brazil accounts, which led to entire global accounts being shut down. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/93937b31-f6c3-4659-902d-48b1ec1990af https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
shermantanktop 2y ago
> The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company The article comes to the exact opposite conclusion. The article repeatedly cites problems associated with culture breakdown, and tenured employees are a key source of continuity for culture. The article goes to some lengths to underline that the culture is a positive and key differentiator for Amazon. The more interesting point is that the cultural element looks like it is highly durable and effective, but has broken down as Bezos (the most tenured employee!) has pulled back. So it's not as durable as everyone thought.
- i_am_jl 2y ago
  I don't think those are mutually exclusive conclusions. Tenured employees help maintain culture, but they don't guarantee that it stays static. Culture developed by the employees who spent their first 5 years growing with the company is not necessarily the same culture developed by those same employees who have stayed in the same role for the last 5 years with a vanishing potential for growth.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Absolutely. A company that goes through an extended period of growth and success can retain (cargo-cult style) all the approaches from that era even while the conditions change. That ossification is obviously not great unless the culture is especially adaptable. And the conditions for most big tech companies have changed radically over the last few years. So the subtle devaluation or reinterpretation of culture is kind of inevitable when forever-growth turns into a zero-sum game. As you say, it might even be the veterans who are doing it.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    If the culture you want to maintain is "first 10 minutes of every meeting is everyone reading the agenda" or "thorough security review for all changes before go live" then you want slow turnover so new hires can be trained and indoctrinated. On the other hand if the culture you want to maintain is "constantly be trying out new technologies, new ways of working and fresh ideas, at the cutting edge nothing is set in stone" you might benefit from new employees who know firsthand how other companies solved whatever problem you're facing.
nebula8804 2y ago
>The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets. What does this even mean? Does it mean they do not have proper CS background? If it means what I think it means, how is that even possible? Amazon recruits at top tier schools, not po-dunk university. Do that have a large % of their Engineering staff from bootcamps?
- barumrho 2y ago
  Being a student not in a narrow sense of being enrolled in a school, but being someone who studies and learns new things by doing rather than simply doing the given task in a conventional/quick/easy way that may not resolve the underlying issues that caused the problems in the first place.
fallinditch 2y ago
> brittle rube goldberg machines This is a nice metaphor that should become widely known and discussed! It can be applied to general management and administration was well as software engineering. Organizational procedures tend towards complexity over time: everyone is involved in 'improving' systems by creating new procedures, and soon enough a new person is needed to deal with or manage the increasingly complex procedures. This is a well known micro economic phenomenon. It's hard to simplify and streamline and so being aware of the tendency towards brittle rube goldberg machines is a useful concept indeed, should become Amazon's 17th management principle.
geph2021 2y ago
There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. I think that's true of most large organizations.
foobarian 2y ago
> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years That... seems about right? I wouldn't expect to get to L7+ in much less than that.
vivekd 2y ago
Maybe that's just what happens to companies that have been around a long time. They go on maintenance mode. You don't see coke or visa innovating much either. It seems like optimizing for innovation makes sense with new upstart products and optimizing for maintenance makes more sense with established products. You started with if Amazon wants change and I think that's exactly what a product with a position of relative market dominance doesn't want
- voisin 2y ago
  > You don't see coke or visa innovating much either. Both exist in industries that aren’t innovating much. Amazon doesn’t enjoy such a luxury.
- neaanopri 2y ago
  OP's description isn't exactly "optimizing for maintenance" either!
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Smart companies (I have no idea if Amazon is "smart" or not) are always innovating. However, most of the innovation will be internal. I used to work for a large corp that owned 80% of its main market and we were always encouraged to seek new ways of doing things and to file as many patents as possible. They were smart enough to realize that they got where they were by being innovative and that no matter how much of the market they controlled, they couldn't stay there by standing still.
- badpun 2y ago
  That would make sense, except Amazon stock's PE is currently around 50, which means that it's priced like a highly innovative company with large growth potential. So, if management doesn't want a massive stock price drop (and they obviously don't), they have to structure the company as if it's innovative and high-growth, to sell a believable story to the stock market.
throwaway_dkdja 2y ago
> There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. OH MY GOD! Thank you for saying this, this is __exactly__ what I've been experiencing. I've seen a bunch of people pursuing their personal (promo) agenda ruthlessly. Delivering on their own projects and initiatives and nothing else. Hire and develop the best my hairy ass!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- killingtime74 2y ago
  I guess don't hate the player hate the game
karaterobot 2y ago
> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career, about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation. It's a different world we're in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience? One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the shipping depot.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  You trained yourself, you paid for your schooling, you continue to learn on your own dollar for the company. The company doesn't pay for any of that anymore like back in the day, so yes, you must do what you can to keep your career flowing, jobs are just stepping stones, they aren't entitled to loyalty, because they stopped being loyal first.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    Every company I've worked at has given me a yearly budget for education, or has just had a rubber stamp policy of paying for classes. I know a few older people whose companies paid for them to take night classes, but I didn't know it was as common as all that.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Consider yourself lucky. I haven’t had that in multiple decades, and no benefits at all for one. Then California came for my contracting job.
ryandrake 2y ago
> 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. This is not specific to Amazon, it's endemic to the whole industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all I know): Very senior leaders and engineers are sometimes where they are because they've clung to their role for a long time, and they don't leave or die at a rate sufficient to frequently bubble up new senior talent through internal promotion. These people may also deserve their position because they are brilliant, too... or they may not. I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.
- PedroBatista 2y ago
  Yeah, but let's not forget: In the same position and context in life, statistically speaking, you would/will do the same.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  I was at an organization that went from doing mostly smart things to doing mostly stupid things. One of the smart things they managed to do was recognize that they were top-heavy with senior+ talent who were fixed in their thinking & behavior and aggressively began recruiting new graduates and reaching out to CS/Engineering/Science seniors. They also added some pretty impressive mentoring programs to bring the new people up to speed quickly. Then they switched to doing stupid shit that mostly undermined all that and the newer people started leaving. But it was pretty good for a couple of years.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Ok so let's say for the sake of argument it's a Smart Thing to focus on hiring a bunch of 22 year old fresh graduates. Is that necessarily going to change anything at the leadership level? The GP is talking about managers of managers, I don't know where you've worked in the past but in my experience Directors and VPs are not taking a lot of advice or insight from the entry level new hires.
agumonkey 2y 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. Known feeling
ignoramous 2y ago
> Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions Hopefully, avoid doing a Boeing in the process.
ecshafer 2y 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. I have never worked at Amazon. But I did work at a company that decided to implement microservices a la Amazon, even going so far as sharing Bezos' famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect essentially happened over night. As people spun up more and more microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine that just destroyed people with on call schedules.
- pc86 2y ago
  Software engineers having "on call" schedules at all is crazy to me. You shouldn't be writing code at 3am to fix a bug after working all day just to turn around and work the next day as well.
  - totally 2y ago
    What would be more sane? Allowing things to remain broken at night? Having someone who is not a software engineer fix it?
    - tobyjsullivan 2y ago
      If a 7-Eleven is open 24 hours a day, they usually hire three 8-hour shifts (roughly speaking).
    - bpfrh 2y ago
      Either pay another full time night shift or yes, accept that things are broken for the time. If your product is really so important that it can't be down, hire more engineers and pass the markup to your customers. I'm glad I live in the country where you have to have 11 hours between end of work and start of work(except for special cases afaik).
ActorNightly 2y ago
Hard disagree. Firstly: >AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time They never released anything innovative, ever. Amazon creates value through optimization. The original AWS came about because they had extra servers lying around that they needed for holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out. The problem with Amazon is that its too bloated, which goes against their optimization bread and butter. The cycle goes like this. First you have an entry level engineer, that hasn't been taught really how to solve problems algorithmically - instead its basically just education in the form of memorization about problems and how to solve them, without anything more fundamental. Then, companies like Amazon need engineers to actually build the products, so they are forced to tailor the interview process to them, thus the prevalence of leetcode style questions, because they know that the engineers are studying those for other companies. So the candiates get selected are basically those that have shown that they can memorize processes better than others. When these candidates work, they do the exact same thing internal to the company, focus on doing the existing processes in hopes to get promoted. As a result you get lots of bloat both time and technology spaces. So no, promoting them into decision making positions is not the right thing to do. The best thing Amazon can actually do long term is to focus on more automation, and reduce headcount. You want fewer, more talented engineers who are able to solve problems autonomously without barriers in the way, who don't need handholding or don't need to handhold others.
- codingwagie 2y ago
  AWS itself was one of the biggest innovations in technology, of all time. Cloudformation, IAM policies, and creating these services as independent composable blocks was revolutionary. S3 was completely new, and is still a dominant force in cloud computing. But my point was that all of the best ideas in AWS came long ago. There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point. I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It filters for: Can learn computer science concepts Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said concepts for a while Is willing to follow directions and recipes Is willing to follow the rules Has some minumum bar of intelligence Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of people that pass the interview are actually very good. The amazon firing process will weed out the rest. Meta has released the best open source software in the last 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode memorization
hintymad 2y ago
> 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. That's not true, at least not in AWS. In fact, I'd argue that a big problem in AWS is that promotion is too fast too soon. Getting to L6 used to be a big deal, and many people were content with being on L5. But now everyone expects that L5 gets promoted to L6 in 2 years or even less. And L6 to L7 in 3 years or less. What many directors do is that they place their favorite L6 to lead a project that launches a new product. If the launch is successful, the L6 will most likely be promoted. We even joked that L8 is the new L7. And of course, this creates so much anxiety to the point that more than 50% of the 1-on-1s I'm aware of involved some discussion about "moving to the next level".
textlapse 2y ago
Amazon seems to have been run in non-ZIRP mode during ZIRP. This may save their asses when ZIRP is firmly over. You say there isn't any innovation: May be you don't need that in a utility company that moves boxes and bits? You need reliable utility that customers expect and love. In an alternate ad-supported company where the primary product (ads) is not the one people are most familiar with, you could play all these games of 'upward mobility', 'promotion' etc because money runs freely and your job is detached from the reality of product, customers or even the larger company goals (assuming, you are not directly working on ads). However, in a company that is truly customer focused (and obsessed - to over use a Bezos word) as is Amazon: all of what you said seems like a good thing? I do take issue with how they treat the low-level employees with ruthless nearly-dictatorial oversight - Amazon burn out is a real thing. OTOH, having talked to Amazon engineers/PMs who quit due to burnout still have some sort of Stockholm syndrome where they have fond attachment to their 'burn out' time and how boring/unfulfilling their new job at X/Y/Z is! It's Complicated.
alberth 2y ago
You just described every Fortune 500 company.
peteGodonn 2y ago
[dead]
kamaal 2y ago
>>Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. This thing comes up in a lot of companies, but really the issue is your 2-year term job tourists/hoppers, and there are quite a few of you going around. Its tiring after a while to keep teaching and training every new member who joins your team. This look even more pointless when you look at the fact that they are likely to leave in a few months anyway. You mostly have your own personal knowledge management system, where all the tribal knowledge goes. Giving people a run of such a large corpus of knowledge/information, especially when they are not like to work with your for more than a few months is pointless. Eventually you only get as much information as much as you have commitment. >>If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions. Why would you promote short term people, who are likely to make bad decisions without stake only to fire people who have demonstrated serving in the long term interests of the company? >>AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time The whole point of AWS is scale and stability, not newer products.
twelve40 2y ago
maybe. i don't know. AWS main services is like an AK-47, it just works, with minimal maintenance. If they started "innovating" like Google with a million different products that get regularly culled, I wouldn't be a faithful user of almost two decades by now.

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.
lucianbr 2y ago
What if it includes them? Doesn't seem like that would change anything.
exe34 2y ago
they could also be stuck under the manager of managers with no upward mobility.
jcadam 2y ago
Ah, the 'ol "workforce greening" where we get rid of all the expensive old farts and replace them with younger/smarter/cheaper devs right out of school. It's brilliant and it always works. There are no downsides whatsoever.

chipdart 2y ago

> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but if that's your take them either you haven't been paying attention or you're not in the company for that long. The whole org was designed so that all employees are ephemeral. Managers are encouraged to promote employees up and out. At each career level you're evaluated against your direct colleagues in the same level, and those lagging behind are bound for PIPs. Check out the old fart tool. The average tenure is below 3 years. Do you it screams upward mobility?

codingwagie 2y ago
Those are just churn and burn lower level employees. I am talking about at the L7+ level. L6 and below is almost a completely different company. I have worked on major tier 1 services in every major part of the company: Retail, Alexa, and AWS. I know many of the people running the important orgs
- sillyfluke 2y ago
  The amazon people I know are purposely lounging at L6 because they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > (...) they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack. I have to call bullshit on this take. Last time I checked, less than 1% ever make it to L6, let alone L7. because it is extremely competitive. It takes a very special person with all the stars aligned to even be considered for a L7 position. We're talking about Principal Engineer/Senior Manager. Claiming they are not promoted to L7 because they don't want to screams of Aesop's the fox and the grapes.
    - sillyfluke 2y ago
      First of all, they were not making this comment in order to justify why they didn't get promoted. They were describing levels in amazon to people that were clueless about it. You also seem to be inadverdently supporting their point. If it takes "a special person" to be an L7, doesn't it also require "effort" to become that person? The person is simply saying that they are not even making the effort they think is necessary to be considered for an L7 since they think there is too little upside to justify that effort. To support their point they mentioned that another friend we hardly see anymore became an L7, their intense schedule and workload being the reason we don't see them anymore. It seemed pretty believable in that context.

nextworddev 2y ago

what's scary about Amazon is that - despite all this madness - it is still growing and better run than most other tech companies

rapsey 2y ago
All that matters is market position.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  Yes
hooverd 2y ago
I got the impression that AWS and retail were two different beasts.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> it is still growing and better run what's the evidence that it's better run? continued growth could just as likely (or more likely) be a result of its dominant position
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  It's subjective, but many (most?) people who worked at Amazon agree that it's an extremely efficient and well-run business comparatively. I've worked at two other companies of similar size and they both were laughably incompetently run in comparison to AWS. They were way better to work for as an individual employee, but certainly bad if you cared about the business operations as a whole (I didn't)
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    How is it better run if most ex-employees and current think it's a place where to succeed you must hoard knowledge and play a crazy political game where your goal is to always have someone on the team ready to chop. If you don't know who that is on your team it's probably you. Your pay is equal to three card monty. You are promised something big when you get hired but it gets spread over 4 years and most of it only vests at the end. Then you find out most employees are pushed out within 2 years and you realize only 10-20% will ever survive to get the amount you expected when you joined. If you make it this far they do it again for more money. The odds of you staying are even less... While this is happening they give you 8 hours of meetings and expect 8 hours of development. You end up working 16 hours a day. You end up so tired and confused you keep going until you burn out. At that point they ppe you. The best way to survive at Amazon is find dirt on your boss. Hire a pi. Coast and use that information to keep you employed. Rinse and repeat for new bosses. It is not run well. Taking these practices and putting them on a regular business wouldn't work. Amazon (Google, Apple, Facebook..) will keep increasing in value regardless of management style (each one of those companies have different culture) because of factors outside of this. They could require everyone to be left handed.. or speak French or be able to ski and they would still succeed.

mcast 2y ago

I've always liked the SRE approach, where you can alleviate software engineers to build new features without burdening the team with 24/7 on call duties.

stackskipton 2y ago
SRE/Ops person here. SRE only works if SRE can look at software and go "Nope, it's not ready for production and I don't care how wanted this feature is." Almost no company is mature enough to allow that behavior.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Same. SRE is generally code for “we need cloud sysadmins but that’s not fashionable anymore.”

ilamont 2y ago

The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Thank you for saying this. I have interacted with various seller-facing Web software platforms (KDP, Ads, Advantage, Seller Central, Transparency, Brand Registry) for years. Hurriedly designed features, broken processes, false-positives, and kluged-together garbage are the norm. Automated support scripts, overwhelmed human CSRs, and the siloed nature of the company compound the problems. Here's one small example: Amazon forced many sellers in the US to start selling in Brazil. It was automated. People's accounts were enabled for Brazil by default. It was poorly communicated, including no easy way to opt out (redirecting links on the help page). Many sellers in a panic started requesting support to shut down their Brazil accounts, which led to entire global accounts being shut down. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/93937b31-f6c3-4659-902d-48b1ec1990af https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...

shermantanktop 2y ago

> The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company The article comes to the exact opposite conclusion. The article repeatedly cites problems associated with culture breakdown, and tenured employees are a key source of continuity for culture. The article goes to some lengths to underline that the culture is a positive and key differentiator for Amazon. The more interesting point is that the cultural element looks like it is highly durable and effective, but has broken down as Bezos (the most tenured employee!) has pulled back. So it's not as durable as everyone thought.

i_am_jl 2y ago
I don't think those are mutually exclusive conclusions. Tenured employees help maintain culture, but they don't guarantee that it stays static. Culture developed by the employees who spent their first 5 years growing with the company is not necessarily the same culture developed by those same employees who have stayed in the same role for the last 5 years with a vanishing potential for growth.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Absolutely. A company that goes through an extended period of growth and success can retain (cargo-cult style) all the approaches from that era even while the conditions change. That ossification is obviously not great unless the culture is especially adaptable. And the conditions for most big tech companies have changed radically over the last few years. So the subtle devaluation or reinterpretation of culture is kind of inevitable when forever-growth turns into a zero-sum game. As you say, it might even be the veterans who are doing it.
- michaelt 2y ago
  If the culture you want to maintain is "first 10 minutes of every meeting is everyone reading the agenda" or "thorough security review for all changes before go live" then you want slow turnover so new hires can be trained and indoctrinated. On the other hand if the culture you want to maintain is "constantly be trying out new technologies, new ways of working and fresh ideas, at the cutting edge nothing is set in stone" you might benefit from new employees who know firsthand how other companies solved whatever problem you're facing.

nebula8804 2y ago

>The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets. What does this even mean? Does it mean they do not have proper CS background? If it means what I think it means, how is that even possible? Amazon recruits at top tier schools, not po-dunk university. Do that have a large % of their Engineering staff from bootcamps?

barumrho 2y ago
Being a student not in a narrow sense of being enrolled in a school, but being someone who studies and learns new things by doing rather than simply doing the given task in a conventional/quick/easy way that may not resolve the underlying issues that caused the problems in the first place.

fallinditch 2y ago

> brittle rube goldberg machines This is a nice metaphor that should become widely known and discussed! It can be applied to general management and administration was well as software engineering. Organizational procedures tend towards complexity over time: everyone is involved in 'improving' systems by creating new procedures, and soon enough a new person is needed to deal with or manage the increasingly complex procedures. This is a well known micro economic phenomenon. It's hard to simplify and streamline and so being aware of the tendency towards brittle rube goldberg machines is a useful concept indeed, should become Amazon's 17th management principle.

geph2021 2y ago

There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. I think that's true of most large organizations.

foobarian 2y ago

> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years That... seems about right? I wouldn't expect to get to L7+ in much less than that.

vivekd 2y ago

Maybe that's just what happens to companies that have been around a long time. They go on maintenance mode. You don't see coke or visa innovating much either. It seems like optimizing for innovation makes sense with new upstart products and optimizing for maintenance makes more sense with established products. You started with if Amazon wants change and I think that's exactly what a product with a position of relative market dominance doesn't want

voisin 2y ago
> You don't see coke or visa innovating much either. Both exist in industries that aren’t innovating much. Amazon doesn’t enjoy such a luxury.
neaanopri 2y ago
OP's description isn't exactly "optimizing for maintenance" either!
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Smart companies (I have no idea if Amazon is "smart" or not) are always innovating. However, most of the innovation will be internal. I used to work for a large corp that owned 80% of its main market and we were always encouraged to seek new ways of doing things and to file as many patents as possible. They were smart enough to realize that they got where they were by being innovative and that no matter how much of the market they controlled, they couldn't stay there by standing still.
badpun 2y ago
That would make sense, except Amazon stock's PE is currently around 50, which means that it's priced like a highly innovative company with large growth potential. So, if management doesn't want a massive stock price drop (and they obviously don't), they have to structure the company as if it's innovative and high-growth, to sell a believable story to the stock market.

throwaway_dkdja 2y ago

> There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. OH MY GOD! Thank you for saying this, this is __exactly__ what I've been experiencing. I've seen a bunch of people pursuing their personal (promo) agenda ruthlessly. Delivering on their own projects and initiatives and nothing else. Hire and develop the best my hairy ass!

deleted 2y ago
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killingtime74 2y ago
I guess don't hate the player hate the game

karaterobot 2y ago

> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career, about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation. It's a different world we're in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience? One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the shipping depot.

downrightmike 2y ago
You trained yourself, you paid for your schooling, you continue to learn on your own dollar for the company. The company doesn't pay for any of that anymore like back in the day, so yes, you must do what you can to keep your career flowing, jobs are just stepping stones, they aren't entitled to loyalty, because they stopped being loyal first.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Every company I've worked at has given me a yearly budget for education, or has just had a rubber stamp policy of paying for classes. I know a few older people whose companies paid for them to take night classes, but I didn't know it was as common as all that.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Consider yourself lucky. I haven’t had that in multiple decades, and no benefits at all for one. Then California came for my contracting job.

ryandrake 2y ago

> 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. This is not specific to Amazon, it's endemic to the whole industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all I know): Very senior leaders and engineers are sometimes where they are because they've clung to their role for a long time, and they don't leave or die at a rate sufficient to frequently bubble up new senior talent through internal promotion. These people may also deserve their position because they are brilliant, too... or they may not. I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.

PedroBatista 2y ago
Yeah, but let's not forget: In the same position and context in life, statistically speaking, you would/will do the same.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
I was at an organization that went from doing mostly smart things to doing mostly stupid things. One of the smart things they managed to do was recognize that they were top-heavy with senior+ talent who were fixed in their thinking & behavior and aggressively began recruiting new graduates and reaching out to CS/Engineering/Science seniors. They also added some pretty impressive mentoring programs to bring the new people up to speed quickly. Then they switched to doing stupid shit that mostly undermined all that and the newer people started leaving. But it was pretty good for a couple of years.
- pc86 2y ago
  Ok so let's say for the sake of argument it's a Smart Thing to focus on hiring a bunch of 22 year old fresh graduates. Is that necessarily going to change anything at the leadership level? The GP is talking about managers of managers, I don't know where you've worked in the past but in my experience Directors and VPs are not taking a lot of advice or insight from the entry level new hires.

agumonkey 2y ago

ignoramous 2y ago

> Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions Hopefully, avoid doing a Boeing in the process.

ecshafer 2y 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. I have never worked at Amazon. But I did work at a company that decided to implement microservices a la Amazon, even going so far as sharing Bezos' famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect essentially happened over night. As people spun up more and more microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine that just destroyed people with on call schedules.

pc86 2y ago
Software engineers having "on call" schedules at all is crazy to me. You shouldn't be writing code at 3am to fix a bug after working all day just to turn around and work the next day as well.
- totally 2y ago
  What would be more sane? Allowing things to remain broken at night? Having someone who is not a software engineer fix it?
  - tobyjsullivan 2y ago
    If a 7-Eleven is open 24 hours a day, they usually hire three 8-hour shifts (roughly speaking).
  - bpfrh 2y ago
    Either pay another full time night shift or yes, accept that things are broken for the time. If your product is really so important that it can't be down, hire more engineers and pass the markup to your customers. I'm glad I live in the country where you have to have 11 hours between end of work and start of work(except for special cases afaik).

ActorNightly 2y ago

Hard disagree. Firstly: >AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time They never released anything innovative, ever. Amazon creates value through optimization. The original AWS came about because they had extra servers lying around that they needed for holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out. The problem with Amazon is that its too bloated, which goes against their optimization bread and butter. The cycle goes like this. First you have an entry level engineer, that hasn't been taught really how to solve problems algorithmically - instead its basically just education in the form of memorization about problems and how to solve them, without anything more fundamental. Then, companies like Amazon need engineers to actually build the products, so they are forced to tailor the interview process to them, thus the prevalence of leetcode style questions, because they know that the engineers are studying those for other companies. So the candiates get selected are basically those that have shown that they can memorize processes better than others. When these candidates work, they do the exact same thing internal to the company, focus on doing the existing processes in hopes to get promoted. As a result you get lots of bloat both time and technology spaces. So no, promoting them into decision making positions is not the right thing to do. The best thing Amazon can actually do long term is to focus on more automation, and reduce headcount. You want fewer, more talented engineers who are able to solve problems autonomously without barriers in the way, who don't need handholding or don't need to handhold others.

codingwagie 2y ago
AWS itself was one of the biggest innovations in technology, of all time. Cloudformation, IAM policies, and creating these services as independent composable blocks was revolutionary. S3 was completely new, and is still a dominant force in cloud computing. But my point was that all of the best ideas in AWS came long ago. There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point. I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It filters for: Can learn computer science concepts Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said concepts for a while Is willing to follow directions and recipes Is willing to follow the rules Has some minumum bar of intelligence Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of people that pass the interview are actually very good. The amazon firing process will weed out the rest. Meta has released the best open source software in the last 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode memorization

hintymad 2y ago

> 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. That's not true, at least not in AWS. In fact, I'd argue that a big problem in AWS is that promotion is too fast too soon. Getting to L6 used to be a big deal, and many people were content with being on L5. But now everyone expects that L5 gets promoted to L6 in 2 years or even less. And L6 to L7 in 3 years or less. What many directors do is that they place their favorite L6 to lead a project that launches a new product. If the launch is successful, the L6 will most likely be promoted. We even joked that L8 is the new L7. And of course, this creates so much anxiety to the point that more than 50% of the 1-on-1s I'm aware of involved some discussion about "moving to the next level".

textlapse 2y ago

Amazon seems to have been run in non-ZIRP mode during ZIRP. This may save their asses when ZIRP is firmly over. You say there isn't any innovation: May be you don't need that in a utility company that moves boxes and bits? You need reliable utility that customers expect and love. In an alternate ad-supported company where the primary product (ads) is not the one people are most familiar with, you could play all these games of 'upward mobility', 'promotion' etc because money runs freely and your job is detached from the reality of product, customers or even the larger company goals (assuming, you are not directly working on ads). However, in a company that is truly customer focused (and obsessed - to over use a Bezos word) as is Amazon: all of what you said seems like a good thing? I do take issue with how they treat the low-level employees with ruthless nearly-dictatorial oversight - Amazon burn out is a real thing. OTOH, having talked to Amazon engineers/PMs who quit due to burnout still have some sort of Stockholm syndrome where they have fond attachment to their 'burn out' time and how boring/unfulfilling their new job at X/Y/Z is! It's Complicated.

alberth 2y ago

You just described every Fortune 500 company.

peteGodonn 2y ago

[dead]

kamaal 2y ago

>>Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team. This thing comes up in a lot of companies, but really the issue is your 2-year term job tourists/hoppers, and there are quite a few of you going around. Its tiring after a while to keep teaching and training every new member who joins your team. This look even more pointless when you look at the fact that they are likely to leave in a few months anyway. You mostly have your own personal knowledge management system, where all the tribal knowledge goes. Giving people a run of such a large corpus of knowledge/information, especially when they are not like to work with your for more than a few months is pointless. Eventually you only get as much information as much as you have commitment. >>If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions. Why would you promote short term people, who are likely to make bad decisions without stake only to fire people who have demonstrated serving in the long term interests of the company? >>AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time The whole point of AWS is scale and stability, not newer products.

twelve40 2y ago

maybe. i don't know. AWS main services is like an AK-47, it just works, with minimal maintenance. If they started "innovating" like Google with a million different products that get regularly culled, I wouldn't be a faithful user of almost two decades by now.