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It's interesting, after my time at Amazon (8 years) -- I struggled to visualize decisions without a document, because you get so used to reviewing things in tha

It's interesting, after my time at Amazon (8 years) -- I struggled to visualize decisions without a document, because you get so used to reviewing things in that way. However, it's EXTREMELY heavy-handed. People will give you comments on the structure of your document (to "raise the bar") instead of the content of the document, and often you can't get documents reviewed until they are aesthetically in the right place for people to digest them. Ultimately, I think it makes sense when you're at a large organization with high attrition (such that you need to keep track of all of the decisions which are made), but otherwise, it's probably not worth it to do a formal document writing process.

qqtt 2y ago
I don’t think that is specific to Amazon. If anything I think the whole paradigm of “over analyzing communications with vacuous update suggestions that don’t matter” is probably the most consistent thread I’ve found in all of corporate America. I’ll never forget early in my career we had huddled around a coworkers computer with our entire team including senior manager writing an email to a VP and the senior manager was making punctuation and the most inane wording updates you can imagine. I once thought there is no way the absurdity of the cost to benefit of that situation would be topped, but how naive I was - turns out generally companies seemingly can’t avoid that kind of atmosphere.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  The songs demand a camp fire
yazaddaruvala 2y ago
The real benefit of doc writing isn’t for decision making it’s for education. It allows everyone at Amazon to evaluate the author’s ability to refine their “chain of thought”. The nice side effect is the author taking 10x more time to save 10x L+1 and L+2 leaders (ie more expensive people) from spending that same time trying to understand it.
- euroderf 2y ago
  > The nice side effect is the author taking 10x more time to save 10x L+1 and L+2 leaders (ie more expensive people) from spending that same time trying to understand it. IMHO this is analogous to most of the economic justification for not being sucky at documentation. When you apply this analysis to the user-facing side, an hour of documentation can save hundreds of hours of user thrashing. This is something that I would assume is intuitive, but under the capitalist mode of software development, it seems to be an uphill fight to get the economic rationale into management's heads. There are of course exceptions, and they stand out in excellence. When you shortchange documentation, you're externalizing costs that shared efficiencies say should be internalized. Kind of like dumping sewage in the lake, or driving on leaded gas.
- zaphirplane 2y ago
  Yet there are more successful companies than Amazon or as successful that don’t use this approach. That clearly shows it’s a cultural or quirky thing, otherwise there would be a clear correlation between a company’s success and the doc culture

qqtt 2y ago

I don’t think that is specific to Amazon. If anything I think the whole paradigm of “over analyzing communications with vacuous update suggestions that don’t matter” is probably the most consistent thread I’ve found in all of corporate America. I’ll never forget early in my career we had huddled around a coworkers computer with our entire team including senior manager writing an email to a VP and the senior manager was making punctuation and the most inane wording updates you can imagine. I once thought there is no way the absurdity of the cost to benefit of that situation would be topped, but how naive I was - turns out generally companies seemingly can’t avoid that kind of atmosphere.

bravetraveler 2y ago
The songs demand a camp fire

yazaddaruvala 2y ago

The real benefit of doc writing isn’t for decision making it’s for education. It allows everyone at Amazon to evaluate the author’s ability to refine their “chain of thought”. The nice side effect is the author taking 10x more time to save 10x L+1 and L+2 leaders (ie more expensive people) from spending that same time trying to understand it.

euroderf 2y ago
> The nice side effect is the author taking 10x more time to save 10x L+1 and L+2 leaders (ie more expensive people) from spending that same time trying to understand it. IMHO this is analogous to most of the economic justification for not being sucky at documentation. When you apply this analysis to the user-facing side, an hour of documentation can save hundreds of hours of user thrashing. This is something that I would assume is intuitive, but under the capitalist mode of software development, it seems to be an uphill fight to get the economic rationale into management's heads. There are of course exceptions, and they stand out in excellence. When you shortchange documentation, you're externalizing costs that shared efficiencies say should be internalized. Kind of like dumping sewage in the lake, or driving on leaded gas.
zaphirplane 2y ago
Yet there are more successful companies than Amazon or as successful that don’t use this approach. That clearly shows it’s a cultural or quirky thing, otherwise there would be a clear correlation between a company’s success and the doc culture