9 ms·

Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

155 points by stock_toaster 1y ago

petalmind 1y ago
The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.
- x2tyfi 1y ago
  This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.
  - dh2022 1y ago
    I left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.
    - htrp 1y ago
      And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    I don’t think moving from Amazon to Oracle does you any favours in that department. Maybe the only switch you could make for a stronger money focus?
- oncallthrow 1y ago
  In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer.
  - bmitc 1y ago
    In what way?
    - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
      [dead]
iLoveOncall 1y ago
As someone who has been working at Amazon for not far from a decade, the author misunderstands some portions because of his focus on a very specific part of the description. In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team. Anyways, a lot of those actually exist only to silence the employees, not as real values (although they are used as values within teams). Like the single mention of "Ownership" being enough to legitimate not giving employees annual refreshers on stocks when they have dropped by 50% and so has everyone's compensation. Or "Disagree and commit" when people push back on the return to office.
- cperciva 1y ago
  In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team. Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
  - felixgallo 1y ago
    Amazon's staff is about the size of 1800s London. There's no way anyone could understand all of what's going on, so people have to use judgement to assess what they know, proxy what they don't know, and move forward.
- felixgallo 1y ago
  I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better. AWS is particularly well-placed for this because its mission is to give the people what they want in exchange for money, rather than to sell the people to other people or radicalize grandma for clicks, so it doesn't have some of the suspicious ethical positions that burden other places in the space. I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives. As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer. It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.
ryandrake 1y ago
> Amazonians talk about "one-way doors" and "two-way doors", and it is quite true that many decisions are can be reversed... but that doesn't always mean that there is no cost associated with reversing a decision. Not many companies get this right. They seem to be very polarized on this mentality: There are companies that are too cavalier about decision making, have this "do something, anything" attitude, try too many risks, and then end up breaking things that are hard to reverse or painting themselves into a corner. And then there are companies that just get paralyzed by every little decision they have to make and end up defaulting to doing nothing out of caution. I think it's really rare to find a company that can consistently apply the right amount of caution and care, but still actually get things done. There's often no internal framework or thought about whether something is a "one way" or "two way" door, as the article puts it. It's just (for example) Product saying "let's do it" and Legal saying "no, don't do it" and nobody knows how to solve this without having a default decision or flipping a coin.
lifeisstillgood 1y ago
“Paxos as a service” Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work … Definitely coming back to that
- xmprt 1y ago
  Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this.
  - maherbeg 1y ago
    etcd is raft, but zookeeper is paxos as a service. so maybe a hosted version since zookeeper can be troublesome for folks to operate.
- cperciva 1y ago
  To be clear, I'm not saying it has to be literally Paxos as a service. There's a bunch of ways you can take operations from different sources in a distributed system and produce a consensus view of what happened first. But aside from trivial and low-performance options (e.g. everyone contends on a single DynamoDB item and uses conditional writes) Amazon hasn't made any of the possibilities available.
pm90 1y ago
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ignoramous 1y ago
    Using principles (as stick and a carrot) is not the same as following it. That said, I do get what you're trying to say: Leadership Principles are inescapable at Amazon, whether or not you want to progress in your career, whether you know how to game it or not, those commandments are set in stone.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    I'd challenge most Amazon employees to be able to even name all the principles.
    - iLoveOncall 1y ago
      I have absolutely no doubt that the extreme majority would be able to without struggling at all.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  We're witnessing in real time, in the USA, that what matters is the coherent mesh of individual principles, and not some words on a page somewhere.
- cperciva 1y ago
photochemsyn 1y ago
The only way the corporate executives of a corporation will ever pay attention to pleas and heartfelt advice from employees - even high-level well-trusted long-term employees - is if those employees are the controlling shareholders who have real voting power over the makeup of the corporate board. Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  Not sure how this is meant to relate to the article. But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.
  - photochemsyn 1y ago
    Well this is what set me thinking: > "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for." I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers." Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.
mikert89 1y ago
Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding. There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems
- la64710 1y ago
  That’s bullshit … just another scaremongering post against employees with some kind of visa. Leadership depends upon individuals not upon their immigration status. From direct experience I can say there are leaders and non leaders on bothe sides. BTW ec2 was first conceived and made in South Africa.
  - huflungdung 1y ago
    [dead]
  - bendbro 1y ago
    H1Bs risk deportation when they are fired. It is inconceivable for this to not impact their performance and behavior. Combine that with Amazon's Jack Welch style stack rank and firing of the bottom and it becomes even worse
    - la64710 1y ago
      Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there. And this actually happens all the time. Folks in Amazon move around as needed across border. The idea of h1-b servitude does not hold much relevance for companies like Amazon who have built massive offshore centers in the last few years.
      - Supermancho 1y ago
apparent 1y ago
The "leaders are owners" bit is a great idea from the shareholders' perspective, but a bit of a raw deal for the employees. That is, every owner wants the employees to act as if he has as much skin in the game as an owner does. But the employees simply do not. They might have some equity, but at Amazon it would only be the tiniest sliver. If you can convince such employees to act as if they are owners, then good for you I guess. But savvy employees would only act as owners to the extent that they are given upside potential to match.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  I don't understand how slivers of stock is supposed to incentivize anyone to do anything. Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Say that it's a completely fair co-op and I have a 1-in-1.5-millionth share of the whole company. Their market cap is about 2.5T, so this is about 1.6 million USD in stock that I own. (By amazing coincidence, their market cap in USD is about the square of the employee headcount) But if I'm a rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level. For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock. I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?
  - jodrellblank 1y ago
    I’m not going to strongly defend it but this “doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right?” isn’t true; if your work scales or you are managing people, you could move the needle more - say you launch a new service from scratch.
VaedaStrike 1y ago
This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?
- phantomathkg 1y ago
  Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime. Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.
- throwaway435675 1y ago
  It was at one time maybe, but like all things you have to adapt and move. I think the article got it right, we've shifted from buildings what's best for the customer to building what the customer *thinks* they want.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Yup. "Free two day shipping" shifted from "two days from when you place your order" to "two days from when we ship your order, which may be an additional one-two days". Even now, I can search for a product, think "Oh, good, something here should work", and hit the "Get it tomorrow" filter. I watch the results change and show a subset of results... ... none of which I can "get tomorrow".
- krackers 1y ago
  It's customer focused in the way that gacha games are "customer focused".
rationalfaith 1y ago
[dead]
yalogin 1y ago
I wonder how much emphasis they put on long term strategy over short term impact. I have seen in reality many companies always focus on the short term.
losvedir 1y ago
My favorite one is leaders "Are Right, a Lot". The others are all generally "meta" about deciding what to do and how to do it, but that one actually calls out the concrete results of actions. It feels pretty meaty, and actually is a way to grade leaders. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as a team lead, who recently very much was not right about something. But fortunately it's "a lot" and not "always".
- dh2022 1y ago
  When I was working at Amazon I did not like this principle. In my experience it led to people arguing: because whoever did not “win” the argument would not be a leader.
  - diskzero 1y ago
    There was a lot of "arguing" at Amazon, or you could call is strenuous discussions. Another principle was Disagree and Commit. I found this principle lacking at other companies. People would disgres and then sabatoge. The Amazon way was to agree to disagree and commit to sincerely work in the direction of the decision. Winning the initial argument did not make you the leader. You became the leader once your solution shipped, gained signifcant market share and some other succcess metric. This was not always the case!
- tj-teej 1y ago
  A missed aspect of "are right, a lot" LP is that the great leaders are able to quickly realize when they're wrong and get on the right side of the argument. It's not "are right from the start, a lot", it's "are right, a lot", kind of works in hand with the Disagree and Commit LP
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095603
some_guy_nobel 1y ago
Anyone taking these leadership principles serious is fooling themselves. Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit. Same happened again with mandated RTO. And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries. Why would any other leadership princples be different?
tmsh 1y ago
Very thoughtful. There’s also Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards, respectively.
smitty1e 1y ago
"Bias for action" is fine, but, with age, the "measure twice, cut once" adage acquires some gravity.
sangeeth96 1y ago
This is good feedback that ideally, Amazonians should read and reflect on but I worry the machine is too big at the moment for anyone there to care. Would take a big event and a reset for things to change. My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises. "Disagree and commit", "Bias for Action" were popular amongst some of the management I knew. There are very detailed internal wiki pages written with examples on the right ways to interpret them but I doubt many bothered to go through all that beyond the material presented during onboarding — which is also not always completed. It was frustrating to see LPs overused by employees in every meeting, document and discussions without much thought as to what they were meant to convey. That said, there were a _handful_ of teams and individuals I met who exemplified these but it was a rare occurrence during my time unfortunately. And even in the moments where someone went above and beyond w.r.t channeling the LPs and the internal process to bring forth a proposal (e.g. famous corp-wide one was the push against RTO), I saw them get shot down unceremoniously while low-effort work and planning with a dusting of LPs got the go-ahead. I hence echo what a few folk here have already said — don't always expect the work environment to reflect the values and principles you read on the about page. Reality is often (sadly) disappointing.
- diskzero 1y ago
  I wonder if overall team size has something to do with how the principles are dealt with? Mobile Shopping is huge. Some teams are tiny, experiencing massive growth or winding down. If a team has a super mature code base or market, and the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? How can it really always be Day One?
  - sangeeth96 1y ago
    > the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads. > How can it really always be Day One? I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.
diskzero 1y ago
I worked at Amazon before the two newest principles were added, so I can't comment on Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. I was asked about the principles during my interview(s) and they were discussed extensively during my onboarding process. I found there were groups of peeple who were very sincere about them and groups that were quite cynical. Some co-workers had no opinion and just wanted to survive their current pager duty. I frequently used some combination of principles as support for an argument for or against some technical or business decision. It was nice to have them written down and the entire company accepting them as the basis of how the business should operate. This was quite different from my time at Apple, where the principles were somewhat fuzzy other than Do the Right Thing, Do What Steve Wants or Put the User First. The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share. There certainly could be cases I don't know about. I found many of the principles helped create a good environment to make technical decisions and maintain some technical autonomy across groups. Yes, working at Amazon is a grind and there many ways working there can suck the joy out of your life. I never found the principles used as a weapon against me, my team or customers. I know Amazon has a lot of faults, but I am not sure they are are directly correlated to the principles. A thought experiment would be to wonder what Amazon would be like if it didn't have any principles at all?
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  All organisations have principles. Beyond a certain size - and sometimes long before then - they're never the stated ones. And while you may have used the stated principles to create a good environment, there's nothing in Amazon's principles that prevents someone else using them to create a bad environment. For example - conspicuously absent from them is any concept of worker welfare.
- patrick451 1y ago
  The problem with the LPs is they are all contradictory. You can make an argument for anything you want using LPs. Want to refactor something? Insist on the highest standards. Don't want to refactor something? Deliver results. It's all BS.
CamperBob2 1y ago
Then there's the rather-hilarious tension between Amazon's "Climate Pledge" and "Yeeeah, forget that whole WFH thing. We're going to need you to sit in traffic for an hour a day so you can Zoom from the office rather than home."
bmitc 1y ago
Amazon is a cult, fullstop. My interview there was the most miserable, antagonistic one I have ever had. And even then they wanted you to regurgitate their principles as if the recruiter didn't over prep you on them.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cebert 1y ago
I used like the leadership principle “Disagree but commit” the most. I thought it was a good principle for handling conflicts and disagreements. However, I’ve seen how it has been used to justify pushing employees go along with RTO initiatives, often with little to no evidence that such policies actually improve productivity. Employees weren’t given an opportunity to present their side of the issue. It made me realize how they’re a tool for management than actual principles the company lives by.
anthem2025 1y ago
Why criticize the employees when you have no clue what their day to day is like? There’s a reason why leadership and the leadership principles are mocked. They vary from okay to kinda dumb to just outright silly. > they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally I feel like the myth that AWS is just internal Amazon stuff exposed externally has done so much heavy lifting despite never really being true.
claw-el 1y ago
> When EC2 launched, it wasn't really clear what people would do with it, but it was very cool and it was clear that it could be a big deal in some form, sooner or later. Hindsight is 20/20, but how do you spot for “it was very cool” and “could be a big deal”? I often hear these used as justification to build something, but the projects often go nowhere..
orsenthil 1y ago
Just look at the principle - "Disagree and Commit." It sounds correct when a group of peers have discussions and debate and in order to move forward, the owner takes this call. The disagreeing opinions are heard, and commitment actually moves the ship for everyone. Now, when the CEO says "Disagree and Commit" to the entire company for (returning to office 5 days week or quit), the meaning of the principle is entirely different. The principles are not used in practice as they meant to me. They are inherently ambiguous and in practice, are used as tools for performance management usually by dirty or opportunistic managers.

155 points by stock_toaster 1y ago

petalmind 1y ago

The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.

x2tyfi 1y ago
This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.
- dh2022 1y ago
  I left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.
  - htrp 1y ago
    And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012
- Aeolun 1y ago
  I don’t think moving from Amazon to Oracle does you any favours in that department. Maybe the only switch you could make for a stronger money focus?
oncallthrow 1y ago
In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer.
- bmitc 1y ago
  In what way?
  - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
    [dead]

iLoveOncall 1y ago

As someone who has been working at Amazon for not far from a decade, the author misunderstands some portions because of his focus on a very specific part of the description. In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team. Anyways, a lot of those actually exist only to silence the employees, not as real values (although they are used as values within teams). Like the single mention of "Ownership" being enough to legitimate not giving employees annual refreshers on stocks when they have dropped by 50% and so has everyone's compensation. Or "Disagree and commit" when people push back on the return to office.

cperciva 1y ago
In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team. Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
- felixgallo 1y ago
  Amazon's staff is about the size of 1800s London. There's no way anyone could understand all of what's going on, so people have to use judgement to assess what they know, proxy what they don't know, and move forward.
felixgallo 1y ago
I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better. AWS is particularly well-placed for this because its mission is to give the people what they want in exchange for money, rather than to sell the people to other people or radicalize grandma for clicks, so it doesn't have some of the suspicious ethical positions that burden other places in the space. I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives. As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer. It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.

ryandrake 1y ago

> Amazonians talk about "one-way doors" and "two-way doors", and it is quite true that many decisions are can be reversed... but that doesn't always mean that there is no cost associated with reversing a decision. Not many companies get this right. They seem to be very polarized on this mentality: There are companies that are too cavalier about decision making, have this "do something, anything" attitude, try too many risks, and then end up breaking things that are hard to reverse or painting themselves into a corner. And then there are companies that just get paralyzed by every little decision they have to make and end up defaulting to doing nothing out of caution. I think it's really rare to find a company that can consistently apply the right amount of caution and care, but still actually get things done. There's often no internal framework or thought about whether something is a "one way" or "two way" door, as the article puts it. It's just (for example) Product saying "let's do it" and Legal saying "no, don't do it" and nobody knows how to solve this without having a default decision or flipping a coin.

lifeisstillgood 1y ago

“Paxos as a service” Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work … Definitely coming back to that

xmprt 1y ago
Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this.
- maherbeg 1y ago
  etcd is raft, but zookeeper is paxos as a service. so maybe a hosted version since zookeeper can be troublesome for folks to operate.
cperciva 1y ago
To be clear, I'm not saying it has to be literally Paxos as a service. There's a bunch of ways you can take operations from different sources in a distributed system and produce a consensus view of what happened first. But aside from trivial and low-performance options (e.g. everyone contends on a single DynamoDB item and uses conditional writes) Amazon hasn't made any of the possibilities available.

pm90 1y ago

I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.

iLoveOncall 1y ago
Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ignoramous 1y ago
  Using principles (as stick and a carrot) is not the same as following it. That said, I do get what you're trying to say: Leadership Principles are inescapable at Amazon, whether or not you want to progress in your career, whether you know how to game it or not, those commandments are set in stone.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  I'd challenge most Amazon employees to be able to even name all the principles.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    I have absolutely no doubt that the extreme majority would be able to without struggling at all.
cyanydeez 1y ago
We're witnessing in real time, in the USA, that what matters is the coherent mesh of individual principles, and not some words on a page somewhere.
cperciva 1y ago

photochemsyn 1y ago

The only way the corporate executives of a corporation will ever pay attention to pleas and heartfelt advice from employees - even high-level well-trusted long-term employees - is if those employees are the controlling shareholders who have real voting power over the makeup of the corporate board. Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.

shermantanktop 1y ago
Not sure how this is meant to relate to the article. But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.
- photochemsyn 1y ago
  Well this is what set me thinking: > "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for." I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers." Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.

mikert89 1y ago

Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding. There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems

la64710 1y ago
That’s bullshit … just another scaremongering post against employees with some kind of visa. Leadership depends upon individuals not upon their immigration status. From direct experience I can say there are leaders and non leaders on bothe sides. BTW ec2 was first conceived and made in South Africa.
- huflungdung 1y ago
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- bendbro 1y ago
  H1Bs risk deportation when they are fired. It is inconceivable for this to not impact their performance and behavior. Combine that with Amazon's Jack Welch style stack rank and firing of the bottom and it becomes even worse
  - la64710 1y ago
    Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there. And this actually happens all the time. Folks in Amazon move around as needed across border. The idea of h1-b servitude does not hold much relevance for companies like Amazon who have built massive offshore centers in the last few years.
    - Supermancho 1y ago

apparent 1y ago

The "leaders are owners" bit is a great idea from the shareholders' perspective, but a bit of a raw deal for the employees. That is, every owner wants the employees to act as if he has as much skin in the game as an owner does. But the employees simply do not. They might have some equity, but at Amazon it would only be the tiniest sliver. If you can convince such employees to act as if they are owners, then good for you I guess. But savvy employees would only act as owners to the extent that they are given upside potential to match.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
I don't understand how slivers of stock is supposed to incentivize anyone to do anything. Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Say that it's a completely fair co-op and I have a 1-in-1.5-millionth share of the whole company. Their market cap is about 2.5T, so this is about 1.6 million USD in stock that I own. (By amazing coincidence, their market cap in USD is about the square of the employee headcount) But if I'm a rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level. For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock. I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?
- jodrellblank 1y ago
  I’m not going to strongly defend it but this “doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right?” isn’t true; if your work scales or you are managing people, you could move the needle more - say you launch a new service from scratch.

VaedaStrike 1y ago

This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?

phantomathkg 1y ago
Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime. Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.
throwaway435675 1y ago
It was at one time maybe, but like all things you have to adapt and move. I think the article got it right, we've shifted from buildings what's best for the customer to building what the customer *thinks* they want.
FireBeyond 1y ago
Yup. "Free two day shipping" shifted from "two days from when you place your order" to "two days from when we ship your order, which may be an additional one-two days". Even now, I can search for a product, think "Oh, good, something here should work", and hit the "Get it tomorrow" filter. I watch the results change and show a subset of results... ... none of which I can "get tomorrow".
krackers 1y ago
It's customer focused in the way that gacha games are "customer focused".

rationalfaith 1y ago

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yalogin 1y ago

I wonder how much emphasis they put on long term strategy over short term impact. I have seen in reality many companies always focus on the short term.

losvedir 1y ago

My favorite one is leaders "Are Right, a Lot". The others are all generally "meta" about deciding what to do and how to do it, but that one actually calls out the concrete results of actions. It feels pretty meaty, and actually is a way to grade leaders. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as a team lead, who recently very much was not right about something. But fortunately it's "a lot" and not "always".

dh2022 1y ago
When I was working at Amazon I did not like this principle. In my experience it led to people arguing: because whoever did not “win” the argument would not be a leader.
- diskzero 1y ago
  There was a lot of "arguing" at Amazon, or you could call is strenuous discussions. Another principle was Disagree and Commit. I found this principle lacking at other companies. People would disgres and then sabatoge. The Amazon way was to agree to disagree and commit to sincerely work in the direction of the decision. Winning the initial argument did not make you the leader. You became the leader once your solution shipped, gained signifcant market share and some other succcess metric. This was not always the case!
tj-teej 1y ago
A missed aspect of "are right, a lot" LP is that the great leaders are able to quickly realize when they're wrong and get on the right side of the argument. It's not "are right from the start, a lot", it's "are right, a lot", kind of works in hand with the Disagree and Commit LP

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ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095603

some_guy_nobel 1y ago

Anyone taking these leadership principles serious is fooling themselves. Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit. Same happened again with mandated RTO. And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries. Why would any other leadership princples be different?

tmsh 1y ago

Very thoughtful. There’s also Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards, respectively.

smitty1e 1y ago

"Bias for action" is fine, but, with age, the "measure twice, cut once" adage acquires some gravity.

sangeeth96 1y ago

This is good feedback that ideally, Amazonians should read and reflect on but I worry the machine is too big at the moment for anyone there to care. Would take a big event and a reset for things to change. My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises. "Disagree and commit", "Bias for Action" were popular amongst some of the management I knew. There are very detailed internal wiki pages written with examples on the right ways to interpret them but I doubt many bothered to go through all that beyond the material presented during onboarding — which is also not always completed. It was frustrating to see LPs overused by employees in every meeting, document and discussions without much thought as to what they were meant to convey. That said, there were a _handful_ of teams and individuals I met who exemplified these but it was a rare occurrence during my time unfortunately. And even in the moments where someone went above and beyond w.r.t channeling the LPs and the internal process to bring forth a proposal (e.g. famous corp-wide one was the push against RTO), I saw them get shot down unceremoniously while low-effort work and planning with a dusting of LPs got the go-ahead. I hence echo what a few folk here have already said — don't always expect the work environment to reflect the values and principles you read on the about page. Reality is often (sadly) disappointing.

diskzero 1y ago
I wonder if overall team size has something to do with how the principles are dealt with? Mobile Shopping is huge. Some teams are tiny, experiencing massive growth or winding down. If a team has a super mature code base or market, and the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? How can it really always be Day One?
- sangeeth96 1y ago
  > the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads. > How can it really always be Day One? I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.

diskzero 1y ago

I worked at Amazon before the two newest principles were added, so I can't comment on Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. I was asked about the principles during my interview(s) and they were discussed extensively during my onboarding process. I found there were groups of peeple who were very sincere about them and groups that were quite cynical. Some co-workers had no opinion and just wanted to survive their current pager duty. I frequently used some combination of principles as support for an argument for or against some technical or business decision. It was nice to have them written down and the entire company accepting them as the basis of how the business should operate. This was quite different from my time at Apple, where the principles were somewhat fuzzy other than Do the Right Thing, Do What Steve Wants or Put the User First. The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share. There certainly could be cases I don't know about. I found many of the principles helped create a good environment to make technical decisions and maintain some technical autonomy across groups. Yes, working at Amazon is a grind and there many ways working there can suck the joy out of your life. I never found the principles used as a weapon against me, my team or customers. I know Amazon has a lot of faults, but I am not sure they are are directly correlated to the principles. A thought experiment would be to wonder what Amazon would be like if it didn't have any principles at all?

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
All organisations have principles. Beyond a certain size - and sometimes long before then - they're never the stated ones. And while you may have used the stated principles to create a good environment, there's nothing in Amazon's principles that prevents someone else using them to create a bad environment. For example - conspicuously absent from them is any concept of worker welfare.
patrick451 1y ago
The problem with the LPs is they are all contradictory. You can make an argument for anything you want using LPs. Want to refactor something? Insist on the highest standards. Don't want to refactor something? Deliver results. It's all BS.

CamperBob2 1y ago

Then there's the rather-hilarious tension between Amazon's "Climate Pledge" and "Yeeeah, forget that whole WFH thing. We're going to need you to sit in traffic for an hour a day so you can Zoom from the office rather than home."

bmitc 1y ago

Amazon is a cult, fullstop. My interview there was the most miserable, antagonistic one I have ever had. And even then they wanted you to regurgitate their principles as if the recruiter didn't over prep you on them.

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cebert 1y ago

I used like the leadership principle “Disagree but commit” the most. I thought it was a good principle for handling conflicts and disagreements. However, I’ve seen how it has been used to justify pushing employees go along with RTO initiatives, often with little to no evidence that such policies actually improve productivity. Employees weren’t given an opportunity to present their side of the issue. It made me realize how they’re a tool for management than actual principles the company lives by.

anthem2025 1y ago

Why criticize the employees when you have no clue what their day to day is like? There’s a reason why leadership and the leadership principles are mocked. They vary from okay to kinda dumb to just outright silly. > they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally I feel like the myth that AWS is just internal Amazon stuff exposed externally has done so much heavy lifting despite never really being true.

claw-el 1y ago

> When EC2 launched, it wasn't really clear what people would do with it, but it was very cool and it was clear that it could be a big deal in some form, sooner or later. Hindsight is 20/20, but how do you spot for “it was very cool” and “could be a big deal”? I often hear these used as justification to build something, but the projects often go nowhere..

orsenthil 1y ago

Just look at the principle - "Disagree and Commit." It sounds correct when a group of peers have discussions and debate and in order to move forward, the owner takes this call. The disagreeing opinions are heard, and commitment actually moves the ship for everyone. Now, when the CEO says "Disagree and Commit" to the entire company for (returning to office 5 days week or quit), the meaning of the principle is entirely different. The principles are not used in practice as they meant to me. They are inherently ambiguous and in practice, are used as tools for performance management usually by dirty or opportunistic managers.