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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

• 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
  The Leadership Principles are less "principles" and more "operational guidelines". Aside from maybe "Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer" (which is a recent addition) they're not saying what Amazon wants to achieve; they're recommendations for effective ways to get things done.
  • wetpaws 1y ago
    [dead]
  • pzmarzly 1y ago
    If they are just recommendations, perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes :)
    • monkeydreams 1y ago
      > perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes They are selecting for people who will "play the game" or, even better, will believe proactively. No one with a lick of sense would believe that Amazon strive to be the best employer in the world. But someone who is capable of doing, for e.g., a highly skilled coding job and who believes that Amazon actually strives to be the best employer, is a rare beast who will likely not unionize at the drop of a hat.
      • hinkley 1y ago
        I "love" how some people think it's important to do a 7 hour interview pressure cooker with a prospective employee to see how they behave in a crisis. This is a straight up condemnation of their development culture and they are so blind they don't even see it. What they want is people who are content to live in a perpetual crisis instead of people who will put their foot down and work like hell to fix it. The amount of blood I'll bleed for a team I've been gelling with for two years is a lot. The amount I'm going to bleed for some jackass I just met who wants me to lick his boots for a job is approximately zero. I hated frat boys in college for the frat culture. I didn't expect to find it in dev culture as an adult. They're called Frat BOYS for a reason. Fuck hazing.
• hibikir 1y ago
  Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book. All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished. You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s. Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program. It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things. As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.
• OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra………. Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up
  • stevage 1y ago
    Yeah and the heartfelt promise by the founders to never ever introduce advertising on the Search page because of the unavoidable conflict of interest.
• gtowey 1y ago
  Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda. My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.
  • Muromec 1y ago
    It makes sense. When leadership speaks topdown in principles, they want some kind of change to happen, so whatever being communicated can be presumed to not be there before.
• hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  I wish all companies would just state the obvious and list the first principle as "Make Money". Perhaps it should go without saying, but sometime around the 90s or so, many companies tried to pretend that they had these lofty, societal goals, and they tried to pretend that making money was almost secondary. The reason I think it's important to list "make money" as the first, primary goal is that it makes it clear that all other goals are subservient to that one. The thing that makes my eyes roll about principles and mission statements is I've seen them all promptly thrown out the window when a company's money making machine is threatened. Essentially, they're principles when they're aligned with making money, but if circumstances change in the slightest, the principles will be jettisoned if they make it harder to make money (which kind of makes it hard to call them "principles" in the first place - maybe "guidelines" would be a better term?)
  • stevage 1y ago
    Yeah, I had a few months inside Facebook, and saw this in action on the internal FB. People would raise objections to unethical actions by the company, and the response was basically "Yeah, but it makes soooo much money."
• stevage 1y ago
  They all have one principle: make money. Everything else is negotiable.
• greesil 1y ago
  Stock price is usually a principle. I've never heard of a company being completely nihilistic, but maybe there are some out there.
• kangs 1y ago
  Principles are just nice words, and that's it. It's, IMO, the action/reward loop that matters most (i.e. incentives). Most, if not all big tech companies do not align incentives with principles - quite the opposite. Most folks in a position of leadership utilize principles and other "nice sounding arguments" for their own personal benefit, i.e. block internal competitors with principles (works great against employees with integrity and quality ethics) while claiming to follow these.. without actually following any. I'm sure everyone here has had some taste of it, or even discussions on how this sucks but "they gotta play the game". Not playing the game is extremely hard when it comes to promos, salary, or getting a large project to go with your name on it (I'd know..). So, until this rant become common sense, principles will just be that - nice words.
• pjmlp 1y ago
  Quickly approaching 50y, I have learnt that company principles are marketing material put out by HR, where we spend useless time on yearly trainings, and like you mention, no one really abides by them. Not a single company I worked on, did they ever mattered beyond company's marketing material.
• hinkley 1y ago
  Principles are what you do when things are hard. I know from painful experience that it's easier to forgive someone who has never promised you they have them than someone who has and then backpedals. Even allowing for the fact that most such statements are aspirational more than descriptive, there are degrees where it transitions from not reaching your goals to straight up betrayal.