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Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals
- throwaway439080 1y agoThe thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
- wetpaws 1y agoAsserting your dominance is part of the leadership /s
- nine_zeros 1y agoThe lesson you learn is that screaming is a one-way street, can be done only in one direction of the org chart. A junior engineer embarrassing a senior principal is a big no no.
- damn_trolls 1y agoThey get it from senior management, and pass it down like generational trauma. This was a problem even in 2013 when I worked there. Once, I was new and actually pushed back against a Director level person's poor behavior in a 70 person meeting, because I didn't know better. I was approached by multiple individuals afterwards telling me how "brave" it was of me. At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.
- b00ty4breakfast 1y agoshit runs downhill
- tekla 1y agoI've never worked directly for Amazon, but for a consultancy that was an AWS Partner. I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.
- darth_avocado 1y agoThere’s a reason Bezos decided to bulk up. Gonna need some of that when people decide to throw hands at all hands.
- seattle_spring 1y agoSome people might take your comment as a joke or exaggeration, but I can confidently say that the worst coworkers I've had by far were all ex-Amazon.
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- kaonwarb 1y agoAn oddly gauzy piece. As an ex-Amazonian, I recommend the (complimentary, insider-written) book "Working Backwards" for those interested in a substantive look at how Amazon ticks.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago> At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff. Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
- vachina 1y agoDidn’t feel like it offered any insights honestly. Guy is feeling holier because he finally gets to work at Amazon.
- vandyswa 1y agoWith Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.
- ge96 1y agosome of you... may die...
- ncr100 1y ago14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today.
- palmotea 1y ago> 14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today. Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
- speff 1y agoI'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
- jackdoe 1y agoor you wait for the inspector's call.
- bdangubic 1y ago14k is massive layoff, even for a company as large as amazon. it isn’t about the “employees who aren’t necessarily doing the work you want done” for sure (all the while they are off-shoring by the more thousands while “america first”-run government is bailing out argentine :)
- darth_avocado 1y ago> The word balance never came up. Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
- dheera 1y agoAmazon doesn't actually pay mediocre, they are very good for FAANG standards. But yes, when you have already cut out the slackers and still are required to PIP x% of every team despite everyone being competent, everyones' coworker relationships automatically become competitive, not collaborative. The culture starts to become a rat race of people working nights and weekends, each trying to not become the one whose family and children might have to get uprooted and leave the US within 60 days because of a PIP. Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
- saagarjha 1y agoAmazon pays pretty mediocre. After their boosts during the pandemic they’re solidly middle of the pack above Apple and Microsoft but below Meta and Google.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoWe are an Amazon/Google family, and I'm surprised how close Amazon comes to Google salary even for a non-dev UXD. It is definitely competitive (same market, about the same level, dev vs UXD).
- villedespommes 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yahoozoo 1y ago> There was only talk of customer obsession and solving problems at scale—imagining the biggest problem possible, then multiplying it by ten. cringe
- constantcrying 1y agoI am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart. It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process. The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes. (Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
- dwb 1y ago> The word balance never came up. Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
- the_panopticon 1y agoI think the subsequent level is 'Distinguished Engineer.' That's terminal AFAIK. Maybe they'll need a 'Sr DE' someday?
- teeray 1y ago“Grand Engineer” “Ascended Engineer” “Archengineer” “Their Excellency, Prime Engineer”
- tetromino_ 1y agoEngirinissimo?
- saagarjha 1y agoOne would think you’d have more tact than to post this today.
- samrus 1y agoIts damage mitigation. I was waiting for actual insights but its all pr fluff
- ruben81ad 1y agoAmazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM. Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more. Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.
- pvelagal 1y agoThey all want GPUs and they are all trading off engineers for GPUs. That seems to be the culture right now :)
- sys_64738 1y agoA horrible company that treats their employees like dirt. We'd be better off if this company never existed.
- illusive4080 1y agoTwo things can be true. They treat their employees poorly and they have invented many things which have vastly benefited millions or even billions of people.
- vachina 1y agoInvented what, precisely?
- digitalPhonix 1y agoAWS (the old, good stuff: EC2 and S3 and maybe DynamoDB)
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoOne click! What an apex of western civilization.
- sharts 1y agoWho cares?
- belZaah 1y agoAnd yet the organization is the closest thing we have in the West to industrial-scale slavery