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> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. One of my j

> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires. In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.

xingped 8mo ago
Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.
- pengaru 8mo ago
  I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.
  - xingped 8mo ago
    Mostly yes, I was just pointing out the irony of quoting Bezos as if Amazon isn't exactly the same problem (if not one of the worst of them all).
Twirrim 8mo ago
About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison. They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch. I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
- Quarrelsome 8mo ago
  > I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product". I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively. Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    After 30 working years let me confirm: Every job is performance theater for the people who control the company
apexalpha 8mo ago
I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers. I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security". I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps. I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such. Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck). I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome. When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy... After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser. Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this. On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.
- antisthenes 8mo ago
  The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm. It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees) The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care. I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
  - apexalpha 8mo ago
    I do! I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed. The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back. A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference. Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.
sgarland 8mo ago
I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?” The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered. Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.
- cbg0 8mo ago
  > at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?” Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
  - sgarland 8mo ago
    Because if you’re in charge of an org, you should occasionally validate what you’re being told? Is this an uncommon belief or something?
    - Quarrelsome 8mo ago
      its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.
binsquare 8mo ago
At one meeting to build out a new service as a next generation to a flagship AWS service that I worked on, I got to meet all the product leaders and managers. At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down. I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.
assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
The story is told in the recent book about Bezos and Amazon. The one by Brad Stone.
crossroadsguy 8mo ago
The later part of that quoted passage ends with a possibly rhetorical question. > ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line? So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.
- nandomrumber 8mo ago
  Andrew R. Jassy is the CEO of Amazon.
interludead 8mo ago
The fact that showing the actual product in a product meeting triggers panic tells you everything you need to know about how far things have drifted

xingped 8mo ago

Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.

pengaru 8mo ago
I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.
- xingped 8mo ago
  Mostly yes, I was just pointing out the irony of quoting Bezos as if Amazon isn't exactly the same problem (if not one of the worst of them all).

Twirrim 8mo ago

About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison. They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch. I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".

Quarrelsome 8mo ago
> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product". I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively. Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  After 30 working years let me confirm: Every job is performance theater for the people who control the company

apexalpha 8mo ago

I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers. I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security". I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps. I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such. Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck). I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome. When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy... After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser. Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this. On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.

antisthenes 8mo ago
The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm. It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees) The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care. I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
- apexalpha 8mo ago
  I do! I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed. The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back. A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference. Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.

sgarland 8mo ago

I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?” The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered. Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.

cbg0 8mo ago
> at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?” Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
- sgarland 8mo ago
  Because if you’re in charge of an org, you should occasionally validate what you’re being told? Is this an uncommon belief or something?
  - Quarrelsome 8mo ago
    its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.

binsquare 8mo ago

At one meeting to build out a new service as a next generation to a flagship AWS service that I worked on, I got to meet all the product leaders and managers. At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down. I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.

assimpleaspossi 8mo ago

The story is told in the recent book about Bezos and Amazon. The one by Brad Stone.

crossroadsguy 8mo ago

The later part of that quoted passage ends with a possibly rhetorical question. > ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line? So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.

nandomrumber 8mo ago
Andrew R. Jassy is the CEO of Amazon.

interludead 8mo ago

The fact that showing the actual product in a product meeting triggers panic tells you everything you need to know about how far things have drifted