[HN Gopher] Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling i...
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Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon
Author : ecliptik
Score : 163 points
Date : 2024-07-31 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| nerdo wrote:
| https://archive.ph/iDMXO
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240731161606/https://fortune.c...
| chipdart wrote:
| I don't think the people quoting leadership principles are coming
| from a place of knowledge or worse: honesty.
|
| Regardless of whether you think about the RTO mandate, internally
| Amazon leaves it quite clear that the whole point of these
| leadership principles is to reduce ambiguity, which means drive
| decision-making in the absence of a clear direction.
|
| This is absolutely not the case with RTO. There was a very clear
| and specific diktat from the very top of the organization. There
| was no ambiguity or void to fill in the decision-making process.
|
| For that, Amazon also has a leadership principle: disagree and
| commit.
|
| Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote
| work was the exception and not the norm. For example, L4s were
| explicitly barred from WFO, and L5s and above had to explicitly
| request an exception in order to work partially from home.
|
| It's ok to frame the debate on whether it's in the company's
| interest to enforce RTO. It's complete nonsense and utterly
| absurd to quote leadership principles to justify their position.
|
| Also, I should add that Amazon's RTO mandate was pushed when the
| company was trying to cull their workforce. The general feeling
| was always that RTO was designed to push people out without
| paying severance. Citing "hire and develop the best" when
| ignoring how the company was decimating teams doesn't build up
| the critic's credibility.
| gedy wrote:
| > Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote
| work was the exception and not the norm.
|
| Sure - but I don't support the RTO order for people hired
| remote during pandemic without a totally unambiguous "this is
| just temporary" when hired. What was the situation for those
| hired 2020-2023?
| anononaut wrote:
| In my mind, the long term WFH for everybody at every company
| was temporary. To me that seems obvious. It was implicitly
| unambiguous.
| digging wrote:
| Is "implicitly unambiguous" anything but an oxymoron? Do
| you think all humans have access to your mental model of
| the world?
| anononaut wrote:
| I think if we work one way for centuries until something
| happens to disrupt that, we can assume an eventual return
| to the average rather than "new normal" nonsense.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Except tech has allowed WFH for almost 4 decades now?
| Teleworking has been a thing since the 60s, it's us that
| are just now catching up to not needing an office.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| I don't think that was obvious. There were lots of
| executives praising lots of teams for keeping things
| running perfectly fine while remote. There is no obvious
| reason to RTO when everything was working fine with remote
| workers.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| In my mind, it was to be temporary until the risk of
| infection at the office was back to pre-pandemic levels. I
| understand that at this point it's more likely that we'll
| define the problem away and normalize shifting that much
| more of a health risk onto employees, but going by the
| original "implicit" agreement we're still in that temporary
| period. Of course it's not serious to threat it as
| temporary because companies and people have made permanent
| adjustments that won't be rolled back.
|
| My (Amazon subsidiary!) employer at no point made anyone(+)
| go back to the office. I happily returned when vaccines
| were widely rolled out, but quickly realized people were
| still getting infected left and right and decided to
| minimize office visists while strictly masking. A good half
| of the team moved out of state and never came back, future
| hires were fully remote as often as not. I got hit by
| layoffs eventually but as far as I have heard the remaining
| team has not gotten any less distributed.
|
| I don't think it's reasonable to describe a forced move to
| full office attendance as an inevitable "return to normal",
| even if we back in March 2020 would have expected it to
| have happened by now. But now in 2024, the world has
| changed and it's an explicit employment policy decision
| that as a purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does thing aims to
| continue layoffs while paying less severance etc.
|
| (+ naturally from atop my ivory throne of tech-wrought
| hubris, I am discounting actual office staff like
| facilities and security as well as some portion of IT etc)
| chipdart wrote:
| > Sure - but I don't support the RTO order for people hired
| remote during pandemic without a totally unambiguous "this is
| just temporary" when hired.
|
| There was a totally unambiguous "this is just temporary" when
| hired that is as explicit as it gets: the contract.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Leadership principles are kool aid and PR. Culture is
| intentional and inherent. Which does Amazon care about more
| from an observation of their system in motion?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Do you not think leadership principles are inputs (even weak
| ones) into culture...?
|
| Seems to me that'd be one of the first things that'd attract
| or deter a potential employee with optionality, which then of
| course does contribute to culture.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Actions are inputs, talk is cheap. Watch what people do,
| not what they say. Revealed intent. More reasonable to say
| "Our corporate culture is this, and we can demonstrate it
| in these ways." Edict vs observations.
|
| In my humble opinion, Amazon has jumped the shark and is a
| worker juicer pretending it is Zappos. It'll keep throwing
| off cash, because there are customers and aggregate demand
| for retail and cloud service, and a never ending supply of
| workers waiting to be juiced, but that doesn't mean those
| leadership principles are the reason for the outcomes. Lots
| of people buying from Temu too, are their leadership
| principles why?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Sure actions are inputs, and so are words.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| IIRC Amazon has _sixteen_ leadership principles, and people
| are meant to know them. They even have their "bar raisers"
| who participate in recruitment and such to evangelize this.
|
| I'd challenge most Amazonians to close their eyes, and see
| just how many of the sixteen principles they can recall.
|
| If you can't recall them all, how can you live them all?
|
| Not to mention, Amazon has a fairly smug, superior attitude
| to them. Some quotes from "bar raisers" talking about life
| at Amazon:
|
| > "We don't expect that you use leadership principles at
| your current job"
|
| > "more than any company I've worked with or heard about,
| we use those principles daily"
|
| > at other companies, employees don't "focus on the
| customer as their customer", instead "their customer is
| their boss ... and they're focused on doing what they're
| told".
|
| My favorite:
|
| > "I know I've certainly referenced a leadership principle
| or two while talking about parenting techniques."
|
| Wow.
|
| Not to mention you could question how much Amazon as a
| whole follows them.
|
| > "strive to be earth's best employer"
|
| May want to listen to complaints from your warehouse and
| delivery employees more, at the least.
|
| > "The thing we're looking for is that you consider and
| care about the customer. We've regularly made decisions at
| Amazon which lowered profit/sales because it was the right
| thing to do for customers."
|
| I'd love to hear an example or two of these.
|
| > "Earn Trust"
|
| Sure, you can trust this WANGXIJGYA power adapter or this
| GHURBLSEYHI toaster oven, and no-one ever got counterfeit
| goods from Amazon as a result of us co-mingling products.
| (Separating out suppliers could be done, but it would
| reduce profits/efficiency... but I thought Amazon was okay
| with that if it was "for the customer...").
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Sure, you can trust this WANGXIJGYA power adapter or
| this GHURBLSEYHI toaster oven,
|
| What a coincidence, I just bought a WANGXIJGYA-brand
| humidifier! And a GHURBLSEYHI-brand massaging footstool.
| Definitely Baader-Meinhof.
| digging wrote:
| The LPs are pretty laughable. From the outside it's
| completely obvious that at least some are not followed in
| any way that a reasonable person would interpret them.
| You mentioned a few, such as their supposed "customer
| obsession." How does building a global panopticon align
| with that? Well, obviously: It doesn't mean _care about
| the customer as a person_ , it means be obsessed with
| driving as many purchases as possible, because a purchase
| is what defines a customer. Irrefutable and noble
| customer obsession.
| chipdart wrote:
| > IIRC Amazon has sixteen leadership principles, and
| people are meant to know them. They even have their "bar
| raisers" who participate in recruitment and such to
| evangelize this.
|
| Not true. Everyone at Amazon is expected to know the
| leadership principles in the sense that everyone at
| Amazon is expected to act without guidance and make
| decisions in line with the company's best interests.
|
| Everyone at Amazon, including those who participates in
| recruitment, is expected to operate using leadership
| principles. Each recruiter is tasked with evaluating all
| candidates based on leadership principles. Bar raisers
| are experienced amazonians who facilitate the evaluation
| and decision-making process by driving discussions on the
| candidates. As the name implies, the role of bar-raiser
| is to raise the bar.
|
| > If you can't recall them all, how can you live them
| all?
|
| This is nonsense. It's like complaining that no one can
| drive because don't recall all road rules. Absurd,
| specially in light of one of those leadership principles
| being "strive to be the Earth's best employer". As if
| low-level grunts have a say.
| taeric wrote:
| I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce
| ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why
| the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many
| people. Consensus is not a goal, in itself. Not ignoring
| dissent, though, is. Make sure you know the criticisms, but
| don't wait until you have them all fully addressed. (Is why
| "bias for action" is a thing...)
| __alexs wrote:
| The word consensus does not feature in the LPs.
| taeric wrote:
| Apologies, I don't have them in front of me anymore and
| should have just looked them up again.
|
| It wasn't consensus, but a lot of people took the disagree
| and commit one as a "you have to get commitment from the
| room." My read was it was your responsibility to commit in
| the room, not to get commitment. Make sure any failure is
| facts of your disagreement, if you have one. Not your lack
| of effort because you did disagree.
| chipdart wrote:
| > I would slightly adjust the reasoning. It is not to reduce
| ambiguity. It is to drive progress despite ambiguity. Is why
| the "consensus" principal is the most frustrating for many
| people.
|
| Not true. The whole leadership principles thing is designed
| to not require or expect any form of consensus. What you are
| expected to do is act, and be accountable for your own
| actions. The whole "disagree and commit" leadership principle
| is specially relevant to manage push back. Everyone is
| expected to do what's best, but regardless of whether there's
| consensus pushing one way or the other, once a call is made
| you're expected to fall in line and work towards a goal.
|
| It the call was the right one or not, that's something to
| discuss during performance evaluation talks, because leaders
| are right, a lot. If you're not right a lot, or where it
| mattered, you might very well be promoted to customer.
| taeric wrote:
| Right, I shouldn't have used the word "consensus." I
| certainly saw this more than makes sense while there,
| though. Some teams do not make progress as long as there
| are critical elements out there.
|
| I would not say you are expected to "fall in line," though.
| I would reword that that you are expected to do your part
| as well as you can. If the line is to fall, the reason for
| it falling should be neither a complete surprise, nor a
| result of you not working hard. Stated differently, don't
| keep concerns hidden, but also don't let your concerns
| prevent you from working hard.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Grass isn't any greener at the other tech companies fwiw.
|
| At Google they cut back office space and made every desk a
| shared desk for many Bay Area teams because hey you work from
| home now right? We're not giving you a designated desk to work
| at anymore. At the exact same time they mandated RTO so you had
| to be in the office more than half the time.
|
| Essentially the policy is to share a desk that you and another
| person must both be at for more than half of the time each. You
| can probably see the stupidity in the policy pretty easily
| right? Sundar still hasn't figured this out. You can't divide a
| desk in a way that gives two people more than half. If you want
| us there the majority of the time give us a freaking desk
| already!
| ASinclair wrote:
| Unless I'm mistaken the teams that share a desk are supposed
| to come in 2 days a week. For teams that don't do this desk
| sharing you have to come in 3 days a week. So there shouldn't
| be an issue of trying to have each person use the desk for
| more than half the week.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| They did eventually state 2 days a week for cloud although
| it's still completely schitzophrenic.
|
| "You must all be in the office the majority of the time,
| the company can't operate efficiently without this"
|
| "Oh we made it impossible people to be in the office the
| majority of the time? Ok for the people who our policies
| make it impossible to come into the office the majority of
| the time, which we previously required alongside statements
| that we need to do this we are now making an exception to
| this since it's not actually needed and we also made the
| policy impossible to obey. For those not doing desk sharing
| though we totally still need you to come in 3days a week
| minimum because the company can't operate efficiently even
| though we just said those guys over there can come in 2
| days a week. Thanks for understanding our clear management
| practices everyone!"
| sswezey wrote:
| Amazon did this too. No more assigned desks, come in 3+ days
| a week, and only have desks for 60% of people. Sterile desks
| that have to be cleaned off at the end of the day, fighting
| for desks because no one is actually coming in on Mondays or
| Fridays, and desks basically on top of each other.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Tech company office planning has seemed to be neurotic even
| before the pandemic and WFH-then-RTO-or-hybrid-or-...
| policies really came into play. And you'd think that the
| office planning would step back and think "hmm, how can we
| adjust our office plans to account for how working policies
| have changed", but instead, it seems all they've changed is
| how they are justifying their changes.
|
| As someone who came into work full-time post-pandemic because
| it turns out that living in a 1-bedroom apartment doesn't
| give you effective home office space to work from home, I was
| consistently aghast at how much the office planners were
| fully "oh, we're going to make your office environment much
| less conducive to work because no one coming to the office to
| actually work" (and then the return-to-office mandate comes
| in...).
|
| What hasn't helped has been the most notable change from pre-
| to post-pandemic: no one takes meetings in a conference room
| anymore. As I'm typing this, I'm getting half of another
| meeting thanks to someone sitting two cubicles behind me.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Sundar should watch Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It has a neat
| solution to this desk problem.
| jerf wrote:
| The LEGO Movie's double-decker couches are also coming to
| mind. Double-decker desks both solves the problem and
| alliterates nicely, making it easy to fit into a Corporate
| Strategy slide deck ("We plan on increasing RoI with our
| best-of-breed D3-based RTO strategy in the new quarter,
| driving measurable revenue growth to the top and bottom
| couches... errr... lines. Six months after deployment we
| expect to utilize data-based business decision making
| analyzing whether top or bottom D3 positions drive more
| customer engagement to our platforms.").
| jt2190 wrote:
| During the dot-com boom I worked at a company that was
| hiring furiously, and was struggling to find a way to
| give everyone a desk. One of our spaces had a very high
| ceiling, and someone suggested vertically stacked "bunk
| cubicles". I guess they took the idea seriously enough
| that they ran it pass various people, because later I
| heard that the idea was rejected due to the fire code.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Fire code? I would also think it would open up the
| company to liability if/when someone would take a tumble
| climbing up the ladder to their top-story cubicle...
| skirmish wrote:
| Google already announced this in 2004:
| https://archive.google/jobs/lunar_job5.html
|
| The full trail starts from
| https://archive.google/jobs/lunar_job.html
| Tomte wrote:
| Time for pair programming!
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are
| much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees
| are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the
| moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the
| devotion of religious converts._
|
| Just like most religious principles, these tenets are vague
| enough to leave incredible room for interpretation, managers can
| cite them to justify just about any policy. I have no doubt that
| the return to office was somehow justified with the same tenets
| that are cited in the objections. That's the way Amazon works,
| it's like a theology debate club.
| chipdart wrote:
| > That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate
| club.
|
| I don't think you have a grasp on the subject. Leadership
| principles are decision-making guidelines. Instead of
| paralyzing teams because someone needs to make a call,
| amazonians are encouraged to simply act based on a set of
| guidelines. That's why "customer obsession" is the top
| principle, and everyone talks about "ownership". You're
| expected to show "bias for action" which means making decisions
| instead of waiting around for someone else to do or say
| something.
|
| Everyone needs to make decisions on a daily basis and if you
| have a clear guideline telling you that you need to do things a
| certain way or prioritize something, it's hard to justify doing
| the exact opposite just because you felt like it. That's the
| exact opposite of a theological debate, as there is a very
| clear actionable item and deliverable without requiring anyone
| to sit around debating nonsense.
| rolfralf wrote:
| Except you can invoke other leadership principles to counter
| that.
|
| You are not "waiting around for someone else". You are "being
| right, a lot" and "insisting on the highest standards". It's
| just about how able you are to use them in your favor.
|
| In a sense, it is all bullshit. Just like a theological
| debate.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I think, just like theological debate, it looks arbitrary
| from the outside trying to reconstruct the whole discipline
| from first(/leadership) principles and ignoring the
| scholarship that has been done in the past couple thousand
| years/implicit understanding that has been built in years
| of meetings.
| lupusreal wrote:
| When you have two or more parties saying diametrically
| opposite things, each citing the same texts to justify
| themselves, it's pretty damn arbitrary. Each side will
| say they have so many years of scholarship backing their
| position, so that turns out to be meaningless.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The leadership principles aren't guidelines for making
| decisions in practice because any decision can be justified
| in terms of the principles. The decision comes first, then a
| justification in the principles is found.
|
| I know what the company documents say about it, but I'm
| talking about how it actually gets used.
| htrp wrote:
| Welcome to Day 2.... the founder is off building yachts and
| spaceships.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's not a spaceship until it reaches space!
| acedTrex wrote:
| Amazon is a shit hole of a company, in all divisions from the
| very top. The reason they pay so much is that they literally
| could not hire a single soul otherwise.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| It's still lower than other big tech. Plus, their fine print
| when it comes to benefits sucks. For example, three year
| vesting on 401k company contribution and the skewed stock
| vesting policy. There are others I have been personally
| affected by that I could mention. Amazon overall has been
| designed to burn out employees and throw them out.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| You get paid cash in lieu of RSUs to bring your early years'
| TC up to what you signed up for, you could just buy AMZN with
| you cash if you wanted to.
| rybosworld wrote:
| It's not a secret that many (most) teams in amazon churn
| through their engineers. But working at Amazon is seen as a
| way to pad the resume. That's why so many engineers are
| willing to spend 2-3 years.
|
| Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by
| joining Amazon.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > Most people know exactly what they are signing up for by
| joining Amazon.
|
| I didn't at first, but the interview "process" was
| hilariously informative. I didn't pass the interview, but
| by that point I knew it was for the best.
|
| The best part was the "casual lunch" with a random team
| member in the middle of the day-long interview. This young
| man _seethed_ , for what reason I couldn't guess. It was
| hard not to take it personally, but in retrospect the dark
| energy radiating off this individual was a profound and
| timely warning that one does not simply walk into Amazon.
| throwawaymeta01 wrote:
| been at a few high-paying companies.
|
| amazon generally pays the lowest and benefits are generally meh
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I read once that they don't even give a free Prime account as
| a benefit.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| The grand total discount an employee gets is 10% a year for
| purchases of $1000 max: so $100.
| alephnerd wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > The disruption caused by the pandemic, as well as the doubling
| of Amazon's headcount in two years, was more to blame, they say.
|
| > Those who joined right before the pandemic, or during the
| madness of 2020 and 2021, had little time to learn and adapt.
| Learning through meeting interactions over videoconferencing, for
| example, was much less conducive to osmosis than in-person
| interactions, either planned or serendipitous run-ins, several
| sources said.
|
| Amazon's massive hiring spree during the pandemic seemed to be
| the biggest cause for the decline of it's culture internally, and
| it's something I've heard from friends as well.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Is it the case though? I mean, it's extremely convenient for
| leadership to say that of course it isn't the fault, it's the
| fault of new employees and WFH.
|
| But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees
| are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's
| fault? they are the ones who allowed or enabled bloating and
| empire building, and they are the ones who didn't intervene
| when culture started deteriorating.
|
| Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company
| at an strategic level, what is their role exactly?
|
| TL;DR it's very rich for execs to blame rank and file
| employees, as if they are powerless to change anything.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer
| employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately
| leadership's fault
|
| Pre-COVID Amazon was always an in-person culture company -
| there just wasn't the muscle needed to manage a fully remote
| organization.
|
| People really underestimate how difficult it is to convert a
| company that was almost entirely in-person and synchronous to
| a fully async culture.
|
| A company isn't just SDE1s and SDE2s writing code - it's also
| PMs communicating with Sales, Sales communicating with
| E-Staff, Support communicating with Eng, Eng Leadership
| communicating with other Eng Leadership, etc.
|
| The brass tacks are that in-person meetings are absolutely
| more synchronized and efficient, because not all
| communication can successfully occur over Zoom - you'll often
| need to meet other members to build consensus or have
| spontaneous conversations with peers or managers, and
| scheduling or doing those over Zoom or Slack is difficult.
|
| > Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the
| company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly?
|
| Execs play a role, and clearly Amazon's execs have decided
| that being fully remote just didn't make sense with how they
| operated.
|
| Also, this kind of an argument absolves line level employees
| if we're being honest. A culture is the sum of it's parts,
| and if line level employees aren't working on propagating the
| culture they want, then it's on them too.
|
| If execs try to draconianly enforce culture, then the same
| people complaining about lack of culture will complain about
| the "corporate cult" (eg. HN complaining about Apple or
| Amazon pre-covid).
|
| This doesn't mean that companies can't be fully remote - they
| absolutely can.
|
| It just takes A LOT of effort and a massive cultural shift to
| become an async organization: a lot of documentation,
| touchpoints, and aggressive calendaring is required and you
| end up having to do on-sites every couple weeks anyhow to re-
| sync.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Not buying it.
|
| Sure, culture is everyone's responsibility. But the share
| is not the same. Doesn't it seem obvious that a VP has
| dramatically more impact on culture that a poor junior
| engineer?
|
| The same execs who allowed overhiring employees with
| expensive comp packages, just to turn around and lay off
| thousands of them, has never apologized or admitted, at the
| very least, some level of incompetence. Instead they blame
| it on those very same people that they hired and then
| fired.
|
| BTW if you hypothesis is correct, shouldn't the culture be
| improving instead of deteriorating? RTO has been in effect
| long enough that we should be seeing it's positive effects
| clearly. Instead the company seems to be rotting from the
| inside. But I guess you could always find a new scapegoat.
| Maybe 3 days a week in office is not enough, and we need
| full 5. Maybe those covid hires are the real problem and we
| need to get rid of them.
|
| Signed: tenured Amazonian (pre-covid), who has recently
| quit fed up with the company.
| hughesjj wrote:
| > in-person culture company - there just wasn't the muscle
| needed to manage a fully remote organization.
|
| Eh. There was always a bunch of remote ("virtual") workers.
| I had teammates in Dublin, Japan, Seattle, and Denver
| simultaneously.
|
| Yes some teams or even orgs could be limited to a single
| stretch of contiguous bullpens, but I swear James Hamilton
| hasn't set foot on land in a decade and he's svp
|
| Amazon has long been one of the worlds largest tech
| employers. They have a heavy docs culture and were one of
| the least affected by the pandemic wfh switch (the
| corporate VPN was rock solid, chime still has some of the
| best video conferencing around, the meetings webapp was
| legit if a bit slow).
|
| Honestly the transition was incredibly smooth. At least in
| my circles the push for async seemed to be built in, and I
| hated when we started going more sync style pre COVID.
|
| I get that Amazon is huge, but corpinfra is a single
| department, and beyond most contemporary companies they
| really had their shit together.
| danaris wrote:
| Even if execs had much less power to steer the culture,
| _they still bear the responsibility_.
|
| That's what it means to be in charge. The Buck Stops Here.
| codingwagie wrote:
| I'm a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees
| run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has
| been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time.
| There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been
| in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML
| teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in
| decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago)
|
| The software engineering paradigms used within the company create
| brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in
| the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where
| the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from
| creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team
| members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform
| knowledge to solidify their place on the team.
|
| The engineers themselves are not students of computer science,
| but just crunch out tickets.
|
| If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant
| amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers
| into decision making positions.
|
| AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
| gnz11 wrote:
| > I'm a long time Amazonian.
|
| > If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant
| amount of tenured employees, ...
|
| Doesn't this include yourself as well then?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Significant amount != all
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Ah, so "everyone but me" type deal.
| jcadam wrote:
| And which ones do we keep? Which senior engineers are just
| coasting and which are among the few who are the final
| reservoir of institutional knowledge holding everything
| together?
|
| Does anyone know? Meh, let's just hand the task to HR and
| hope it all works out.
| lucianbr wrote:
| What if it includes them? Doesn't seem like that would change
| anything.
| exe34 wrote:
| they could also be stuck under the manager of managers with
| no upward mobility.
| jcadam wrote:
| Ah, the 'ol "workforce greening" where we get rid of all the
| expensive old farts and replace them with
| younger/smarter/cheaper devs right out of school.
|
| It's brilliant and it always works. There are no downsides
| whatsoever.
| chipdart wrote:
| > There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have
| been in some org 5+ years.
|
| I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but if that's your take them either
| you haven't been paying attention or you're not in the company
| for that long. The whole org was designed so that all employees
| are ephemeral. Managers are encouraged to promote employees up
| and out. At each career level you're evaluated against your
| direct colleagues in the same level, and those lagging behind
| are bound for PIPs.
|
| Check out the old fart tool. The average tenure is below 3
| years. Do you it screams upward mobility?
| codingwagie wrote:
| Those are just churn and burn lower level employees. I am
| talking about at the L7+ level. L6 and below is almost a
| completely different company.
|
| I have worked on major tier 1 services in every major part of
| the company: Retail, Alexa, and AWS. I know many of the
| people running the important orgs
| sillyfluke wrote:
| The amazon people I know are purposely lounging at L6
| because they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios
| for their dept are completely out of wack.
| chipdart wrote:
| > (...) they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios
| for their dept are completely out of wack.
|
| I have to call bullshit on this take. Last time I
| checked, less than 1% ever make it to L6, let alone L7.
| because it is extremely competitive.
|
| It takes a very special person with all the stars aligned
| to even be considered for a L7 position. We're talking
| about Principal Engineer/Senior Manager.
|
| Claiming they are not promoted to L7 because they don't
| want to screams of Aesop's the fox and the grapes.
| pydry wrote:
| An average tenure of ~3 or less years is actually kind of
| what Id expect if upper management has calcified.
| nextworddev wrote:
| what's scary about Amazon is that - despite all this madness -
| it is still growing and better run than most other tech
| companies
| rapsey wrote:
| All that matters is market position.
| hooverd wrote:
| I got the impression that AWS and retail were two different
| beasts.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > it is still growing and better run
|
| what's the evidence that it's better run? continued growth
| could just as likely (or more likely) be a result of its
| dominant position
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| It's subjective, but many (most?) people who worked at
| Amazon agree that it's an extremely efficient and well-run
| business comparatively. I've worked at two other companies
| of similar size and they both were laughably incompetently
| run in comparison to AWS. They were way better to work for
| as an individual employee, but certainly bad if you cared
| about the business operations as a whole (I didn't)
| ipaddr wrote:
| How is it better run if most ex-employees and current
| think it's a place where to succeed you must hoard
| knowledge and play a crazy political game where your goal
| is to always have someone on the team ready to chop. If
| you don't know who that is on your team it's probably
| you.
|
| Your pay is equal to three card monty. You are promised
| something big when you get hired but it gets spread over
| 4 years and most of it only vests at the end. Then you
| find out most employees are pushed out within 2 years and
| you realize only 10-20% will ever survive to get the
| amount you expected when you joined. If you make it this
| far they do it again for more money. The odds of you
| staying are even less...
|
| While this is happening they give you 8 hours of meetings
| and expect 8 hours of development. You end up working 16
| hours a day. You end up so tired and confused you keep
| going until you burn out. At that point they ppe you.
|
| The best way to survive at Amazon is find dirt on your
| boss. Hire a pi. Coast and use that information to keep
| you employed. Rinse and repeat for new bosses.
|
| It is not run well. Taking these practices and putting
| them on a regular business wouldn't work. Amazon (Google,
| Apple, Facebook..) will keep increasing in value
| regardless of management style (each one of those
| companies have different culture) because of factors
| outside of this. They could require everyone to be left
| handed.. or speak French or be able to ski and they would
| still succeed.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| The compensation blew my mind when I worked there.
|
| At the end of my first year I got "exceeds" and a large
| comp bump (almost all of it from RSUs).
|
| Those RSUs would start vesting one year after this
| "exceeds" conversation took place--April 1st (start of Q1
| a year later).
|
| So I'd get a (small) vest ~13 months later. Considering
| the average tenure (typically 18 months from what I heard
| from a higher-up in my org), the deck is stacked against
| actually making the big comp numbers. You work very hard
| to make more if you can survive another year after you
| worked hard. Odds are good you won't.
| mcast wrote:
| I've always liked the SRE approach, where you can alleviate
| software engineers to build new features without burdening the
| team with 24/7 on call duties.
| stackskipton wrote:
| SRE/Ops person here. SRE only works if SRE can look at
| software and go "Nope, it's not ready for production and I
| don't care how wanted this feature is." Almost no company is
| mature enough to allow that behavior.
| ilamont wrote:
| _The software engineering paradigms used within the company
| create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing
| everywhere in the company._
|
| Thank you for saying this. I have interacted with various
| seller-facing Web software platforms (KDP, Ads, Advantage,
| Seller Central, Transparency, Brand Registry) for years.
| Hurriedly designed features, broken processes, false-positives,
| and kluged-together garbage are the norm. Automated support
| scripts, overwhelmed human CSRs, and the siloed nature of the
| company compound the problems.
|
| Here's one small example: Amazon forced many sellers in the US
| to start selling in Brazil. It was automated. People's accounts
| were enabled for Brazil by default. It was poorly communicated,
| including no easy way to opt out (redirecting links on the help
| page). Many sellers in a panic started requesting support to
| shut down their Brazil accounts, which led to entire global
| accounts being shut down.
|
| https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
| shermantanktop wrote:
| > The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the
| company
|
| The article comes to the exact opposite conclusion.
|
| The article repeatedly cites problems associated with culture
| breakdown, and tenured employees are a key source of continuity
| for culture. The article goes to some lengths to underline that
| the culture is a positive and key differentiator for Amazon.
|
| The more interesting point is that the cultural element looks
| like it is highly durable and effective, but has broken down as
| Bezos (the most tenured employee!) has pulled back. So it's not
| as durable as everyone thought.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I don't think those are mutually exclusive conclusions.
|
| Tenured employees help maintain culture, but they don't
| guarantee that it stays static.
|
| Culture developed by the employees who spent their first 5
| years growing with the company is not necessarily the same
| culture developed by those same employees who have stayed in
| the same role for the last 5 years with a vanishing potential
| for growth.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Absolutely. A company that goes through an extended period
| of growth and success can retain (cargo-cult style) all the
| approaches from that era even while the conditions change.
| That ossification is obviously not great unless the culture
| is especially adaptable.
|
| And the conditions for most big tech companies have changed
| radically over the last few years. So the subtle
| devaluation or reinterpretation of culture is kind of
| inevitable when forever-growth turns into a zero-sum game.
| As you say, it might even be the veterans who are doing it.
| michaelt wrote:
| If the culture you want to maintain is "first 10 minutes of
| every meeting is everyone reading the agenda" or "thorough
| security review for all changes before go live" then you
| want slow turnover so new hires can be trained and
| indoctrinated.
|
| On the other hand if the culture you want to maintain is
| "constantly be trying out new technologies, new ways of
| working and fresh ideas, at the cutting edge nothing is set
| in stone" you might benefit from new employees who know
| firsthand how other companies solved whatever problem
| you're facing.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Culture is not singular, but the summation of many different
| desires and behaviors. The behaviors of those who climb and
| then defend a position is likely different from the people
| who change positions every few years. As time progresses,
| more of the defenders stay, and more of the changers leave.
| This would shift the culture over time, not because it's made
| up of different people, but because only a subset remain.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >The engineers themselves are not students of computer science,
| but just crunch out tickets.
|
| What does this even mean?
|
| Does it mean they do not have proper CS background? If it means
| what I think it means, how is that even possible? Amazon
| recruits at top tier schools, not po-dunk university. Do that
| have a large % of their Engineering staff from bootcamps?
| barumrho wrote:
| Being a student not in a narrow sense of being enrolled in a
| school, but being someone who studies and learns new things
| by doing rather than simply doing the given task in a
| conventional/quick/easy way that may not resolve the
| underlying issues that caused the problems in the first
| place.
| geph2021 wrote:
| There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have
| been in some org 5+ years.
|
| I think that's true of most large organizations.
| foobarian wrote:
| > There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have
| been in some org 5+ years
|
| That... seems about right? I wouldn't expect to get to L7+ in
| much less than that.
| fallinditch wrote:
| > brittle rube goldberg machines
|
| This is a nice metaphor that should become widely known and
| discussed!
|
| It can be applied to general management and administration was
| well as software engineering. Organizational procedures tend
| towards complexity over time: everyone is involved in
| 'improving' systems by creating new procedures, and soon enough
| a new person is needed to deal with or manage the increasingly
| complex procedures. This is a well known micro economic
| phenomenon. It's hard to simplify and streamline and so being
| aware of the tendency towards brittle rube goldberg machines is
| a useful concept indeed, should become Amazon's 17th management
| principle.
| vivekd wrote:
| Maybe that's just what happens to companies that have been
| around a long time. They go on maintenance mode. You don't see
| coke or visa innovating much either.
|
| It seems like optimizing for innovation makes sense with new
| upstart products and optimizing for maintenance makes more
| sense with established products.
|
| You started with if Amazon wants change and I think that's
| exactly what a product with a position of relative market
| dominance doesn't want
| voisin wrote:
| > You don't see coke or visa innovating much either.
|
| Both exist in industries that aren't innovating much. Amazon
| doesn't enjoy such a luxury.
| neaanopri wrote:
| OP's description isn't exactly "optimizing for maintenance"
| either!
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Smart companies (I have no idea if Amazon is "smart" or not)
| are always innovating. However, most of the innovation will
| be internal. I used to work for a large corp that owned 80%
| of its main market and we were always encouraged to seek new
| ways of doing things and to file as many patents as possible.
| They were smart enough to realize that they got where they
| were by being innovative and that no matter how much of the
| market they controlled, they couldn't stay there by standing
| still.
| badpun wrote:
| That would make sense, except Amazon stock's PE is currently
| around 50, which means that it's priced like a highly
| innovative company with large growth potential. So, if
| management doesn't want a massive stock price drop (and they
| obviously don't), they have to structure the company as if
| it's innovative and high-growth, to sell a believable story
| to the stock market.
| throwaway_dkdja wrote:
| > There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy
| team members guard their technical platform knowledge to
| solidify their place on the team.
|
| OH MY GOD!
|
| Thank you for saying this, this is __exactly__ what I've been
| experiencing. I've seen a bunch of people pursuing their
| personal (promo) agenda ruthlessly. Delivering on their own
| projects and initiatives and nothing else.
|
| Hire and develop the best my hairy ass!
| karaterobot wrote:
| > There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have
| been in some org 5+ years
|
| Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a
| Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career,
| about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people
| like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a
| raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When
| I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they
| didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but
| I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't
| long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is
| primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as
| much as, err, _value creation_. It 's a different world we're
| in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the
| 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the
| fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and
| thus less loyalty and patience?
|
| One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't
| treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the
| 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of
| candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the
| shipping depot.
| downrightmike wrote:
| You trained yourself, you paid for your schooling, you
| continue to learn on your own dollar for the company. The
| company doesn't pay for any of that anymore like back in the
| day, so yes, you must do what you can to keep your career
| flowing, jobs are just stepping stones, they aren't entitled
| to loyalty, because they stopped being loyal first.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Every company I've worked at has given me a yearly budget
| for education, or has just had a rubber stamp policy of
| paying for classes. I know a few older people whose
| companies paid for them to take night classes, but I didn't
| know it was as common as all that.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky. I haven't had that in multiple
| decades, and no benefits at all for one.
|
| Then California came for my contracting job.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the
| industry, or the fact that software people feel they have
| more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
|
| Well unions are pretty well known for prioritizing seniority
| above all else.
|
| It's one of the biggest negatives that come up against them.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The thing that is different is the ridiculously high demand
| for developers since the 1990s, minus downturns like the dot
| com bust. Developers can job hop and get perks because
| software is still in the process of eating the world.
|
| But no boom lasts forever. In other creative fields or games
| development, where supply far exceeds demand, the situation
| is much less favorable for workers and that's eventually
| where the software industry is going to be as well.
| necovek wrote:
| I am not so sure that's true. Almost anything that gets
| created today involves some software, and infrequently some
| new software, in the pipeline.
|
| Do remember that there is a whole bunch of software that
| needs to be created for our household appliances, any
| electronic device (those tiny little SoCs that control a
| sensor or voltage or whatever), or tools used to make
| anything else. We are also in the midst of a push to get
| everything "digitized", including our entire homes, cars,
| buses, libraries, movie catalogs, music libraries, battery
| charging, communication infrastructure etc. And everyone
| keeps a computer or two or three (phone, smartwatch,
| tablet, fitness trackers) on them at almost all times --
| all these need software to do something useful.
|
| Basically, I think software developers are going to remain
| in need as long as we rely on computers. And just like
| farming has never gotten obsoleted because we continue to
| need food (though increasing the brute force of the tools
| we have has allowed us to rely on fewer farmers), we'll
| continue to need new software (it's still an open question
| if there are tools like Copilot that will enable us to
| achieve similar efficiency improvement and rely on fewer
| software developers, but my guess is no).
| layer8 wrote:
| Incidentally, this job-hopping is bad for software, because
| too much institutional knowledge is getting lost, and the
| job-hoppers don't get to experience the long-term
| consequences of their design and implementation decisions.
| pc86 wrote:
| Good companies will allow time for documentation and
| testing[0], and great developers will _make_ time for it
| whether it 's officially there or not.
|
| [0] Mediocre unit tests are as good or better than pristine
| API docs that are slightly out of date.
| layer8 wrote:
| Having good documentation is great, but there is
| nevertheless a substantive cost in high turnover even if
| you have good documentation. Documentation doesn't
| replace experience with the product or project, nor is it
| ever complete.
| hosh wrote:
| Looking back at my own career, I do not jump ship every
| 18 months, and I have been able to accumulate deep
| knowledge that are broadly applicable, that has enabled a
| lot of options when it is time to go to a new company.
|
| So in addition to having better continuity of
| institutional knowledge, there is a benefit to staying on
| longer (at least for me).
| pests wrote:
| It can be good for software too. Best practices and new
| ways of working slowly dissolve through other companies as
| employees move around. Many of the great technologies
| invented at the FAANGs eventually get recreated at other
| companies or in open source because of this movement.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Best practices and new ways of working slowly dissolve
| through other companies as employees move around.
|
| Doesn't help against cargo culting and reinventing wheels
| Just Because We Can And Have The Money.
|
| Just because Google did Kubernetes everyone else followed
| suit despite there being competitors available (e.g.
| DCOS, but that one sadly failed because it was utter
| bananaware). Everyone followed Google for Angular and
| then went over to Facebook's React, and on the backend
| side it's Go here and Rust there.
| zappchance wrote:
| All of those were made to solve problems with their
| predecessors and I believe that almost every one of them
| (Angular is debatable) has been a success in moving the
| needle.
| arp242 wrote:
| I've seen former coworkers brag on their CVs about
| "highlights" for work they did that was nothing short of an
| unmitigated disaster. But they didn't stay long enough to
| watch the meltdown.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation
|
| Companies reward loyalty because they can keep you behind the
| market rates. Hiring a new person costs you market rates.
| Keeping you around with 2-3% increases every year with
| occasional promotions of 5% will ensure you stay behind the
| market.
| pc86 wrote:
| Unions reward seniority over everything else, including
| skill. I'd much rather have the current environment of being
| able to leave for something better without starting over
| again at the bottom of the pile.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Unions reward seniority over everything else, including
| skill. I'd much rather have the current environment of
| being able to leave for something better without starting
| over again at the bottom of the pile.
|
| Let's see if you still hold that opinion in a few years
| when you reach your 40s/50s, can't find a job because
| ageism, and you have to compete with people who work
| 16h/day surviving on cold pizza and Red Bull.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, I'm 62, and I still hold that same opinion.
| pc86 wrote:
| Already well into that age range and have no trouble
| finding jobs because I'm productive and continue to
| upgrade my skills. Those habits are rewarded, as opposed
| to rewarding you for simply existing longer/having gotten
| hired earlier.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Let's see if you still hold that opinion in a few years
| when you reach your 40s/50s, can't find a job because
| ageism
|
| Unions forcing companies to pay him higher due to his age
| makes ageism worse, not better.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I suspect much of the ageism in tech comes from
| talented/successful people filtering out of the
| mainstream workforce by 40s/50s. I think a lot of very
| skilled people end up with the means to focus on other
| parts of life, or to do whatever they want in tech and
| not be beholden to a corporate master.
|
| Which isn't to say that everyone who doesn't retire by
| then is bad, just that the ratio is different than 20s
| and 30s and this probably colors people's view of the
| group. Especially with the crazy industry growth we've
| seen over the career of the average 50 year old in tech.
| danaris wrote:
| Unions reward what their membership wants them to reward.
|
| Are you active in your union? Have you voiced concerns over
| this policy of theirs?
| Jensson wrote:
| Democracy does what their people want, yet about half the
| population are really unhappy after each election. You as
| an individual can't change things in most cases, you get
| what the union gives.
| rwmj wrote:
| I'm in a union and they don't "reward seniority over
| everything else". In my experience this is either made up
| or affects some narrow class of jobs but is used as an
| excuse to bash all unions. As another response says, unions
| do what their members want.
| pc86 wrote:
| Pilots bid for jobs based on seniority and are laid off
| in reverse order of seniority. Same with police officers.
| Every union job there is has a concept of seniority
| number and there's no way to get around that unless you
| go into management in which case you're no longer in the
| union (such as smaller police departments where the
| lieutenant and/or chief are not under union purview).
| rurp wrote:
| There are a lot of factors for the change in loyalty but I
| think the single biggest one is from when the managerial
| class went all-in on outsourcing. Those execs didn't care
| that they had a factory full of workers that had been loyal
| for decades, they happily sent those job oversees for a bump
| in that year's profit (and the resulting bonus). The people
| making those decisions didn't care that so many families,
| towns and cities were ruined by these actions, through no
| fault of the workers.
|
| Given that betrayal of the old social contract, why on earth
| would anyone choose to be loyal to such companies? Work
| loyalty still exists with individual managers or owners of
| small businesses that actually interact with their workers,
| but these days most workers correctly assume that most
| corporations are being run with little regard to anything
| aside from profit; and those workers act accordingly.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| That loyalty makes zero sense when one will be downsized in
| 0.1 seconds if it would make the CEO 1% richer and staying in
| the same role means getting paid less than market rate
| including new folks in the same org.
|
| As a uniom fellow he might well be overpaid if he at 30 years
| in makes a lot more than the 10 year guys while doing the
| same exact job as them.
|
| Basically people like your dad were getting tithed by
| management for loyalty while wondering why you don't tithe
| your company for security in a market where the most
| important goods require 2-5x as much.
|
| Many blue collar workers in the 70s could afford a house, a
| car and a wife who didn't work to take care of the home and
| kids.
| dakiol wrote:
| > is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the
| industry, or the fact that software people feel they have
| more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
|
| I would rather phrase the question as: why should any
| employee have loyalty towards a given company? The main goal
| of companies is to make money (if they could make money
| without employees, well imagine that). The main goal of an
| employee is also to make money. People don't usually work for
| free (there are exceptions, of course, I'm talking here about
| the vast majority of works and employees). Given these
| statements, it's natural that:
|
| a) companies get rid of employees that don't make money
| (unproductive employees). Layoffs happen every single day
|
| b) employees switch to other companies for more money.
| Obviously, this is easier to do in some industries than
| others, but the essence is the same in all of them
| creshal wrote:
| > Layoffs happen every single day
|
| It didn't use to be that way, which is what OP was trying
| to get at. Companies used to reward loyalty with bonuses
| that scaled by tenure, and tried to retain workforces that
| they spent considerable resources on training, even through
| lean times.
| 9dev wrote:
| Things used to be more local, and less cynical. You're of
| course correct in your assessment, logically speaking. But
| with a shred of empathy--on both sides--it is also clear
| that loyalty to your employer is beneficial to them, since
| they can rely on their workforce even if they face a rough
| year, and loyalty to your employees is beneficial to them,
| since they can rely on a stable job, even if live gives
| them a hard time. Both situations do occur all the time,
| and are just part of human existence.
|
| So I wonder if this is either the end-stage capitalism
| everyone is talking about, or the community aspect got
| thrown under the bus somewhere.
| dakiol wrote:
| Yes, there's also that side. You're right. When I wrote
| my comment I was thinking more about the classic tech
| company/startup. But definitely there are other kind of
| companies more local (and in the past they were more
| common).
| maeglin wrote:
| > 35 year career
|
| look what they took from us. I've been working for 24 years
| and I expect I'll be working 25-30 years more.
| defen wrote:
| > Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company
| rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation.
|
| Because truckers don't "create value" the same way that
| software engineers do. If you had a company of 100 of the
| "top 0.1%" truck drivers, maybe you could charge a bit more
| because your insurance would be lower and you'd have fewer
| accidents and late deliveries. If you had a company with 100
| of the "top 0.1%" software engineers there's a good chance
| you're on your way to having a company worth billions of
| dollars.
| hintymad wrote:
| I think the key is consistency, and it is consistency that is
| hard for a company to guarantee. If a company does not
| promote often, like Apple, employees will be content to stay
| where they are. But once the company starts to promote some
| people in a short time frame and especially some think the
| promoted do not deserve the promotion, the employees will
| start to envy, to demand a speedy promotion, and the company
| will slowly, sometimes even quickly, turn into a promotion-
| oriented culture. Case in point, working in Google was such a
| prestige 15 years ago, and few people would even think about
| reaching E6. What about now?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Loyalty died because the C-suite are comically greedy idiots
| and don't care to keep the good workers by recognizing their
| worth. Mind you, they never really did, but people just
| realize it a bit more now, plus things _have_ gotten worse in
| that regard.
|
| I can't tell you the amount of good colleagues I've seen
| leave because management was too stubborn to give them a 7%
| raise. The most baffling thing is that they'll have no qualms
| (or perhaps no choice) to subsequently replace them with
| someone else for at minimum double of whatever 7% would've
| cost them. This causes a cascading issue where people are
| annoyed that new hires get such a big boost while the current
| staff have to fight for every measly percentage increase, so
| the older employees slowly trickle out.
|
| I've had it happen myself too. A place I really enjoyed
| working at, I found the work great and had a great
| relationship... But the CTO stubbornly refused to give me a
| 9% raise. I referred my friend and started looking elsewhere.
| I got a roughly 30% paybump, and my friend got hired to
| replace me for roughly 20% more than what I asked for.
|
| So why on earth would I be loyal? The people running the show
| are hilariously short-sighted and can only see the beacon
| emanating from their VC buddies shoveling money their way, so
| whatever, I don't care ultimately if something I worked on
| dies or not.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long
| time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward
| mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+
| years.
|
| This is not specific to Amazon, it's endemic to the whole
| industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all I
| know): Very senior leaders and engineers are sometimes where
| they are because they've clung to their role for a long time,
| and they don't leave or die at a rate sufficient to frequently
| bubble up new senior talent through internal promotion. These
| people _may also deserve their position_ because they are
| brilliant, too... or they may not. I 've worked in a place with
| technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job
| was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Yeah, but let's not forget: In the same position and context
| in life, statistically speaking, you would/will do the same.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I was at an organization that went from doing mostly smart
| things to doing mostly stupid things.
|
| One of the smart things they managed to do was recognize that
| they were top-heavy with senior+ talent who were fixed in
| their thinking & behavior and aggressively began recruiting
| new graduates and reaching out to CS/Engineering/Science
| seniors. They also added some pretty impressive mentoring
| programs to bring the new people up to speed quickly.
|
| Then they switched to doing stupid shit that mostly
| undermined all that and the newer people started leaving. But
| it was pretty good for a couple of years.
| pc86 wrote:
| Ok so let's say for the sake of argument it's a Smart Thing
| to focus on hiring a bunch of 22 year old fresh graduates.
| Is that necessarily going to change anything at the
| leadership level? The GP is talking about managers of
| managers, I don't know where you've worked in the past but
| in my experience Directors and VPs are not taking a lot of
| advice or insight from the entry level new hires.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Not directly, no. The point in this case was
| understanding that the engineering culture had stagnated
| and needed to be refreshed. The people ordering the
| change in hiring clearly understood that it would take a
| long time for any newly introduced behaviors to percolate
| through the company. But without explicitly addressing
| the situation, things would just have gotten worse over
| time.
|
| The reality was that in a fairly short time, focusing
| hiring on new grads actually had the intended effect of
| improving the way we did things. However, the company
| started becoming more unpleasant to work for soon after
| that. And a lot of those new hires, now with a couple
| years' experience, left. As did I, so I can't say how
| permanent the changes were.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _This is not specific to Amazon, it 's endemic to the whole
| industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all
| I know):_
|
| Seems like this is also the problem with Congress.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody
| knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee
| Number 3" and nothing more.
|
| Why does there need to be anything more? They probably know
| how the systems work and are ready to step in if necessary.
|
| Also, they busted their ass before other people were at the
| company, enabling the company to grow and create the jobs
| that all the other people are now in.
|
| To me it's not anywhere near as egregious as the founder who
| worked for a couple of years, then outsourced all leadership
| to a CEO for hire, and now does nothing, but still maintains
| 50%+ ownership of a company.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > The software engineering paradigms used within the company
| create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing
| everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on
| maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and
| prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge
| sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their
| technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the
| team.
|
| Known feeling
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant
| amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young
| engineers into decision making positions_
|
| Hopefully, avoid _doing a Boeing_ in the process.
| ecshafer wrote:
| > The software engineering paradigms used within the company
| create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing
| everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on
| maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and
| prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge
| sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their
| technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the
| team.
|
| I have never worked at Amazon. But I did work at a company that
| decided to implement microservices a la Amazon, even going so
| far as sharing Bezos' famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect
| essentially happened over night. As people spun up more and
| more microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team
| collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things
| became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine
| that just destroyed people with on call schedules.
| pc86 wrote:
| Software engineers having "on call" schedules _at all_ is
| crazy to me. You shouldn 't be writing code at 3am to fix a
| bug after working all day just to turn around and work the
| next day as well.
| totally wrote:
| What would be more sane? Allowing things to remain broken
| at night? Having someone who is not a software engineer fix
| it?
| bpfrh wrote:
| Either pay another full time night shift or yes, accept
| that things are broken for the time.
|
| If your product is really so important that it can't be
| down, hire more engineers and pass the markup to your
| customers.
|
| I'm glad I live in the country where you have to have 11
| hours between end of work and start of work(except for
| special cases afaik).
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| If a 7-Eleven is open 24 hours a day, they usually hire
| three 8-hour shifts (roughly speaking).
| dakiol wrote:
| If the product that breaks in the night is SO important
| for the company, well, why is not the company paying for
| dedicated people (not the engineers who create the
| product) to take care of it when it's broken? As said
| above, while on-call you don't write code, you just turn
| off feature flags, reboot machines, etc.
|
| If the company cannot afford that, then the product is
| not that important and can remain broken until the
| morning.
|
| Even 24h fast food places hire 3 people (each working
| 8h)!
| antisthenes wrote:
| If you want things to not break, have redundancy in
| hardware and failover modes that let you function in
| reduced capacity.
|
| Manual fixes should never be done in a hurry, and if your
| system is that fragile, I really wonder about the
| competency of your senior employees and leadership.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It is a self fulfilling prophecy. Unrealistic schedules
| results in crappy code which results in pagers/alert going
| off at all hours which results in unrealistic schedules.
| Agile's answer is that we reduce the scope of things
| delivered. You might as well spit into the wind. Deadlines
| are set by the business, no matter what the Agile
| evangelist said.
| vizzier wrote:
| My experience being "on call" as an engineer has mostly not
| been that you need to write code at 3am. It usually comes
| down to restarting a machine, deploying a new machine or
| copy, or informing the rest of the company that some 3rd
| party API that you rely on is currently down.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| But that's not engineering work, that's technician or
| operator work. The engineer comes in later to discuss
| what went wrong and how to prevent it next time.
|
| Speaking as a technician whose seen 3 AM at work many a
| time.
| geoelectric wrote:
| I think the devops-inspired idea of engineers owning what
| they deploy has become fairly popular, for better or for
| worse.
| vizzier wrote:
| For my own part, this wasn't a huge team. We had the
| knowledge of if the issue was application/software based
| but would pass back to ops if it was hardware/OS related.
|
| One possible bonus, being on call operating your own
| software also gives you a solid incentive to not wake
| yourself up in the morning by writing bad code, and
| fixing those issues that do arise quickly.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > being on call operating your own software also gives
| you a solid incentive to not wake yourself up in the
| morning by writing bad code
|
| Unfortunately, my software interacts over network with
| software written by other people; if something goes wrong
| at 3 AM the users don't know which part caused the
| problem, so they wake up a random person.
| fragmede wrote:
| if your pagerduty is doing that, something has gone very
| wrong at your company
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Seriously! Working weekends in retail when I was young, one
| of the hallmarks of a "real, professional job" was not
| having to work nights/weekends when your routine schedule
| is during the day. It was a major motivator to get through
| school and get skilled.
|
| Now I see young engineers from top-tier school working "on
| call" without complaint. I've found ways to avoid such
| roles, but it always seemed ridiculous _and_ completely
| unnecessary in a world where there are software engineers
| around the globe that could easily work full time support
| positions.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I found it to be rather the opposite; when I was off from
| a wage-slave job, I was actually off. If the boss called,
| you could just ignore it and say you missed it because
| you were studying or sleeping or with friends or whatever
| and they couldn't really say anything because they knew
| they didn't pay you enough to care.
|
| When you're making real money, they own your ass.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Software engineers having "on call" schedules at all is
| crazy to me. You shouldn't be writing code at 3am to fix a
| bug after working all day just to turn around and work the
| next day as well.
|
| Oncall is only crazy to anyone who also believes it's
| totally acceptable to have whole services down for hours
| throughout the night.
|
| To those who understand what it takes to have anything
| available 24/7, you understand damn well that you need
| someone to jump on a laptop as soon as an alarm bell rings.
| 9dev wrote:
| Well, that someone better be someone else than me,
| because I'm not going to do unpaid night shifts. If you
| want something running 24/7, it's surely important enough
| to warrant hiring someone else to take care of it while
| I'm asleep, no?
|
| Keep your fancy valley salary (with the ridiculous rent
| prices attached), and I'll keep my European workers
| right's protection--including undisturbed sleep after my
| 8 hours workday.
| necovek wrote:
| Such a weird take.
|
| There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the
| extra hours you are paying your engineers or other
| technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation
| and performance, the cost is always there.
|
| In a business, cost is always balanced with the return on
| that investment.
|
| So it trivially follows that on-call only makes sense
| where the return is bigger than the investment. If you
| are having your $100/h engineers become $20/h engineers
| during the day because of the on-call rotation, and you
| lose $200 of sales over night when things are down (even
| your customers are asleep) -- you are actually investing
| that $80/h difference for 8 hours ($640) to recover $200,
| for a net loss of $440.
|
| Yes, there are cases where it's fully acceptable to
| simply have your service down for the night. Eg. imagine
| a service that provides the amount of energy sun is
| providing for a location (to combine it with solar farm
| production): is it really that bad if that's down at 2am?
| Sure, it might be nice to get it back up before the sun
| is up, but this is just a trivial example where an uptime
| of ~70% (fluctuates) is perfectly acceptable.
| rewgs wrote:
| If what we're talking about is a website/app/SaaS/etc,
| and if it needs to be up 24/7, then that almost certainly
| means that it's being used globally, or at least across
| several timezones.
|
| So, hire a team in another time zone.
|
| This is a problem of management not prioritizing the
| health and wellness of their employees, simple as that.
| devbent wrote:
| It works well of the company empowers engineers to write
| software that doesn't break all the time.
|
| At HBO Max every incident had a full writeup and then
| _real_ solutions were put in place to make the service more
| stable.
|
| My team had around 3 incidents in 2 years.
|
| If the cultural expectation is that the on call buzzer will
| never go off, and that it going off is a Bad Thing, then on
| call itself isn't a problem.
|
| Or as I was fond of saying "my number one design criteria
| (for software) is that everyone gets to sleep through the
| night."
|
| The customers win (stable service) and the engineers win
| (sleep).
| triceratops wrote:
| At Amazon's scale is there any alternative to a service
| oriented architecture?
| necovek wrote:
| SOAs serve the purpose to more clearly delineate
| responsibilities: any appearance of tight coupling is made
| relatively obvious.
|
| Nothing stops someone from simply enforcing the same
| division in a single large code base. Your API contract can
| be your public API in whatever programming language, and
| this would allow you to work with the same assumptions from
| the SOA.
|
| It would only be easier to break out of the recommended way
| of doing things, but you can provide simple tooling that
| does static analysis to prevent that (I remember using
| Zope3 security configuration to achieve exactly that with
| Python code in ~2006).
|
| If you are concerned about a performance from such a large
| monolith, you could be using a functional language (or at
| least the pure functional paradigm) that allows easier
| infinite horizontal scaling.
| devbent wrote:
| > But I did work at a company that decided to implement
| microservices a la Amazon, even going so far as sharing
| Bezos' famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect essentially
| happened over night. As people spun up more and more
| microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team
| collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things
| became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine
| that just destroyed people with on call schedules.
|
| Micro services solve a problem for companies that have
| already reached a certain scale were cross team
| communications have become unfeasible and now communicating
| by well defined API contract is a better choice.
|
| Also ideally micro services should reduce the blast radius of
| outages. If an outage is not easily traced to what team is
| root causing it, then proper monitoring is not in place.
|
| Sure I've had times where on call went off and it wasn't my
| team's fault but it was no more than 10 minutes to determine
| that and reroute the call and then to back to sleep.
|
| The other fact is that when designing a new microservice it
| should be done in conjunction with the primary consumers of
| that service just like designing any other part of software.
| Stakeholders need to be brought in and consulted.
|
| The advantage of microservices is that new code is only going
| to impact direct consumer s and downstream services.
|
| It also allows you to upgrade a service in place or
| completely rewrite it so long as you adhere to the original
| contract.
|
| I've seen impressive rollouts of security updates across a
| huge code base that was only possible because of a
| microservice-based design.
|
| I've seen giant monoliths fall apart as multi-year long
| efforts are undertaken just to update the build system.
|
| The hard part of a microservices is they require discipline
| in an organization and basically assigning an engineer for 1
| to 2 weeks to write run books and add monitoring.
|
| Of course, those runbooks should be written no matter what
| paradigm someone uses!
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Hard disagree.
|
| Firstly:
|
| >AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
|
| They never released anything innovative, ever. Amazon creates
| value through optimization. The original AWS came about because
| they had extra servers lying around that they needed for
| holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out.
|
| The problem with Amazon is that its too bloated, which goes
| against their optimization bread and butter.
|
| The cycle goes like this. First you have an entry level
| engineer, that hasn't been taught really how to solve problems
| algorithmically - instead its basically just education in the
| form of memorization about problems and how to solve them,
| without anything more fundamental.
|
| Then, companies like Amazon need engineers to actually build
| the products, so they are forced to tailor the interview
| process to them, thus the prevalence of leetcode style
| questions, because they know that the engineers are studying
| those for other companies.
|
| So the candiates get selected are basically those that have
| shown that they can memorize processes better than others. When
| these candidates work, they do the exact same thing internal to
| the company, focus on doing the existing processes in hopes to
| get promoted.
|
| As a result you get lots of bloat both time and technology
| spaces. So no, promoting them into decision making positions is
| not the right thing to do.
|
| The best thing Amazon can actually do long term is to focus on
| more automation, and reduce headcount. You want fewer, more
| talented engineers who are able to solve problems autonomously
| without barriers in the way, who don't need handholding or
| don't need to handhold others.
| codingwagie wrote:
| AWS itself was one of the biggest innovations in technology,
| of all time. Cloudformation, IAM policies, and creating these
| services as independent composable blocks was revolutionary.
| S3 was completely new, and is still a dominant force in cloud
| computing. But my point was that all of the best ideas in AWS
| came long ago.
|
| There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform
| capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point.
|
| I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It
| filters for:
|
| Can learn computer science concepts
|
| Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said
| concepts for a while
|
| Is willing to follow directions and recipes
|
| Is willing to follow the rules
|
| Has some minumum bar of intelligence
|
| Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of
| people that pass the interview are actually very good. The
| amazon firing process will weed out the rest.
|
| Meta has released the best open source software in the last
| 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode
| memorization
| hintymad wrote:
| > Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long
| time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward
| mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+
| years.
|
| That's not true, at least not in AWS. In fact, I'd argue that a
| big problem in AWS is that promotion is too fast too soon.
| Getting to L6 used to be a big deal, and many people were
| content with being on L5. But now everyone expects that L5 gets
| promoted to L6 in 2 years or even less. And L6 to L7 in 3 years
| or less. What many directors do is that they place their
| favorite L6 to lead a project that launches a new product. If
| the launch is successful, the L6 will most likely be promoted.
| We even joked that L8 is the new L7. And of course, this
| creates so much anxiety to the point that more than 50% of the
| 1-on-1s I'm aware of involved some discussion about "moving to
| the next level".
| textlapse wrote:
| Amazon seems to have been run in non-ZIRP mode during ZIRP.
| This may save their asses when ZIRP is firmly over.
|
| You say there isn't any innovation: May be you don't need that
| in a utility company that moves boxes and bits? You need
| reliable utility that customers expect and love.
|
| In an alternate ad-supported company where the primary product
| (ads) is not the one people are most familiar with, you could
| play all these games of 'upward mobility', 'promotion' etc
| because money runs freely and your job is detached from the
| reality of product, customers or even the larger company goals
| (assuming, you are not directly working on ads).
|
| However, in a company that is truly customer focused (and
| obsessed - to over use a Bezos word) as is Amazon: all of what
| you said seems like a good thing?
|
| I do take issue with how they treat the low-level employees
| with ruthless nearly-dictatorial oversight - Amazon burn out is
| a real thing. OTOH, having talked to Amazon engineers/PMs who
| quit due to burnout still have some sort of Stockholm syndrome
| where they have fond attachment to their 'burn out' time and
| how boring/unfulfilling their new job at X/Y/Z is! It's
| Complicated.
| alberth wrote:
| You just described every Fortune 500 company.
| lacoolj wrote:
| Time to sell all our $AMZN
| kkfx wrote:
| Honestly? For what I see recently the 2023 report
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap...
| about a general "slowdown" seems to be more a nearby 1929...
|
| Automakers after exceptionally high profit while their volumes
| was lower and lower seems to be come to an end, the AI push, a
| clear bubble, seems ready to burst, most tech-centric projects
| from autonomous vehicles to smart cities show their bad
| outcome. Essentially in the west we seems to be still the best
| ONLY in PR and weapons. All others sectors are down.
|
| BTW just to show where we are here in EU a BYD Atto 3 costs for
| the basic version ~37.990EUR while in Thailand (so imported as
| well from China) cost ~8750EUR while our small power tools
| producer have started to produce only crap and hyper-expensive
| non-crappy tools, with even DRM in batteries locking the user
| out of the ability to switch the same battery from two same
| vendor devices, in China all batteries can be swapped from any
| vendor simply because they choose standard connectors. There
| are simple examples, but also good enough indicators how bad
| things are.
|
| We are still better in software, but with current management
| trends it will not last longer, and with current scholar
| reforms... Well... I doubt new generations can be less than
| mere incompetent than ever...
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I really like Amazon's LPs, but I think they're often stretched
| to accommodate whatever opinion one has.
| belval wrote:
| That's a misconception of what the LP are for though (in my
| opinion). They exist to provide a shared vocabulary that helps
| with meetings/interviews/reviews. "Deliver results/bias for
| action" are often at odds with "insist on the highest
| standards", same with "disagree and commit" and "ownership".
| The point is to get people to hash out the difference in
| opinions along 12 (the other 2 are atrocities) axis that give a
| direction to the discussion.
|
| I've heard "I think this decision is not customer obsessed and
| we need to do better" in a lot of meetings. Make fun of the LPs
| all you want (I really get it), but they are definitely a net
| positive in the day-to-day.
| matrix87 wrote:
| this is completely unrelated but amazon quality has gone
| significantly down over the past couple months
|
| 3 out of the 4 times I've ordered something from them it either
| didn't show up or the wrong thing showed up
|
| most of these sellers seem to just be dropshippers with chinese
| goods employing "reputation management" tactics. can't say I
| trust the average amazon seller at this point
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| There's a comment to this effect on every thread even
| tangentially related to Amazon's marketplace for the past 5+
| years, all with timeframes that are much shorter (like your "a
| few months") - much shorter than the timelines that are implied
| by how long those comments have existed.
|
| There has been _some_ gradual decline, but realistically you
| just had a string of bad luck with Amazon fulfillment and it 's
| not indicative of any particular recent change.
| rybosworld wrote:
| The same thing was said about google search for a while -
| that it was declining in quality. Some people noticed and
| others didn't.
|
| You'd see threads with one person claiming google search is
| worse. Another person chimes in with a comment similar to
| yours; that is: "your experience has just been uniquely
| unlucky".
|
| Then almost overnight, the search quality reached a point
| where most people took notice and agreed: "yeah the search
| quality really is worse".
|
| I'm not saying this is what's going on with Amazon, but this
| pattern is a typical part of enshittification.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| While I agree that it can be a pattern of enshittification,
| I don't think it's one that Amazon is actually currently
| going through, at least with regards to fulfillment. If
| anything, I think they probably had a drop in quality a
| little over 5 years ago that has long since plateaued.
|
| I order lots of items from Amazon (50+ in the past month
| alone) across a lot of categories (non-perishable food, fun
| clothing for myself and my partner, office supplies, lots
| of little fun trinkets, etc) and I can only remember _one_
| in the past several months (easily >100 items) that failed
| to arrive (An obscure limited edition flavor of lemon
| kitkats specifically not fulfilled by amazon), and even
| that was something that they notified me of. And I
| literally can't remember the last time I received an
| actually "wrong" item.
|
| I think people showing up with stories of 3/4 of their
| orders being messed up are the kind of extreme outliers you
| get from a product used by tens of millions of people - and
| by the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people who
| read HN. It's just something that happens sometimes in the
| global supply chain. Hell, I personally have experience
| with that from one of my few significant purchases from a
| brick-and-mortar: the mattress topper they were supposed to
| get me in a week was delayed by 3 months _because the
| delivery truck was stolen, in Texas_
|
| That said, it's ironic that you bring up search, because I
| think Amazon's _search_ is the part of the storefront that
| is _actually_ undergoing active enshittification right now.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > There's also a rabid attention on so-called "input" metrics of
| a certain business--think selection or price--rather than output
| metrics such as revenue.
|
| Anyone wanna comment on the distinction? Why are input metrics
| any more important than output metrics?
|
| In fact I'm not even sure I understand why price is characterized
| as "input" and revenue as "output". Input and output to what
| exactly?
| dastbe wrote:
| goals.
|
| taking a different example, you might have a goal to lower
| outage minutes by 50%, so your output metric is "outage
| minutes". in order to change the output, you need to identify
| what projects/mechanisms you can use to change the output. More
| often i've seen these be referred to as input goals (increase
| test coverage, adopt feature flagging, etc.) but you could
| always associate a metric to them.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Ok but "outage minutes" is itself an input to something else,
| like customer satisfaction or whatever. So that label isn't
| really clarifying anything.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I think the idea is that input is things that you absolutely,
| directly control, and output is more like "outcomes". You can
| control the price and certainly you can impact revenue by
| setting a price and, like, doing the whole rest of your job,
| but you still don't directly set the revenue.
|
| My understanding of why they make this distinction is that if
| you focus on output metrics and you don't meet the target, you
| can be rationalize it as "well, we did a really good job but we
| failed to meet the goal because of circumstances beyond our
| control/market conditions/...", but if you focus on an input
| metric you're more directly accountable on whether you did what
| you said you'd do, and you come up with more actionable steps
| on how to fix it if not.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| The article mentions LPs being used punitively.
|
| That reminds me of the idea that "when a measurement becomes a
| target, it creates to become a good measurement". What's
| happening is that LPs started out a guidelines on how to make
| good decisions. It was explained to employees that LPs should be
| taken seriously and show that that people who genuinely apply the
| LPs get promoted more. Therefore, displaying LPs became an easier
| way to get promoted than actually making good decisions.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Amazon's retail problem is that it is failing the customer by
| using 3rd party sellers.
|
| And in places where Walmart+ or Target circle are available I bet
| they are losing sales. I actually prefer Walmart+ and Target
| now.. but I am only N=1. I may do the whole foods delivery when
| it becomes available though so that would bring me back in to the
| Amazon fold.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Walmart+ InHome in particular is a great experience compared to
| Amazon Fresh. You can get regular Walmart+ deliveries for
| $98/year, but for another $40/year, you get unlimited
| deliveries by a Walmart employee who doesn't accept tips and
| makes sure they're delivering to the right address.
|
| My only worry is that Walmart might be subsidizing the service,
| because as a customer I'm paying less and I'm happier compared
| to the gig worker version.
| The-Bus wrote:
| Walmart also uses 3rd Party Sellers; I don't believe Target
| does. There's enough commentary about false/bootleg products on
| Amazon that it's no longer my primary destination for any
| purchases I need delivered.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| They do but they are easier to avoid buying from. It's
| usually the same folks crossed listed across amazon, walmart,
| target, ebay etc...
| _xander wrote:
| Amazon 1st party is and continues to be a loss leader. If they
| got rid of their 3rd party sellers tomorrow, the company would
| go bankrupt from the loss of B2B commission, fulfilment and ads
| revenue
| ralferoo wrote:
| > the two-pizza rule: teams focused on a specific goal or project
| should be lean enough that two pies could suffice as a team meal.
|
| Today I learned that teams in Amazon should contain no more than
| 2 people.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I think that's actually true if you need more than 8 people
| things start to break down fast
| deanCommie wrote:
| Tell me you're Italian without telling me you're Italian lol.
|
| The Amazon "2 pizzas" are Two Large American pizzas. Something
| with 8-12 slices where 2 slices is enough for a meal.
| triceratops wrote:
| I think they were bragging about how much they eat.
| klyrs wrote:
| No more than two _managers_. Pizza is withheld from developers
| for performance reasons.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Dangle the slice just out of reach...
| linuxlizard wrote:
| > the two-pizza rule:
|
| Or just me.
| eikenberry wrote:
| An 18", Chicago style pizza would easily feed 4 people on its
| own where a Titino's Party Pizza would serve less than 1.
|
| I guess Amazon has a problem with specifications as well.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| They should stop making a cargo cult of Amazon's idiosyncratic
| management techniques and adopt the "GE Way" that is proven to be
| the best way to run a company by business school professors all
| over the world.
| jessepasley wrote:
| This bring laughter to my life
| downrightmike wrote:
| Neutron Jack is the worst person to look to for management
| advice. He only got lucky, but not because he did the right
| things.
| bilater wrote:
| "I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt,"
| Jeff Bezos.
|
| One of the most surprising things in my brief experience at
| Amazon was how much of a shitshow it was. The two-pizza rule and
| self-sustainability for each team led to huge overlaps, with
| teams doing the same thing.
|
| With such a huge organization, you had to go through 15 different
| stakeholders to get a single thing done, and there was an
| ingrained middle management whose only function was to connect
| you to the right person.
|
| Just figuring out who was responsible for what and how to get
| things done was a challenge in itself.
|
| Despite all this, Amazon still succeeds, and their process of
| PR/FAQ, leadership principles, and one-pagers is one of the best
| I've ever seen.
|
| But I wonder if at some point, like with any philosophy and just
| like Bezos predicted, it will become too much and the whole thing
| will cave in on itself.
| bilater wrote:
| Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything...which
| sounds great but that includes basic software like their own
| Github.
|
| They had this monstrosity called Code Commit that I saw
| recently is getting canned. Good riddance. What an ugly pos.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > Also they have a dumb rule to dog food everything
|
| This is false. Otherwise I'd be interested in any reliable
| sources.
|
| As far as I can tell this is some sort of urban myth since
| AWS first stepped onto the scene.
| zbentley wrote:
| I believe it's based on Steve Yegge's original
| microservices rant:
| https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
|
| I don't think that's myth, though I've heard it criticized
| variously as outdated, or just one person's take.
| specialp wrote:
| They subject us to meet with them as customers on Chime. This
| is despite everyone hating the product. CodeCommit was
| annoying because nobody uses it, and you had to touch
| adjacent projects like CodeStar to do something like trigger
| on a GitHub commit.
| hintymad wrote:
| To give Amazon and Bezos credit, their 14 leadership principles
| give a pretty balanced framework for decision making. Customer
| obsession and working backwards to help focus on what's
| important, disagree and commit to resolve differences that root
| in intuition or assumptions, bias for action to minimize
| analysis paralysis, and etc. It's amazing that Amazon can
| sustain its size for so long. But yeah, eventually it is people
| who enforces culture, and eventually an empire falls.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos ("6-pagers," in
| Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the
| giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a
| contributor to Amazon's world-beating success as any blockbuster
| product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
| himself.
|
| I have said many times, and will continue to say:
|
| Amazon is a 2 trillion dollar company despite their policies, not
| because of them.
| asynchronous wrote:
| A lot of people that work at Amazon drink the koolaid though,
| and come out thinking like they're the best people on the face
| of the planet for working at Amazon.
| EricE wrote:
| 50 years is about the right age for any human organization. After
| that, dark patterns start to irreparably corrupt them.
|
| Also stumbled on this yesterday which has had me really pondering
| a lot of my thoughts and assumptions too:
| https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392
| smarm52 wrote:
| Amazon management ethos is famous. I've always wondered if it's
| actually effective. Traditionally, power follow these rules:
|
| De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D.
| (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press.
|
| Which is echoed in the article:
|
| > One current Amazon senior manager said they've consistently
| observed bosses new to the company use the principles "as weapons
| to put those who aren't favorites in their place," while
| employing other principles to build up their favorites.
|
| I'd assume that the older management style that the article
| points out (from Bezos) was similar, but with different words; As
| these rules about power are consistent from governments, to
| companies, to home owners associations, etc. But the article
| paints a rosy picture of them, so it's not clear if there's
| something novel there, or just a dressed up version of the same
| old rules.
| wormlord wrote:
| Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of
| Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership
| principles.
|
| I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face
| value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values
| stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding
| at Amazon.
|
| Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow,
| attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused
| a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"?
|
| People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I
| don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft.
| Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to
| justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to
| being in the right place at the right time.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > There are 16 Leadership Principles at Amazon. Any Amazon
| employee can recite most of them by heart (those who can't won't
| last very long).
|
| My friend urged me to apply to Amazon, I didn't want to but
| thought what the heck, let's sacrifice a day of vacation to give
| it whirl. But it was very bizarre experience. It felt like some
| communist party meeting having to learn the tenants and repeating
| them back and sing praises to the great Jeff. No doubt, most of
| those are good principles, but the cult-like attitude seemed
| strange.
|
| > "Sometimes I'll hear, 'It's amazing you had this 'bias for
| action'...and other times when I believe I've had 'bias for
| action,' they will say you weren't data-driven (from the
| leadership principle 'Dive deep') enough."
|
| That's brilliant. They've converged to selective enforcement one
| of the central pillars of corruption and control. Introduce just
| slightly contradictory rules, and with 16, that's already enough,
| and you can use them for anything.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Yeah I don't think I can swallow my brain long enough to deal
| with nonsense like that. Most companies have dumb principals
| but they don't force you to memorize them.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I still can't get over how bad Alexa is, how it barely even works
| to do the simplest tasks, gets so confused so easily, etc. They
| have spent so much money. They have so many developers. They have
| so much compute available. The technology to make it way better
| is just lying around and open source now, and has been for the
| past 1.5 years at least. If I were put in charge of Alexa, I
| really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group
| of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something
| approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the
| integrations working. It's just mind boggling how poorly managed
| the whole thing has been, and I think it's a real indictment of
| top management for letting it get so bad after so much effort and
| money.
| textlapse wrote:
| OTOH, it's the most perfect device for our household. I have
| tried other devices - they all do gimmicky stuff and slow down
| the primary use-case because someone arbitrarily decided what
| _I_ should ask (or worse, they ask for feedback after getting
| everything wrong - like I am a free human training sample to
| their massive dataset)
|
| My use cases are: play songs via bluetooth, turn on/off things
| (it's almost scary how fast it is), and set kitchen timers.
|
| It's perfect, fast and gets to the point (just says 'Okay' as a
| response).
|
| No gimmicky answers to stuff like 'meaning of life, universe
| and everything' or 'how many tennis balls would cover the
| surface of Mars etc'. Just. Gets. The. Job. Done. No need for
| fancy LLMs here.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I've got some of the Google ones, and I quite like them, but
| it weirds me out how many common things they just can't do.
| For me (and for other people, I suspect), the #1 use case for
| these things is kitchen timers, and they can do that, and
| they have fun custom animations for different and sounds for
| different things I'm timing, but then I ask for it to take a
| minute off the timer, and it can't, or I ask to rename a
| timer, and it can't.
| weezin wrote:
| >If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay
| everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs
| and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the
| voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working
|
| This is literally what they are doing lol.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Consider Amazon's home assistant business - Alexa.
|
| Its hard for me to imagine that customers are the focus of these
| products.
|
| It appears that Amazon's commercial interests are the focus of
| Alexa.
|
| Alexa could be awesome but its just not.
| strivingtobe wrote:
| The article brings up the two new LPs that were added, one being
| "Strive to be the world's best employer".
|
| The biggest slap in the face about this LP is that the word
| "strive" used to be a bad word at Amazon. If you ever said you
| were going to "strive" to do something, you would be told that's
| not good enough. If you put it in a doc, you would be told to
| remove it. "Strive" was a weasel word. We never accepted
| "striving" as part of our tenets or our goals. Our goals never
| were to "strive to build a good service", our goal was just
| "build a good service"!
|
| And then they went and made the new LP "Strive to be the world's
| best employer". Why isn't it just "Be the world's best employer"?
|
| It may seem like a small thing, but it's an example of the ethos
| that has been chipped away inside Amazon. That particular LP has
| always been the butt of jokes because it's been clear over the
| last 5 years that leadership isn't actually serious about it, but
| the use of the weasel word "strive" really just put the cherry on
| top.
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