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Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#81

Post by throwaway343534 »

wjamesg wrote: post #24
_gi12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the…

Burn down chart?

It's pointless gimmicky make-work that presents your upper management with the fantasy that development work is not a difficult bespoke engineering effort, but rather an assembly line like they studied at business school.

In order to pull off this sleight of hand, real work is broken up into elastically-sized multiples of a subjective metric called "points" which the team is allowed to estimate. This estimation game is key as it builds buy-in from the team by appearing to "give them a seat at the table." Chunking the estimations into sprints is a smoke screen to keep the scam going.

Having acquired the buy-in from the people actually doing the work, the estimates are immediately converted to commitments by tracking progress on a burn down chart and telling upper management that the project will begin at 100% work remaining and proceed in a steady, linear assembly line fashion to 0% work remaining after the time allotted.

Deviations from a steady downward slope are interpreted as failures of the development team which paradoxically reinforces the standing of the chart presenter because they are able to "show the numbers". Unchecked, this ultimately elevates them to diety-like cult standing.

As the flawed assumptions underlying the chart are never questioned after the initial implementation, the use of burn down charts ultimately ends with:

- Blue Pill Ending: the company shoots itself in the foot by firing the team for failing to make the burn-down chart linear

- Seller's Market Ending: the team gets wise to the con and leaves the company

- Red Pill Ending: the process manager is fired after heroic intervention by the technical leadership

A process manager that wants to show up with their PMI certification and their burn-down charts faces a precarious end-game.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#82

Post by taurath »

fbonetti wrote: post #54
Diederich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was happening at a startup ? How common is this kind of process slavery in startups?

Yes, it was a VC-funded, early-stage startup. On top of the large amount of process and the one week sprints, we also four different dev teams each working on their own microservice app which was tightly coupled to the other apps in the company. Every team had to deploy at the same time, and if one app went down, the other apps went down with it. The company's platform was essentially an ecommerce site that could hav…

Sounds like the CTO is trying to preemptively solve all the problems they had at their last company.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#83

Post by sinnoh »

smokeyj wrote: post #10
mstank wrote: post #2

"A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp." Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlin…

This is how I feel about our democratic process. The process is you pick one of two parties. Then you get into a face bloodying fight with the other party. Nothing gets done, then you pat yourself on the back for doing your part. When you come to the realization that nothing has been accomplished, you blame those who didn't participate in the brawl. Suggesting that people work ON the process rather than IN the proces…

> This is how I feel about our democratic process.

Oh it's applicable anywhere humans interact in modelled systems. It happens in writing too - some team might be in a creative mindset and write some funny or brilliant work; a subsequent team either accurately recreates the mindset and creates a 'true spiritual successor' to the original work that can develop things like 'where that story would have gone, taken to its natural conclusion' or 're-tell it better' or so forth;

or they can simply mimic the 'formulas' or even just 'copy the original jokes' and 'miss the point'.

I might have a list of these.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#84

Post by [deleted] »

smokeyj wrote: post #57
dangero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.

Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technolo…

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#85

Post by FreakyT »

plandis wrote: post #76
x2f10 wrote: post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

You're 1.) implying that Amazon isn't actively trying to fix it (otherwise they would be "walking the walk") and 2.) that it's a widespread issue (all I've heard about counterfeit products are from a few HNers)

Same here -- I've seen a lot of comment sections upset about it, but I haven't encountered the issue myself yet.

I'm sure it's a problem, and I certainly hope Amazon is trying to fix it, but I don't think it's the massive company-destroying thing that people are making it out to be.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#86

Post by veidr »

plandis wrote: post #76
x2f10 wrote: post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

You're 1.) implying that Amazon isn't actively trying to fix it (otherwise they would be "walking the walk") and 2.) that it's a widespread issue (all I've heard about counterfeit products are from a few HNers)

It's absolutely a widespread issue. I know it happens repeatedly to me, and every Amazon user I know well enough to have ever discussed this issue with, but don't take our word for it:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=amazon+...

(I do think this is probably a hard problem, however, so I don't necessarily accept that Amazon isn't working hard on it...)

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#87

Post by bambax »

From then 1997 letter:

> We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.

Every single one of those partners either folded or fell into utter irrelevance. The only one surviving is Amazon itself.

Don't know what to make of it, though.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#88

Post by nebabyte »

smokeyj wrote: post #57
dangero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.

Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technolo…

> If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law.

...You just described the legislative branch. Direct democracy has its own problems; even if you scale for proportions of people, the people leading their everyday lives do not have the time to inform themselves en masse of particulars about issues, and thus would be readily swayed by false information. (As can already be seen with voting on ballot measures, which are a headache enough just being statewide)

And *viola

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#89

Post by GVIrish »

TheGRS wrote: post #25
dpark wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” - Bezos > We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz Ouch

Yea, I'm not going to share which airline or which branch (other than to say it wasn't United or Chicago), but I have a relative who works at a pretty high position in one of them and they were, to my great surprise, in defense of United and the police in that episode earlier this week. Statements like "airlines bump people all the time", "they can't offer anymore than what they did, its a set rule", and "if they jus…

I think there are two problems here.

One is that since 9/11 the airline industry has gotten far more comfortable with calling the police to remove passengers. In some cases it's totally justified. But in others airlines are jumping to the threat of police force in order to "solve" issues with customers. Basically using the stick instead of the carrot because the stick is easier and costs less money.

The second problem is a far more pervasive problem in society where people excuse the use of force on someone simply because that person didn't comply with a minor request. This is how someone who didn't want to accept a ticket for selling bootleg cigarettes ended up dead. Or the guy just this week who got pummeled by a police officer for jaywalking. "Just comply" they say. Sure, but it doesn't mean you should be beaten, bloodied, or even killed for not complying.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#90

Post by devopsproject »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #71
devopsproject wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By almost every account, Amazon is terrible place to work: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... This isn't the type of leader you want to be.

Yet by every account that mattters it doesn't, right? I understand that people who are there can certainly wish that the place and culture were different in some significant way, but the only barometer that should have some weight is the ease or difficulty that Amazon has in attracting and retaining top talent -- and that to the extent that it is harming their ability to deliver results. Which, from the outside, it c…

> but the only barometer that should have some weight is the ease or difficulty that Amazon has in attracting and retaining top talent

They have terrible retention. One of the worst and in many years the absolute worst.

A few years back workers were passing out from working in 100 degree temps. They were disciplined for performance and instead of installing air conditioning, they lined up ambulances and paramedics to take falling bodies to the hospital. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...

This is grotesque.

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