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Amazon's Leadership Principles

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Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#101
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain.

Looking at his comment history I'm started to think I misread irony for sincerity, but its still not clear to me where that's delimited. The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You sho…

He was clearly being sarcastic, I don't know how you can think that he was serious.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#102
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at his comment history I'm started to think I misread irony for sincerity, but its still not clear to me where that's delimited. The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You sho…

He was clearly being sarcastic, I don't know how you can think that he was serious.

lol thanks for popping in. It sounded like he was being derisive, but not sarcastic. Sounded like he was legitemately trying to level a critique about Bezos not dogfooding, in other words (instead the fact that he's a garbage human being). Fair enough if I'm wrong, but the same kind of shit has and will continue to be said here in complete sincerity.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#103

1. Screw 2. Every last employee 3. Out of their last dime 4. Deny 5. Lie 6. Deny the lying 7. Work them to death 8. As soon as it takes the slightest toll on them, fire them 9. Their suppliers too 10. And may God help delivery services 11. Deny 12. Lie about that too 13. Deny lying about it, of course 14. Don't even profit from it (except personally if you're Jeff Bezos, of course, who somehow became a billionaire cr…

I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that to my reports; my compensation is fair; and I would escalate immediately if I ever saw anyone abused, mistreated, or cheated. Amazon's a big company and I'm sure there's terrible managers out there and true harrowing stories. And there are problems, here and…

From what I've seen inside Amazon, upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples, so a bad VP, director or manager could cause a lot of damage to those beneath them.

I was lucky enough to work in a really great environment with a management chain who cared deeply about the people under them, but I worked with unpleasant and bullying managers from other divisions, and chatted to people who'd fallen out of favour and had their manager absolutely grind them down until they left.

But, overall, I'm not foolish enough to believe that this is particularly unique to Amazon, and I've heard far worse stories from pretty much every other sector of employment.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#104
post #36

Some of these are contradictory - in addition, some of these aren't really even leadership principles of much merit outside the company they're created for. Here is an example of a proven set of leadership principles that is a worthwhile read: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm . Someone who can embody all of these principles that the Marine Corps espouses is someone I can respect immensely regar…

>> Ensure the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished This might be a good idea for running a military unit but fails miserably in IT. As a leader I hardly ever supervise my engineers, they have to understand the tasks and only come to me if there something that they do not understand. Giving them as much freedom as possible is one reason they like to work with us, feedback we got from 90% of them. Sometimes…

>>This might be a good idea for running a military unit but fails miserably in IT.

This explains why IT has such losers in management positions. Most managers in IT think all they are supposed to do in a day is browse internet, forward emails, approve leaves/vacations, build their cartels and leave.

Sorry. But to ensure people under you understand the work they do and the sole responsibility of achieving the goals assigned is on you, the manager.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#105

1. Screw 2. Every last employee 3. Out of their last dime 4. Deny 5. Lie 6. Deny the lying 7. Work them to death 8. As soon as it takes the slightest toll on them, fire them 9. Their suppliers too 10. And may God help delivery services 11. Deny 12. Lie about that too 13. Deny lying about it, of course 14. Don't even profit from it (except personally if you're Jeff Bezos, of course, who somehow became a billionaire cr…

I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that to my reports; my compensation is fair; and I would escalate immediately if I ever saw anyone abused, mistreated, or cheated. Amazon's a big company and I'm sure there's terrible managers out there and true harrowing stories. And there are problems, here and…

> But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now.

Ex Amazon SDE here. Did you fail to notice the incredible turnover rate among engineers? Most stay less than 18 months. (I've seen the real numbers from tools that mine employee IDs and join date).

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. He doesn't know the meaning of the word, that's all.

I have to admit, I have the same opinion. But I'm always delighted to be proven wrong, and would appreciate good arguments against it.

A principle is just a foundational truth that you start a chain of reasoning or behavior from.

You can have principles for maximizing profits, principles for good software architecture, principles for increasing reliability of your vehicle.

These are principles for leadership, OP is conflating that with principles for moral living, or principles for ethical behavior, or something like that.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that to my reports; my compensation is fair; and I would escalate immediately if I ever saw anyone abused, mistreated, or cheated. Amazon's a big company and I'm sure there's terrible managers out there and true harrowing stories. And there are problems, here and…

From what I've seen inside Amazon, upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples, so a bad VP, director or manager could cause a lot of damage to those beneath them. I was lucky enough to work in a really great environment with a management chain who cared deeply about the people under them, but I worked with unpleasant and bullying managers from other divisions, and chatted to people who'd…

>>upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples

This thing tells me the upper management itself was the bad apples.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#108
post #94
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's cheaper and more efficient to have them onsite.

Also because dehydration and injuries are a problem in fulfillment centers, especially during high volume or high heat.

Why should dehydration be an acceptable problem ? i can understand heat and not using air-conditioning, but even soldiers in hot countries manage to stay hydrated.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#109
post #13

Do these leadership or company principles ever truly have any effect on employees or products? I've seen them thrown around at my company on a few occasions, but they never feel like they drive much beyond trying to be one of those gaudy motivational posters.

They get discussed in almost every circumstance, every meeting. Especially the customer focus one. It really does seem to work, from my perspective.

I now work for a relatively new division at another company, one staffed with a lot of ex-AWS staff. One of the earliest things they did there is work with employees from a few different previous companies to figure out our own values, and we've proceeded to apply them to the business in similar fashion. First and foremost among them being one focusing on the customer.

Happy customers come back, and are also likely to talk about it to their friends. You might take a hit to your bottom line now, but you'll make it back in the long run with repeat business from the customer.

The only one I ever had an issue with there was frugality. I get why it's there, and the intention, but it leads to something we'd internally refer to as "Frupidity". Frupidity is where in the interests of frugality, the company would do something really stupid, or that would ultimately end up costing them more money.

It also became the last recourse of the bad manager. "we're not going to do this, because frugality" and you then won't be able to get them to budge an inch regardless of what data you bring. It especially will end up being a local to their team only frugality.

Re: Amazon's Leadership Principles

#110
post #13

Do these leadership or company principles ever truly have any effect on employees or products? I've seen them thrown around at my company on a few occasions, but they never feel like they drive much beyond trying to be one of those gaudy motivational posters.

OH absolutely. They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time. Frugality means putting up with lousy hardware and cramming people into working environments to the point where people start bringing up OHSA w.r.t. number of toilets. Customer obsession means getting an email about a feature used by a couple percent of users and having to spend a week scrambling because…

On almost all your points, I do agree with you. But for one:

> are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff

"Disagree and commit" means that when you don't agree with the decision being made, you make that clear, you state why, but then you commit to the decision that was made and work with your team to achieve the goals. It means you don't whine throughout the project that it wasn't done the right way, and you don't bullshit with "I told you so" later if you turn out to be correct.

If your manager makes the call that it's going to be done in way X, you disagree with him politely, then you commit to doing it way X.

What I find far more interesting about the leadership principles is that they recently dropped one: "Vocally self-critical". Oh, that's really just part of 'Earn Trust', apparently, but I'll bet in two more years that phrase isn't even part of the Earn Trust description anymore.

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