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The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

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Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#61

Post by jcrites »

dang wrote: post #54

Yegge's article never says it was an email. What should the title be? Edit: I've taken a rather lame crack at it and am open to improvements.

The circumstances that Yegge described happened somewhat before my time, but I suppose you could call it an "internal goal" or "internal mandate".

Amazon's not really big on "mandates" in general, but the term seems to fit Yegge's characterization of what happened. "Internal goal" would be another way to phrase it. E.g., "The single most important technical goal in the history of Amazon".

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#62

Post by thefounder »

The issue if you are developing using such requirements is that the product will end-up quite expensive. A simple messaging or authentication feature becomes a fully fledged multi-tier service maybe with super admins, owners/admins and clients. Dev budget is not an issue for Amazon though...

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#63

Post by Infernal »

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.

I know of one CIO (between 10k and 1k employees) who operates by tell/train/terminate. Tell the staff what to do, if they can’t then train them, if they’ve been trained and can’t/won’t then terminate them.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#64

Post by blub »

solarengineer wrote: post #45
jeffbarr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe that Steve was exaggerating for effect here. In my 17 years at Amazon I have never seen or heard of a threat of this nature. The overall intent of the email was to tell teams to decouple, decentralize, and to own their own destinies.

An ex Netflix person, who has since moved to Amazon, spoke at a client place three weeks ago. He casually mentioned things such as "we forgive the first time, and we fire the second time". From how he spoke, we felt that this may be the norm in Silicon Valley and related places. I have much respect for what he has achieved, so I didn't interrupt to question such a fear-inducing mindset.

I remember reading that their head of HR was very supportive of this firing policy and she was herself fired: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs-cul... :)

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#65

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.

Elon Musk did this fairly recently at Tesla:

"There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.

Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding."

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#69

Post by QuercusMax »

kylek wrote: post #41
cm2012 wrote: post #7

I love some of Amazon's executive policies. From what I've read, everyone has to write a multi-page paper before executive meetings, and everyone has to read it, so the meeting goes smoothly with everyone understanding the issues. I hate how no one reads anything in most organizations.

Not sure about execs, but this happens in engineering meetings (regarding new features being implemented or other semi-major changes). Whoever is initiating the meeting writes up a paper describing the terminology, the nature of the change and why it's needed, how it will be implemented etc. The entire dev team (+ maybe other dev teams within the group), management (the initiator's boss + 1 level above, maybe other d…

That sounds like a low-fi, synchronous, in-person version of reviewing a Google Doc (with comments, suggestions, etc).

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#70

Post by morelisp »

duxup wrote: post #19

Eat your own dogfood. You can't sell to customers effectively if your flagship product only works because it has access to resources the customers will never have... and it is designed around that flagship's needs and not your customer's needs.

AWS is largely a side-effect of this memo, not its instigator. At the time, Amazon's dog food would be books/clothes/literal dog food.
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