Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
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Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#2[deleted]
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#3What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside.
Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves.
Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated. Who will do this at Amazon?
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#4What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and…
Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#5I'm guessing that business processes in a company as big and successful as Amazon are well beyond the point of turning into a religious cult. And now we see adepts of such cults, sometimes familiar with only a single cult, without much understanding why this cult was there, reproducing that cult to build new companies.
And funny thing, it sometimes is a success.
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#6What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and…
> Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated.
Is Amazon really stagnating? They still seem to be making a ton of moves from my casual observation.
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#7As someone who left Amazon, I'd never want to deal with that garbage culture ever again in any form or permutation.
It gives me a headache that founders who previously worked at Amazon would want to promote the "culture" dissonance of Amazon at their own companies.
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#8What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and…
Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#9> Amazon’s hard-driving company culture has come in for its share of criticism...
Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]?
> Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly.
AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this.
> Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance.
This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10].
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[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc
[1] https://oxide.computer/principles/
[2] Marc Brooker, Amazon's approach to building resilient services, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44
[3] Peter Ramensky, Amazon's approach to high-availability deployment, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4
[4] Andy Troutman, Amazon's approach to running service-oriented teams, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000
[5] Colm MacCarthaigh, Amazon's approach to security during development, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ
[6] Becky Weiss, Amazon's approach to failing successfully, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU
[7] Thomas Blood, Amazon's culture of innovation, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE
[8] Andy Warfield and Seth Markle, Lessons from Amazon S3's culture of durability, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0
[9] Colm MacCarthaigh, Lessons from Amazon's highest available data-planes, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo
Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups
#10What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and…
> Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2.
Where did Jeff Bezos say this?