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Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

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Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#31

Post by m-ee »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #26
m-ee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "H…

I now get photos of my package when it was delivered.

I gave up and moved entirely to using the lockers when I order from amazon now. Curiously they still managed to lose a package between the last distribution center and their locker.

But larger scale it made me doubt if their model of Uber style contract workers doing just in time delivery with incredibly tight deadlines can ever work. For the speed they promise at their scale I don't see how they'll get around hiring more workers, giving more reasonable workloads, and providing incentives to actual get the job done right instead of lying to try and meet their numbers.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#32

Post by jasonboyd »

m-ee wrote: post #19
logicallee wrote: post #17

I was just reading here on HN how Amazon recently quietly replicated and replaced UPS and FedEx with their own fleet. These companies are $82.92 billion and $65.45 billion companies respectively so I was pretty impressed.

I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "H…

I agree.

I have frequently had packages marked as delivered that were not delivered. When I contacted Amazon they would say if it does not show up in a day or two contact us again and they would also give me a $5 gift card. The package would always show up just like they said. It's pretty obvious that the drivers are lying about the delivery (due to aggressive quotas, I assume) and it's obvious that Amazon is aware of the problem because they have a pat answer when you contact them.

I have also had many packages marked as undeliverable for any number of completely made up reason. Reasons such as: no access code (not a gated community, no access code required), nobody in the office to receive the package (it's a condo, not apartments, there is no office), no safe place to leave the package (there is a six foot privacy fence around the front porch), could not find the address (receive multiple packages a week without issue), etc. These packages would always show up the next day proving these were completely fabricated excuses.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#33

Post by heavyset_go »

celticmusic wrote: post #20
neffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade. The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews. It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China. Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all chri…

I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

> It works well as it is

Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#34

Post by bcantrill »

ignoramous wrote: post #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…

My criticism of Amazon's values are (1) they are (generally) not values and (2) they can be used to justify essentially any action. We tried to be mindful of that with Oxide's values which are very much values (and not management bromides or all-hands claptrap) and we are explicit about the fact that (as values) they can come into tension: we explicitly ask applicants to describe a time when two of our values have come into tension for them and how they've resolved it.[1] (The answers have honestly been incredible: many are deeply thoughtful, insightful and inspiring!)

So you may believe that we missed the mark, but Oxide's values are in contrast to Amazon's -- aligned only in the belief that a company's values should be articulated clearly and referred to frequently.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAK...

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#35

Post by heavyset_go »

m-ee wrote: post #19
logicallee wrote: post #17

I was just reading here on HN how Amazon recently quietly replicated and replaced UPS and FedEx with their own fleet. These companies are $82.92 billion and $65.45 billion companies respectively so I was pretty impressed.

I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "H…

It's ironic that we've found ourselves facing the same problem we criticized the Soviets for when they constantly fudged their metrics in order to meet their quotas.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#36

Post by FussyZeus »

heavyset_go wrote: post #35
m-ee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping. Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque. "H…

It's ironic that we've found ourselves facing the same problem we criticized the Soviets for when they constantly fudged their metrics in order to meet their quotas.

I don't really know what people expect from a workforce that's underpaid, without benefits, and completely at-will employed.

If you want people to give a fuck about their job, pay them enough to live comfortably off of it. Give them benefits so they can feel secure. Give them paid time off, proper breaks, etc.

It's a little gross how people bitch and complain about service and low-tier labor workers "just being there for the paycheck" as though a single person ever finished high school with the dream of working as an Amazon delivery driver.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#37

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaya2z wrote: post #23
taurath wrote: post #12

Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.

Throwaway account because I don’t want my primary account to be associated with my career in any way. I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means t…

[deleted]

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#38

Post by _vertigo »

taurath wrote: post #12

Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.

Can you expand on this?

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#39

Post by BeetleB »

celticmusic wrote: post #20
neffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade. The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews. It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China. Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all chri…

I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

Problems with Amazon's website:

- For a long time they performed poorly on Firefox. Opening multiple tabs would cause my PC to come to a crawl. They fixed this 1-2 years ago.

- I used to be able to jump directly to reviews. Now it's multiple clicks away. One click to get to the review section. Then scroll down. Then click again. This is very annoying.

- I don't get notified when someone replies to my review. The rest of the world solved this problem well over 15 years ago.

- Lumping of quite different products into one listing, so when I'm reading reviews I can't easily tell if I'm reading the review for the product I want.

- Way too many gamed reviews out there. Whole web sites exist to handle this problem that Amazon has.

- Same item has multiple listings. Why?

I could list all the other problems that their retail division has, but the above is just about the web site. Whenever I hear that they are Customer Obsessed, I wonder which world they live in. As someone who buys stuff from them, and as someone who has sold stuff through them, neither experience could be classified as caring much for the customer.

Their retail division really does remind me of MS Windows and its stagnation, where MS wouldn't improve anything because of their dominance.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#40

Post by pm90 »

throwawaya2z wrote: post #23
taurath wrote: post #12

Yup, and it’s filling out every other company in Seattle with people conditioned to be assholes - this isn’t a leadership principle but it is how you act over time after being ranked according to the leadership principles.

Throwaway account because I don’t want my primary account to be associated with my career in any way. I’m a strong advocate of the leadership principles. My organization knows when to cut the noise and get down the business but we have a fairly diverse workplace where opinions are valued but being rude, insulting coworkers, arrogance, etc are not tolerated. Creating an environment where people don’t feel safe means t…

> Usually people who scream the loudest about others being assholes are the ones who can’t get along.

I was nodding along until this line. The fact that you would phrase it this way makes it hard for me to trust whatever you said earlier.

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