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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

#41

Post by pmiller2 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
celticmusic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#42

Post by hitekker »

bcantrill wrote: post #34
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 co…

Out of curiosity, what kind of research went into articulating Oxide’s culture?

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#43

Post by jerkstate »

asveikau wrote: post #22
jerkstate wrote: post #18

Asshole managers who copy Jeff Bezos are just this tech generation's version of asshole managers who copied Steve Jobs that we had to deal with 20 years ago.

Was it cool to copy Jobs 20 years ago, after NeXT but before OS X, iPod, and iPhone? I don't think so. Was it cool to copy his asshole traits before he was kicked out the first time? I would have been too young to know. I am not sure how widely they were publicized. Anyway, I am not the biggest Amazon fan, but if what they are imitating are things like "customer focus" as claimed in the article and it's not a euphemi…

I would say if there was any lull in Jobs' popularity it would have been between when he was fired in '85 to the early '90s, by '96 Pixar had released Toy Story and Jobs had been Acqui-hired back by Apple. OS X, iPod, and iPhone are far from his first successes.

Through this time he worked with thousands of people and was an asshole the whole time, so when people saw his trajectory in the 90s after his fall in the 80s they were even more convinced that Scully was wrong and Jobs had been right all along.

One of the things they mention in the article is the "bar raiser" concept and I've seen that concept used politically at Amazon offshoots. They don't mention in the article the morale-crushing public blame games in the name of "accountability" that Bezos acolytes can't resist doing, that's well documented in many other Amazon introspectives. Same shit, different decade.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#44

Post by iudqnolq »

paxys wrote: post #13
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…

Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.

Except the search page has changed, just well.

Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#45

Post by hitekker »

pm90 wrote: post #40
throwawaya2z wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A throwaway proclaims, without evidence, that their employer is a paragon of virtue and its victims are liars, miscreants, criminals etc.

A predictable pattern.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#46

Post by [deleted] »

dchichkov wrote: post #5

I'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.

[deleted]

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#47

Post by pmiller2 »

jasonboyd wrote: post #32
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 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 o…

You got that right. I can’t even get them to deliver reliably to my mailbox at a UPS store. It’s like they just can’t figure out that it’s a business with business hours or something, even though I have it in the delivery instructions for that address. Either that, or they’re just straight lying like you said, but I’ve had enough repeated problems that I just suspect incompetence.

I once went so far as to try and get Amazon to blacklist my address for their contracted delivery drivers, but, of course, they wouldn’t do it.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#48

Post by dgemm »

paxys wrote: post #13
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…

Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.

Google does this constantly with Gmail, calendar, Android, and so on.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#49

Post by pmart123 »

jariel wrote: post #27
remarkEon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price. Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era. Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the…

From my recollection, Ballmer continually overpaid for random acquisitions that screamed “in the moment hot thing” versus well-thought, strategic. From an outsiders view, the whole we must take over the world syndrome manifested into trying to buy a way into everything that could be big versus fit well with Microsoft.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#50

Post by kbos87 »

I can appreciate the sentiment behind not saying that something “isn’t my job.” But that’s also a quick road to people shaming and guilting one another into doing work they think needs to be done, regardless of what the hierarchy thinks should be done. Simple answers usually aren’t the right ones.
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