11–20 of 147 posts
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
“Paxos as a service” Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work … Definitely coming back to that
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
As someone who has been working at Amazon for not far from a decade, the author misunderstands some portions because of his focus on a very specific part of the description. In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your…
Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
The Leadership Principles are less "principles" and more "operational guidelines". Aside from maybe "Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer" (which is a recent addition) they're not saying what Amazon wants to achieve; they're recommendations for effective ways to get things done.
There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems
As someone who has been working at Amazon for not far from a decade, the author misunderstands some portions because of his focus on a very specific part of the description. In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your…
I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives.
As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer.
It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.