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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

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Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#31

Post by dh2022 »

losvedir wrote: post #28

My favorite one is leaders "Are Right, a Lot". The others are all generally "meta" about deciding what to do and how to do it, but that one actually calls out the concrete results of actions. It feels pretty meaty, and actually is a way to grade leaders. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as a team lead, who recently very much was not right about something. But fortunately it's "a lot" and not "always".

When I was working at Amazon I did not like this principle. In my experience it led to people arguing: because whoever did not “win” the argument would not be a leader.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#33

Post by huflungdung »

la64710 wrote: post #29
mikert89 wrote: post #17

Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding. There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems

That’s bullshit … just another scaremongering post against employees with some kind of visa. Leadership depends upon individuals not upon their immigration status. From direct experience I can say there are leaders and non leaders on bothe sides. BTW ec2 was first conceived and made in South Africa.

[dead]

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#34

Post by harshs08 »

mikert89 wrote: post #17

Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding. There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems

please don't turn this into another blind/reddit forum. I suggest refraining from making broad claims like "80% of corporate workers are visa workers" without actual data.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#35

Post by brcmthrowaway »

mikert89 wrote: post #17

Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding. There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems

Whats the next amazon?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#36

Post by shermantanktop »

photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The only way the corporate executives of a corporation will ever pay attention to pleas and heartfelt advice from employees - even high-level well-trusted long-term employees - is if those employees are the controlling shareholders who have real voting power over the makeup of the corporate board. Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more…

Not sure how this is meant to relate to the article.

But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#38

Post by Aurornis »

hibikir wrote: post #21
pm90 wrote: post #7

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.

Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book. All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power…

The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s.

Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.

It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.

As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#39

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

apparent wrote: post #19

The "leaders are owners" bit is a great idea from the shareholders' perspective, but a bit of a raw deal for the employees. That is, every owner wants the employees to act as if he has as much skin in the game as an owner does. But the employees simply do not. They might have some equity, but at Amazon it would only be the tiniest sliver. If you can convince such employees to act as if they are owners, then good for…

I don't understand how slivers of stock is supposed to incentivize anyone to do anything.

Amazon has 1.5 million employees. Say that it's a completely fair co-op and I have a 1-in-1.5-millionth share of the whole company. Their market cap is about 2.5T, so this is about 1.6 million USD in stock that I own. (By amazing coincidence, their market cap in USD is about the square of the employee headcount)

But if I'm a rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level.

For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock.

I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money

I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#40

Post by some_guy_nobel »

Anyone taking these leadership principles serious is fooling themselves.

Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit.

Same happened again with mandated RTO.

And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries.

Why would any other leadership princples be different?

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