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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

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Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#41

Post by pvtmert »

mikert89 wrote: post #24
iLoveOncall wrote: post #3

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…

leadership principles are relevant to high level amazon employees, L6 and below they are used as a control mechanism/justification to call out low performance

As a ~4 year tenured L5, I agree. There is annual performance review system called Forte. During forte, each person is rated in each leadership principles (LPs) by their peers and manager, possibly from away-team members.

As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is extremely limited. Citing Ownership (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently weaponised to limit promotions/pay-raises.

I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.

When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)

Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action

Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.

It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.

Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#42

Post by bendbro »

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.

H1Bs risk deportation when they are fired. It is inconceivable for this to not impact their performance and behavior. Combine that with Amazon's Jack Welch style stack rank and firing of the bottom and it becomes even worse

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#44

Post by lazide »

Aurornis wrote: post #38
hibikir wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like a good soldier being conscripted into a shit army, life ain’t fair. Always brutal to see, though.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#45

Post by mikert89 »

harshs08 wrote: post #34
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.

the article is a misrepresentation of amazon work culture, what do you want me to say

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#46

Post by gtowey »

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.

Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda.

My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#47

Post by OrvalWintermute »

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.

I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra……….

Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#48

Post by photochemsyn »

shermantanktop wrote: post #36
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.

Well this is what set me thinking:

> "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for."

I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."

Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#49

Post by jodrellblank »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #39
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 ran…

I’m not going to strongly defend it but this “doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right?” isn’t true; if your work scales or you are managing people, you could move the needle more - say you launch a new service from scratch.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#50

Post by pzmarzly »

cperciva wrote: post #13
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.

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.

If they are just recommendations, perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes :)
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