61–70 of 147 posts
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
Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?
My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises. "Disagree and commit", "Bias for Action" were popular amongst some of the management I knew.
There are very detailed internal wiki pages written with examples on the right ways to interpret them but I doubt many bothered to go through all that beyond the material presented during onboarding — which is also not always completed. It was frustrating to see LPs overused by employees in every meeting, document and discussions without much thought as to what they were meant to convey.
That said, there were a _handful_ of teams and individuals I met who exemplified these but it was a rare occurrence during my time unfortunately. And even in the moments where someone went above and beyond w.r.t channeling the LPs and the internal process to bring forth a proposal (e.g. famous corp-wide one was the push against RTO), I saw them get shot down unceremoniously while low-effort work and planning with a dusting of LPs got the go-ahead.
I hence echo what a few folk here have already said — don't always expect the work environment to reflect the values and principles you read on the about page. Reality is often (sadly) disappointing.
The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share. There certainly could be cases I don't know about. I found many of the principles helped create a good environment to make technical decisions and maintain some technical autonomy across groups. Yes, working at Amazon is a grind and there many ways working there can suck the joy out of your life. I never found the principles used as a weapon against me, my team or customers. I know Amazon has a lot of faults, but I am not sure they are are directly correlated to the principles. A thought experiment would be to wonder what Amazon would be like if it didn't have any principles at all?
This is good feedback that ideally, Amazonians should read and reflect on but I worry the machine is too big at the moment for anyone there to care. Would take a big event and a reset for things to change. My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally f…
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.
This is good feedback that ideally, Amazonians should read and reflect on but I worry the machine is too big at the moment for anyone there to care. Would take a big event and a reset for things to change. My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally f…
I wonder if overall team size has something to do with how the principles are dealt with? Mobile Shopping is huge. Some teams are tiny, experiencing massive growth or winding down. If a team has a super mature code base or market, and the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them? How can it really always be Day One?
During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads.
> How can it really always be Day One?
I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-raise…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
They are selecting for people who will "play the game" or, even better, will believe proactively.
No one with a lick of sense would believe that Amazon strive to be the best employer in the world. But someone who is capable of doing, for e.g., a highly skilled coding job and who believes that Amazon actually strives to be the best employer, is a rare beast who will likely not unionize at the drop of a hat.
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.
(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)