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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

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Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#101

Post by uxcolumbo »

pvtmert wrote: post #41
mikert89 wrote: post #24

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…

Great background and experience and you seem very driven and proactive.

That someone like you doesn’t get recognised or rewarded reeks of piss poor leadership.

And then the petty reason not to give a good performance score - your manager should have stood up for you, unless they were ignored as well.

What’s the allure of working at Amazon these days?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#103

Post by Aeolun »

jodrellblank wrote: post #49
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just work smarter instead of more and have a much larger effect on stock price.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#104

Post by Aeolun »

x2tyfi wrote: post #5
petalmind wrote: post #2

The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.

This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.

I don’t think moving from Amazon to Oracle does you any favours in that department. Maybe the only switch you could make for a stronger money focus?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#105

Post by patrick451 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #51
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

Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?

We have a lot of unemployed American tech workers. There is no reason hire people on visas other than suppressing wages and getting what amounts to an indentured servant.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#106

Post by patrick451 »

diskzero wrote: post #63

I worked at Amazon before the two newest principles were added, so I can't comment on Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. I was asked about the principles during my interview(s) and they were discussed extensively during my onboarding process. I found there were groups of peeple who were very sincere about them and groups that were quite cynical. Some co-workers had no…

The problem with the LPs is they are all contradictory. You can make an argument for anything you want using LPs. Want to refactor something? Insist on the highest standards. Don't want to refactor something? Deliver results. It's all BS.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#107

Post by scarface_74 »

master_crab wrote: post #84
pvtmert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forte isn’t used to withhold comp. It’s just a development tool. That’s why it was always held in January after end of year comp. If your manager told you otherwise, they are being passive-aggressive about your prospects. Second, if you’re a fifth year L5, start interviewing now. L5 technically is a terminal level (is that still a thing there?) but you aren’t supposed to spend five years at that level.

Ingenii (sp? I have been gone for two years) was where you put your accomplishments and goals. But Forte is (was?) where your management and peer feedback is managed.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#108

Post by kangs »

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.

Principles are just nice words, and that's it.

It's, IMO, the action/reward loop that matters most (i.e. incentives).

Most, if not all big tech companies do not align incentives with principles - quite the opposite. Most folks in a position of leadership utilize principles and other "nice sounding arguments" for their own personal benefit, i.e. block internal competitors with principles (works great against employees with integrity and quality ethics) while claiming to follow these.. without actually following any.

I'm sure everyone here has had some taste of it, or even discussions on how this sucks but "they gotta play the game". Not playing the game is extremely hard when it comes to promos, salary, or getting a large project to go with your name on it (I'd know..).

So, until this rant become common sense, principles will just be that - nice words.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#109

Post by o1bf2k25n8g5 »

neilv wrote: post #79
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…

> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. This has the ring of truth. Has anyone solved this problem? Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)

>> power does what power wants

> Has anyone solved this problem?

You're asking if anyone has solved the problem... of human nature? I don't think it's at the top of most people's lists of action items.

> Is anyone trying to solve this problem?

Your nearest meditation center, I suppose.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#110

Post by sumedh »

la64710 wrote: post #78
bendbro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there. And this actually happens all the time. Folks in Amazon move around as needed across border. The idea of h1-b servitude does not hold much relevance for companies like Amazon who have built mas…

> they can easily relocate back to their own country

Many visa workers have families, and relocating an entire household, especially when children are involved is a huge emotional and logistical challenge.

Its not easy

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