111–120 of 147 posts
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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
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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?
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> 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.
This Bezos-style hyperaquisition isn't new exactly but it's not the constant norm its currently made out to be: its a sociecal failure mode with clear precedent but by no means a constant and its not at all obvious that it's inevitable.
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.
Not a single company I worked on, did they ever mattered beyond company's marketing material.
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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…
Also, depending on your org you might be on a timer for L6, which sounds impossible given the situation. So... fair warning.
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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.
"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started. (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…
When the 90th percentile employee has a GED and works warehouse or delivery, actions to earn “best employer” may be invisible or worse to the 5% who are software people. I’ve worked at Meta too, and Meta absolutely had better coffee. And WAY better health insurance. But Amazon’s health insurance is uniform for all staff, and that means something.
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.
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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 need to multiple it by the probability of that new service actually succeeding, which is low. And even then, do you expect it to move stock price by more than 10%? Otherwise it's not going to meaningfully impact your RSU compensation
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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.