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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

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Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#121

Post by seanhunter »

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…

> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants,

There is an interesting hypothesis for this in the book "The Evolution of Civilizations" by Carroll Quigley[1]. Basically his idea in the book is that as organizations (or civilizations) get beyond a certain critical mass, people start to lose connection with the collective goals that originally united them and start to coalesce around internal goals related to their smaller unit. So this in a company is when you go from everyone devoting all their efforts to the shared mission and instead working on team goals or (worse) internal politics that may or may not be aligned with the bigger goal.

It's a very interesting book. He's a controversial figure because some of his (other) writings are popular among conspiracy theorists. I haven't read that stuff, but this certainly made sense to me at the time that I read it.

[1] https://ia801601.us.archive.org/4/items/CarrollQuigley-TheEv...

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#122

Post by bluesroo »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #86
neilv wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

Valve? Though I have no idea how they're going now with the anarchy-as-an-organisational-structure thing these days.

I remember in the 2010s reading about them and also reading that there are de facto hierarchies within Valve for given projects, even if they aren’t explicitly laid out.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#123

Post by bluesroo »

benreesman wrote: post #114
o1bf2k25n8g5 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Human nature admits a spectrum of outcomes on this, and I'd argue that most humans are not in fact pathologically acquisitive and power obsessed. Most humans value high status , but healthy societies confer high status in ways de-coupled from counterproductive Putinism. The people who attended the fifth Solvay Conference (that famous photo), who ran the Manhattan Project, who put men on the moon (or went) all were fa…

I’d agree that most humans are not pathological power seekers; however I believe that’s exactly why we end up with successful pathological power seekers.

Like the world is learning with nukes, you cannot rely on the powerful for mercy. You can only rely on the powerful to grasp for more power and the only way to stop them is to yourself be as strong as possible.

If a utopia ever exists, it will only be because of a stalemate arms race (see: no nuclear powers have had an open war). Peaceful utopia is otherwise too easily disrupted by a single asshole with a big stick.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#124

Post by kelipso »

JustExAWS wrote: post #73
Muromec wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s captured audience who will not push back as hard as they maybe should. That and depressing wages of course

I saw this myself. When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”. For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will),…

Most tech workers can’t get a contract job to save their lives, they have no idea how. But those people still have mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. Your scenario is actually pretty rare.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#125

Post by scarface_74 »

master_crab wrote: post #120
scarface_74 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds right. But there was a reason forte was always at the start of year after the end of year comps. So that it wasn’t factored into performance. It’s been a few years since I was at AWS but unless that changed, that’s a key reason why it was always meant to be a development tool. Not a comp tool.

Just the opposite, Forte was where your management and peer feedback was and where you found your award for your comp. It actually went down in 2021 during review time because of volume. I was in AWS ProServe and the joke was that maybe we should go multi cloud for resilliance.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#126

Post by JustExAWS »

kelipso wrote: post #124
JustExAWS wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this myself. When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”. For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will),…

Most tech workers can’t get a contract job to save their lives, they have no idea how. But those people still have mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. Your scenario is actually pretty rare.

My coworkers were in AWS ProServe with me. Any of us who were halfway decent would have contracts for AWS implementations falling out of the sky if we left.

Companies loved to contract ex AWS ProServe folks. It was a win win for both sides. Even if we charged $100-$120 hour W2 contract, that was still much less than the same companies would pay AWS or any of the well known 3rd party cloud consulting companies where consultants work full time for the consulting companies.

All of the people I know who were laid off from ProServe during the great Amazon purge starting in 2023 just reached out to former clients and got jobs or contracts almost immediately.

Remember all of us worked remotely at the time so $100-$120 hour as a W2 contractor went a long way.

Now for the software developers who worked at AWS, that would be a different story. I don’t know any of them up to and including a senior that would have been capable of both talking to a customer and sussing out their needs and going from an empty AWS account to leading a full working solution.

Since leaving AWS, I’ve been in a position to hire directly for the company and recommend candidates for clients [1] and I’ve never been impressed with software developers from BigTech when I needed to hire at smaller companies. They just don’t know how to operate in green field, ambiguous environments where they don’t already have infrastructure and processes in place.

[1] I don’t do or lead staff augmentation projects. My goal is to have success criteria at the beginning of the project, teach the client how to support and expand the implementation and move on. Sometimes they need us to be in their internal hiring loop to make recommendations on who to hire.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#127

Post by master_crab »

scarface_74 wrote: post #125
master_crab wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds right. But there was a reason forte was always at the start of year after the end of year comps. So that it wasn’t factored into performance. It’s been a few years since I was at AWS but unless that changed, that’s a key reason why it was always meant to be a development tool. Not a comp tool.

Just the opposite, Forte was where your management and peer feedback was and where you found your award for your comp. It actually went down in 2021 during review time because of volume. I was in AWS ProServe and the joke was that maybe we should go multi cloud for resilliance.

They must have changed it, because forte had zero comp related stuff in it when I was there. Purely a 360 process.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#128

Post by scarface_74 »

woooooo wrote: post #116
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…

Your manager and skip probably barely understand what you do, and then can't sell it to the director. You get put on the bottom of the list and then the manager trawls their email for a weak-sauce justification. Also, depending on your org you might be on a timer for L6, which sounds impossible given the situation. So... fair warning.

It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through.

I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6.

But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promotion. When you change jobs, you control the narrative. Incoming folks at Amazon almost always get better offers than people coming in.

One of the interns I mentored who came back as an L4 recently got promoted after three years and their comp package was the same as mine when I was hired there back in 2020 and is 20% less than new hires at her position.

AWS had an “anonymous” comp sharing internal Slack channel #pay-equity where you submitted your message to a Slack workflow that anonymized it before posting it. Of course the workflow admin knew about it.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#129

Post by woooooo »

scarface_74 wrote: post #128
woooooo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your manager and skip probably barely understand what you do, and then can't sell it to the director. You get put on the bottom of the list and then the manager trawls their email for a weak-sauce justification. Also, depending on your org you might be on a timer for L6, which sounds impossible given the situation. So... fair warning.

It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through. I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6. But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promot…

Meh, sure it's up to him but if his management chain isn't interested, then it's basically impossible.

Best to recognize the reality and plan accordingly

Signed, a guy who saw this happen to talented L5s like you.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#130

Post by jollyllama »

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…

> 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.

> power does what power wants

It would be nice if, in more cases, we could dispense with fictions such as the former and simply acknowledge the latter, in a transparent way, and move on.

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