Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

daemonology.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 147 posts

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#81

Post by Supermancho »

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…

> 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

Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened? It's a big company so I assume it's something that's demonstrable. I happen to think that it's unlikely that Amazon leadership would adapt by making allowance, rather than replace.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#82

Post by phantomathkg »

VaedaStrike wrote: post #23

This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?

Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime.

Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#83

Post by cperciva »

plantain wrote: post #53
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…

The real purpose of equity grants is to fudge the OpEx accounting costs on non-GAAP reports.

Isn't there also a difference in tax treatment?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#84

Post by master_crab »

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…

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.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#85

Post by htrp »

dh2022 wrote: post #30
x2tyfi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.

And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#86

Post by marcus_holmes »

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?)

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

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#87

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

I loved what Dalio wrote before Principles (like his white paper for All Weather) but Principles seemed to be mad self-aggrandizement done on such a scale to get a "Emperor's Clothes" kind of reaction from people. My sources were telling me about how Dalio was driving David Ferrucci crazy [1] trying to make an AI that could enforce Principles before I read about it in Bloomberg.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ferrucci

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#88

Post by AnotherGoodName »

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?)

If i’m honest I feel the issue is all the humans with human motivations.

An AI run organisation may solve it?

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#89

Post by osigurdson »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #35
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

Whats the next amazon?

I'm not sure, but the first Amazon was most definitely Sears.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

#90

Post by seer »

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?)

I wonder what happened with Frédéric Laloux’s “reinventing organisations”? Seemed to have so much promise at the time when Ruby on Rails was a new thing and people were laughing at DHH’s joke essay on the “Emotional Programmer”…

This all seems like a failure of incentives - the hard truth is that organisations that survive long enough all end up valuing only the survival of the organisation itself - and structure incentives accordingly. But maybe there is a way to modify these incentives somewhat?

Humanity all thought that monarchies are the only way of ruling successful states for _thousands_ of years … but now they are almost gone, and people live much more happy and productive lives.

Maybe we can figure out a way to shape institutions to not only have an “executive branch” but some other institutions that can also govern it.

We kinda have the idea of CEO and “board” which share power, maybe there is one or two more power centers that we can add that will ultimately prolong the life of an org?

Post reply on HN