The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.
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In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team.
Anyways, a lot of those actually exist only to silence the employees, not as real values (although they are used as values within teams). Like the single mention of "Ownership" being enough to legitimate not giving employees annual refreshers on stocks when they have dropped by 50% and so has everyone's compensation. Or "Disagree and commit" when people push back on the return to office.
Not many companies get this right. They seem to be very polarized on this mentality: There are companies that are too cavalier about decision making, have this "do something, anything" attitude, try too many risks, and then end up breaking things that are hard to reverse or painting themselves into a corner. And then there are companies that just get paralyzed by every little decision they have to make and end up defaulting to doing nothing out of caution.
I think it's really rare to find a company that can consistently apply the right amount of caution and care, but still actually get things done. There's often no internal framework or thought about whether something is a "one way" or "two way" door, as the article puts it. It's just (for example) Product saying "let's do it" and Legal saying "no, don't do it" and nobody knows how to solve this without having a default decision or flipping a coin.
Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work …
Definitely coming back to that
Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you.
Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality. Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much.
There was a time when employees, even line managers and senior engineers, had massive scope and built state of the art systems
I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives.
As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors. At Amazon I was frequently in coopetition with other teams that drew from the same budget pool as mine, and some of them (not to their credit) would use any means necessary to empire build. On the positive side, that kind of behavior was unusual, and I, and many other managers in my experience, happily gave up ownership and readjusted plans when it was clearly in the best interests of the business and eventually the customer.
It may look from the outside that there are many 'silos' owing to Amazon's deep parallelized structure -- consider each individual team working to deliver an AWS service, for example -- and it's definitely true that some of the older Amazonian mechanisms for synchronizing team goals and ensuring leadership coherence have decayed over time -- but generally the teams do roll up in a sensible way and are reviewed together in a sensible way, and alignment is generally better inside AWS/Amazon than any peer.
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. That's how most large companies end up spending very large amounts of money on things that wouldn't actually pass muster to anyone aiming for the organization's best interest and with actual knowledge of what is being accomplished.
You see new, wide eyed PMs approaching budgeting processes as if the goal really was profitability, or customer satisfaction, or something reasonable. But if they are going to stay as PMs for long, they better realize quick that the vast majority of project proposals have only a passing interest in what will be accomplished, and are mainly about making sure every sub-organization gets fed sufficient money to not lose people, or possibly even grow if the manager is well liked. All the efforts in documentation and justification are just theater.
But done right, principles/tenets like this can function as a mild counterforce to the command/control hierarchy you describe. And funnily enough, these Amazon principles came top-down.
Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.
It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.
As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.
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 rank-and-file employee with nobody under me, then doubling my production could only be equivalent to adding one more 1-in-1.5-millionth to the company's value, right? Equivalent to hiring one more employee at my level.
For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock.
I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money
I just don't see any math in which stock isn't basically a tragedy of the commons for boots-on-the-ground workers. If I was paid for exactly the labor I do, doubling my effort doubles my paycheck. If I have stock, some of that revenue is spread to everyone else who has stock. Giving everyone stock doesn't incentivize anyone any more, right? What am I overlooking?
Internally, the curtain fell apart in about 2022, when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit.
Same happened again with mandated RTO.
And that's just for corporate employees! Enough has been written about how awful things are for those working in the warehouses/deliveries.
Why would any other leadership princples be different?
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-raises.
I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog. Then, when I go through my backlog, I prioritize these things according to their predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.
When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)
Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action
Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.
It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.
Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!
Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up
> "... if Amazonians sat down and asked themselves "what do customers need in order to design their applications well" they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally. AWS should return to its roots and release important building blocks - the things customers will need, not necessarily what they're asking for."
I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."
Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability.
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
If it’s good for the company to operate like that, it can’t be bad for an employee, right?
Moral corruption started from the top and once it reaches bottom, it’s all about proverbal catalytic converters off the company truck.
Then the whole thing collapses of course
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?
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.
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.
(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!)
And while you may have used the stated principles to create a good environment, there's nothing in Amazon's principles that prevents someone else using them to create a bad environment.
For example - conspicuously absent from them is any concept of worker welfare.
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), your severance amount is decreased to a third of the original.
But you can appeal the failed pip and if your appeal is denied, that gets cut to another 1/2.
So $40K would have quickly become less than $7K.
All of my coworkers on H1B were scared shitless it would happen to them. I was doing my 40 hours a week during my focus, refusing extra work, going on vacations and of course putting feelers out to all of my former clients (working in AWS’s consulting department) and former coworkers.
I had already paid off all of our debt, built up savings, sold all of my AMZN stock, and moved to state tax free Florida.
I knew someone would give me a job or a contract. H1B visa holders can’t work contracts and maintain their status.
Why are you still there?
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?)
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.
Not to mention they can randomly ban account for no reason given.
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.
An AI run organisation may solve it?
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?
Perhaps it should go without saying, but sometime around the 90s or so, many companies tried to pretend that they had these lofty, societal goals, and they tried to pretend that making money was almost secondary.
The reason I think it's important to list "make money" as the first, primary goal is that it makes it clear that all other goals are subservient to that one. The thing that makes my eyes roll about principles and mission statements is I've seen them all promptly thrown out the window when a company's money making machine is threatened. Essentially, they're principles when they're aligned with making money, but if circumstances change in the slightest, the principles will be jettisoned if they make it harder to make money (which kind of makes it hard to call them "principles" in the first place - maybe "guidelines" would be a better term?)
That might be the case if workers were bricklayers and output was measured in walls. But supposedly this incentive might cause you to have a brilliant idea that makes billions for the company, and then you're gaining more than a few bucks.
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?
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.
> 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.
Not a single company I worked on, did they ever mattered beyond company's marketing material.
Also, depending on your org you might be on a timer for L6, which sounds impossible given the situation. So... fair warning.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I suspect alignment to long-term profits weirdly solves it at larger scales, but that kind of unbridled greed is weirdly hard for large organizations anyway.
The thing it wants is usually continuation of certain hierarchies, and singular long-term goals toward anything tend to disrupt that.
There’s a reason why leadership and the leadership principles are mocked. They vary from okay to kinda dumb to just outright silly.
> they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally
I feel like the myth that AWS is just internal Amazon stuff exposed externally has done so much heavy lifting despite never really being true.
Even now, I can search for a product, think "Oh, good, something here should work", and hit the "Get it tomorrow" filter. I watch the results change and show a subset of results...
... none of which I can "get tomorrow".
My plan was always to stay four years for the initial offer, build a network of potential clients (I worked in AWS ProServe), use the comp to pay off debt and stack money (I sold my AMZN stock the moment it vested) and move on. While I was there I became the second highest contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” and published my own projects to the official AWS open source repository.
I also used the pivot from “enterprise dev” to “cloud consultant specializing in cloud native solutions” to stay permanently remote as I moved to my next company and relocate to state tax free Florida after COVID lifted.
I knew going in I didn’t have the stomach to put up with Amazon’s bullshit or BigTech in general. When GCP was recruiting for similar positions, I neither wanted to work for another large tech company and definitely didn’t want to be in an office.
On the other hand, I tell all younger people to do whatever it takes to get into a large public tech company and make as much money and get as many RSUs as they can.
People could self-organize, on-demand, for a task, and structure whatever hierarchy was appropriate, based on somewhat optimal resource allocations for that task.
(Example: Person A might normally be the most experienced at facilitating the group's coordination, but A is providing key technical expertise for this task. Person B isn't critical path on this task, and has facilitating skills and interest in that role, so B volunteers for that role for the duration of the task.)
It's not "are right from the start, a lot", it's "are right, a lot", kind of works in hand with the Disagree and Commit LP
Hindsight is 20/20, but how do you spot for “it was very cool” and “could be a big deal”? I often hear these used as justification to build something, but the projects often go nowhere..
I know from painful experience that it's easier to forgive someone who has never promised you they have them than someone who has and then backpedals.
Even allowing for the fact that most such statements are aspirational more than descriptive, there are degrees where it transitions from not reaching your goals to straight up betrayal.
I worked a short contract there and I've seen the 'meatgrinder' bit. I joked (not really joking) with my fellow contractors that maybe the reason they walk four abreast is shell-shock, not arrogance. A couple days a week we went to lunch in a daze.
It's clear there's not enough quality control in their 'culture', by almost an order of magnitude. I've known two different people who quit after less than 2 weeks. One after being called on Sunday asking why he wasn't at work. On his second fucking week at the company.
The amount of blood I'll bleed for a team I've been gelling with for two years is a lot. The amount I'm going to bleed for some jackass I just met who wants me to lick his boots for a job is approximately zero.
I hated frat boys in college for the frat culture. I didn't expect to find it in dev culture as an adult. They're called Frat BOYS for a reason. Fuck hazing.
Now, when the CEO says "Disagree and Commit" to the entire company for (returning to office 5 days week or quit), the meaning of the principle is entirely different.
The principles are not used in practice as they meant to me. They are inherently ambiguous and in practice, are used as tools for performance management usually by dirty or opportunistic managers.