Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

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.

If they are just recommendations, perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes :)

> perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes

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.

"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 eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)

In many ways they are the best employer, just for shareholders and not employees.

I had lunch with the Amazon leader most responsible for ensuring all staff in the fast-moving-cardboard half of the company had health insurance from day one of employment, no waiting time. Of a decades long career, that was the one thing I saw most animate her—care for fellow humans.

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.

In Seattle there are some developers who call Amazon employees AmHoles. It's part their general arrogance, punctuated by things like their tendency to walk down the sidewalk four abreast and not notice that they are pushing people going the other way out of their way.

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.

I "love" how some people think it's important to do a 7 hour interview pressure cooker with a prospective employee to see how they behave in a crisis. This is a straight up condemnation of their development culture and they are so blind they don't even see it. What they want is people who are content to live in a perpetual crisis instead of people who will put their foot down and work like hell to fix it.

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.