I work for Amazon, and I personally am a huge fan of the "LPs" . I consistently find myself mentally consulting them when I'm not sure what to do in a particular situation. I also think it really helps to work in an environment where everyone shares the same core values.
I spent four years writing software for those warehouse associates. Spent a lot of time inside those behemoth buildings, met a lot of good people and worked pretty much every job for at least a few hours.
The thing to remember is that warehouse jobs suck everywhere. Amazon just happens to be a large employer. And overall, if I had to work in a warehouse I'd prefer to work in an Amazon one.
Now, if you want to hate on how Amazon treats human beings, go read up on the delivery drivers. A year on developing that software led me to quit.
> The thing to remember is that warehouse jobs suck everywhere.
Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep. I mean, sure, they're not the most glamorous. But what sets Amazon apart is how, as with their other operations, they've "streamlined" things, being "data-driven." By all accounts I've read, in an Amazon warehouse you're truly a number, with metrics gathered and ruthlessly analyzed. They've streamlined the recruiting/hiring process too, so there's a line of people around the block waiting to take your job the moment you slip up.
I did some warehouse work as a teenager. I wasn't a number. I was fresh meat in a violent, snide culture where there weren't any coherent processes or data. I'm a tough bloke, so one-armed Wally and angry Floyd did not ruin my summer. But if I were to go back into a warehouse again, I'd much rather have metrics and a data-driven system of accountability that applies to everyone. It beats an unstructured tyranny where overhead lighting is deliberately broken so cruel stuff can happen in dark corners.
I'm pretty sure what he was trying to say is that, as bad as Amazon's warehouses may be, his experience was worse, and, perhaps, that back in the day, warehouses were worse.
What conclusion you or the OP choose to draw from that is a different question.
Agreed! It's why immigrants in low-paying, low-skill jobs press so hard for their children to get as much formal education as possible. Even two years of community college is enough to gain more control (and income!)
Why put quotation marks around "data-driven" and "streamlined"? They are data-driven. People who do their jobs well get recognition, and the guys who show up and put in a half-assed day are asked to leave.
The jobs are designed to be doable with 5 minutes of training by anyone off the street. But they offer 40-hour weeks at above-average wages for untrained labour, with set expectations that can be met. Many sites offer after-work classes for in-demand skills to help people get better jobs. They have medical staff on-site in case of injuries, water stations everywhere to help keep people hydrated, safety rules and regulations they follow very carefully.
Most warehouse jobs do not offer those things.
>there's a line of people around the block waiting to take your job the moment you slip up.
Recruiting is typically handled by outside firms, at most sites I saw. They don't want to fire people, because hiring people costs money. Even if initial training takes 5 minutes, it takes a week or more to get good at the job, which means every time they fire someone, they lose money on labour efficiency while a new person gets up to speed.
I have some criticisms of the company after my time working there- including some that, as you said, gave me trouble sleeping at night. None are related to the way warehouse associates are treated.
Part of the reason Amazon is so successful and highly regarded is the degree to which they exploit their warehouse employees. This exploitation results in customer orders being stocked and shipped quickly and in costs being reduced. Amazon is obsessed with the customer, remember, not the employee.
This, in general, is important to remember - especially if you're planning on being employed by Amazon, or doing business by them. Amazon will do anything* to make the customer experience better - and that means getting maximum efficiency out of every link in the supply chain by pushing vendors, publishers and employees to their limits.
Life can be quite nice as a developer, if you've got a manager who understands that developer efficiency can be cultivated by not putting on undue pressure. But if you're in any role with a single metric which can be ruthlessly optimized, expect that to happen.
* Anything except sacrifice the Long-Term Projects. As a former Amazon site developer, I've been incredibly pissed off about the Amazon website and apps degrading the customer experience in order to aggressively push Prime, Amazon Music, Amazon Mom/Student, etc. There's some stuff on there bordering on dark patterns, and it goes against everything that was drilled into us devs over the years.
I see Amazon as a company that wants to give a great service to humans but their humans in Warehouses aren't up to the task. I predict in a decade a large part of their warehouse will be automated for the labor heavy skills.
There is an inherent desire to enslave to leverage work off automation. Robots would be perfect slaves for corporations.
Whoever makes electric muscles and sells it at scale is going to be the next billionaire.
I work in an automated Amazon facility - robots carry the bins around to human associates who do the Moravec's Paradox - ridden work requiring fine motor skills and quick visual acuity (those bins can be very messy) or the simple labor that wouldn't be cost effective for a machine that probably costs more than my car (such as pushing juice carts around the facility.)
The problem is, humans are up to the task - if you push them hard enough. A robot isn't going to be more cost effective than that for a long time to come. Given Amazon's culture, I'm not certain they would replace their human workforce en masse even if they could, as long as meat remains fundamentally cheaper.
> So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer.
Why should dehydration be an acceptable problem ? i can understand heat and not using air-conditioning, but even soldiers in hot countries manage to stay hydrated.
Where in all of this did you get that someone saw it as an "acceptable problem"? Hell, where did you get that dehydration isn't a problem for soldiers?
I grew up in Texas. Literally everyone I knew, and absolutely everyone who did manual labor, was familiar with the dangers of the dehydration+heat combo. It still happened all the time, despite being common knowledge.
Show me a warehouse actively preventing workers from getting water and I will join the moral outrage. But "dehydration happens in a warehouse during a heatwave" is an obvious consequence, not a shocking fact.
Amazon doesn't actively prevent workers from getting water - in fact, they're quite clear about dehydration being a problem.
However, the job is designed to push people to the limit, so dehydration being a problem is clearly acceptable to Amazon in the abstract. In the facility where I work, depending on where you are, it can be a long enough walk to the nearest water fountain that you risk getting written up for being off task if you water too often, because Amazon is "frugal" with things like that.
I don't get it either. Probably the last 4 or so things I've purchased on Amazon have not actually been shipped to me. I hate using it and try hard to avoid it these days.
That's extremely hard to believe, just because it's such an unusual complaint. You generally get something in the mail, even if it's a Chinese counterfeit. There must be a logical explanation -- what do you think is contributing to the problem?
Not an original author, but had it several times as well.
Example one - tracking number was plain fake. Amazon refunded after I've contacted them through A-Z guarantee.
Example two - tracking number was ok, but order was delivered to Florida, instead of California, with no comment from seller. Amazon refunded through A-Z guarantee.
Is anything in this thread for real? This post talks about a bunch of stuff that sounds like gibberish to someone not working at Amazon. The hell is an LP? More importantly, how does this possibly become the top comment?
Also this user has only made 2 comments in a year? That's worse than my throwaways
Leadership Principles, the topic at hand. The author probably put "LPs" in quotes to indicate that us outsiders need to piece together what the acronym is using the context of the post, but that they are referenced often enough internally that the acronym is recognizable to employees on its own.
If you were "customer obsessed" I would be able to buy a fucking Chromecast on Amazon, but instead you're too busy trying to force Google to shoehorn your absolutely shitty Amazon video service on there.
How does Amazon's purported customer obsession square with its vast offering of counterfeit goods? Just off the top of my head, I can recall reading articles about counterfeit perfume, pet accessories, books, CDs, DVDs, and clothing. This is not to mention my personal experience with counterfeit electronics (blue smoke!) At this point I'm not sure there's any product category I'd trust, with the possible exception of things Amazon puts its own name on. Is this by design? Do they aspire to sell only Amazon-branded goods?
Care to elaborate? I've only been using their service for 18 years, so it's possible I missed something during 1997 or 1998 that would change my perception of the counterfeiting issue. But from where I sit it appears to have grown much worse over that time. Do you mean that Amazon has always had a terrible counterfeiting problem and we're only just noticing?
Amazon is the first place I've seen where the core values are useful, clear, and integrated into the culture. For the values to be effective, everyone up to the top has to follow them, and you can see that at Amazon in the annual shareholder letters.
Other companies I've seen ask their HR staff to put some words (e.g., "Entrepreneurship" or "Be bold") on some posters and call it done.
Ex-Amazonian here. I still use some of the principles in my day-to-day life. There are some things I don't like about Amazon, but I reckon they did pretty well at the Principles - and I liked the way that they refined and clarified them over time, eliminating any that didn't work, and providing good examples to prevent people from over-optimizing individual principles (particularly frugality) to the point of uselessness.
I interned there last year. They really want to get this point across. Like, I had to sit through an entire day of orientation repeatedly telling me this in different ways. We even had "fun" games to re-inforce the principles lol. I was going to be there for a maximum of 2 months, but nope.
But hey, the tech was really cool. My team was amazing, we went on multiple team outings during my short stay. Office hours were very relaxed - I came in whenever I wanted and left the office when I liked. My manager gave me full ownership of my task. I had all the resources in the company if I quickly wanted to test something.
> We even had "fun" games to re-inforce the principles
As an ex-consultant forced to go through corporate training at more clients than I can count, I hope there's a special place in hell for anyone in HR who creates/buys a game-based training product.
Why no, I do not want to "drive a racecar down HIPAA Highway" to remind me what an unauthorized disclosure is.
Somewhere in the bowels of Amazon's intranet I came across some HR training games and tried to find out who made them, and with what. It seems like an odd genre. I wound up on a mailing list but still haven't found anything out.
So the million dollar question, given what they tried to teach you did you change anything about your task or did you just did what you would have done anyway?
Not sure if you know, but "ownership" isn't a word or concept that Amazon invented. I'd like to add that Amazon isn't the first company to have leadership principles. From my experience, the only people that actually believe this crap are people that haven't been exposed to this sort of corporate propaganda in the past. Taking responsibility for a project, seeing it to completion, and following a standard is the right thing to do; not just an Amazonian thing to do.
From an ex-gf who worked in corporate culture, I did learn to see the other side of this. The benefits (when it's being done for honestly good purposes) are in standardization.
Both of language and in approach.
There's innumerable ways to get from A to B. If everyone knows that if someone says "Widgetification" then they mean X & that the standard way of accomplishing the task is Corporate Approach Y, then everyone can get back to work having saved time in communication.
So I think there's definitely an efficiency case to be made.
PS: I'm aware it's used for evil (anti-organized labor, preventing valid workplace lawsuits, covering management's ass, etc) at a lot of shops too.
So how much do they pay for this kind of job? And how much latitude are you given as a "leader"? Is it all talk or are they serious about this? I don't really care if I can buy a private jet but I will put in a lot of hours if that means I get to live a life never caring about money (> 200k a year).
I've seen this said before in other companies ("we want leaders") but when it's time to put some resources into X or Y project, things slow down really fast...
Amazon tries to push Leadership Principles into every part of at least their corporate world. It's supposed to drive decision making for basically everyone, brand new engineers on up (I don't know if they push them lower down the stack). What I'm getting at is it's not solely for "leaders" as in high level folks.
> live a life never caring about money (> 200k a year)
I'm in my 3rd year as an engineer here (and of my career). Their target for me is 175k as a new SDE II, but I'm already well above that considering AMZN growth. If we're talking calendar year, as long as AMZN doesn't take a dive, next year I'm easily hitting 200k (yes, I realize how crappy the reliance on RSUs is). I'll probably hit 200k as an actual target next year. So, your number isn't difficult to reach, which is both great and ridiculous.
Thanks for the data point. I'm looking at openings in Canada and the only numbers I've found during a cursory search were 'Salary Range: $80,000 to $140,000/yr, commensurate with experience' for a 'Research Scientist II' position.
Amazon employee here. Just to clarify these leadership principles are intended to apply to everyone at Amazon, not just those that are in "lead" positions, but if you are applying them a lot you are much more likely to end up in a senior or manager position. These principles are also a significant part of both the initial hiring process and the post hire advancement within Amazon.
Pay obviously varies but I've found it to be competitive with what I've been offered by other large tech companies, and better than almost all startups I've talked to, especially when you factor in that compensation in Amazon stock is actually worth a lot of money, while startup stock is a gamble with pretty bad odds.
As a former Amazon intern, the impression I got is that "every" role is supposed to be a "leadership" role. It makes sense when you realize that they are hiring/growing so fast, they need to (a) transmit culture quickly & efficiently and (b) be able to arbitrarily put people in "management" positions org-chart-wise.
For intern/new grads, Amazon is less competitive than similar sized companies (Google/Facebook/Microsoft). Microsoft is also based in Seattle so this isn't just about differences in taxes/cost of living.
The vesting is also backweighted so that they don't lose too much stock from people who leave after less than a couple years.
Some of these are contradictory - in addition, some of these aren't really even leadership principles of much merit outside the company they're created for.
Here is an example of a proven set of leadership principles that is a worthwhile read: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm . Someone who can embody all of these principles that the Marine Corps espouses is someone I can respect immensely regardless of profession.
>> Ensure the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished
This might be a good idea for running a military unit but fails miserably in IT. As a leader I hardly ever supervise my engineers, they have to understand the tasks and only come to me if there something that they do not understand. Giving them as much freedom as possible is one reason they like to work with us, feedback we got from 90% of them. Sometimes if the task is impossible to be done we expect them to come back, explain why and also provide an alternative. This happens a lot too.
Supervision doesn't always mean micromanaging or looking over their shoulders. You have to adjust your supervision strategies to the task and environment.
>> 9. Exercise care and thought in supervision. Over supervision hurts initiative and creates resentment; under supervision will not get the job done.
You might give your engineers a lot of freedom but at the end of the day you know what they're working on and you see their outputs.
>>This might be a good idea for running a military unit but fails miserably in IT.
This explains why IT has such losers in management positions. Most managers in IT think all they are supposed to do in a day is browse internet, forward emails, approve leaves/vacations, build their cartels and leave.
Sorry. But to ensure people under you understand the work they do and the sole responsibility of achieving the goals assigned is on you, the manager.
I used to work at Amazon, and I liked their leadership principles.
They're intentionally contradictory, but that's just an acknowledgement that perfection is impossible. When you choose to focus on one aspect of your career, that's often going to be at the detriment of something else. This also means that there's always room for career development and self-improvement.
I didn't know what to expect seeing that it was a link to the Marine Corps...
But essentially, I agree. The examples in that link are about as close as you can get to some actual generally inspiring leadership principals.
The amazon leadership principals, by contrast, look and sound like empty corporate marketing fluff.
By comparison, far from being something that makes them stand out and sound different, it makes them sound exactly the same as every other big company :(
I was introduced to these at USMC Officer Candidate School and agree wholeheartedly; these principles are effective and I have tried to live into them (as appropriate) as I've taken on manager/director roles in my career.
Amazon recently reached out to me to attend a giant recruiting event and included a link to these principles, and the "Are Right, A Lot" line item turned me off completely. There's something about stating that as a guiding principle that runs counter to my instincts and experience.
I'm as smart and as "right" as anyone on my team, but as a headline that rubbed me the wrong way. The finer print "...seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs" sounds better, but confirming my beliefs along with every else's has worked pretty well so far.
For what it's worth, I was probably looking for an excuse to back off anyways. I have a great job where I am.
Those USMC principles are fine principles; they exhort leaders to care for and develop the juniors under them. In my experience, in a political corporate environment, behaving that way will hold you back. Instead of "know your marines and look out for their welfare" you should "know your manager and look out for his/her welfare" ie "manage upwards". Instead of "keep your marines informed" you should "keep your manager informed, and only share information with your juniors selectively". Instead of "take responsibility for your actions" you should "ensure failures can be blamed on some scapegoat". If you're "managing out" a weak team member to avoid a payout you should "ensure the task is not accomplished" to build a paper trail justifying their later dismissal.
If you are a leader and you aren't looking out for the people under you then you are a shit leader. Applies to the Marines, applies to Amazon.
My manager there largely did what you are talking about and it did nothing good for anyone involved. It's pretty much the reason why one of the guys who worked for him as an engineer is now moving up to senior manager well my former manager is still stuck at the same place.
Acting the way you describe just leads to poor performance from your subordinates, up to them just leaving. That reflects poorly on you.
I've seen the tactics I described work very well in investment banking, purely in terms of personal advancement. I naively adopted a USMC style approach as a newly minted manager and got beaten up and stabbed in the back massively by the more experienced and Machiavellian managers. So I left. It's important to realize the difference between a mature org and a growing business. In a mature org the senior staff are all fighting to get a bigger slice of a pie that doesn't grow. That's not the case in a growing business. Note that I'm using the term manager, not leader.
You should check it out and see. The implicit precursor to "right, alot" is that you're trying things that might be wrong. Don't just try things for kicks, have some intention that they'll most likely turn out right (presuming there's a cost).
This doesn't apply to an AB test where you don't care what's right, you're just putting it out there and letting the users decide. What's 'right' there is the AB test itself and doing it.
I believe you can manage upwards and downwards. You don't and shouldn't have to shit on your team to make your superior look good, but if you can in a way that benefits the team, then do it!
I work for one of the big three strategy consulting firms and our values / principles are intentionally similarly contradictory. There are simply things that cannot be black and white and where it is about constantly trying to make the best out of the grey zone in between. Some of the best and deepest discussions I had with colleagues was exactely about that particular grey zone and how to find the right balance
Thanks for the link, really interesting. I'm an anti-militarist but I've recently become a little obsessed with the idea of conflict, the use of force, and how we negotiate the force-related conflicts we have with the others.
For example this:
> 1.Put your Marines' welfare before your own--correct grievances and remove discontent.
reminded me of an essay ("The Concept of the Political") that I've read recently, written by Carl Schmitt, where he defines politics as the conflict between friends and enemies, and nothing more. His later "Theory of the Partisan" was also very interesting.
Later edit: this point
> 7. Protect the health of your unit by active supervision of hygiene and sanitation.
reminded me of how the first recorded presence of a doctor on the territory of my country (which, of course, at that time hadn't been formed yet) happened almost 2,000 years ago when the Romans decided to invade this territory and when they brought doctors with them in order to heal and care the wounded soldiers. At least another ~1,500 years would pass until medics would be present again around these parts, approximately during the late Middle Age. To say nothing of the complex sanitation installations that the Romans were putting in place almost immediately after they had finished building a fort in the middle of nothingness. The more I read about the Romans' organizational structure and logistics the more impressed I am, they somehow look like an alien species.
>AThe more I read about the Romans' organizational structure and logistics the more impressed I am, they somehow look like an alien species.
Yep, sometimes I wonder what society would look like today if the (western) Roman empire had never collapsed, and they had somehow been able to correct its fatal flaws in time. Europe basically did nothing for 1000 years.
There is nothing more damaging to the morale of a soldier than the idea that if he or she is hurt then they will not be cared for.
Their structure was far ahead of it's time, and indeed, laid the groundwork for today. Any staff officer today who went back in time to review a Roman unit would have no problems identifying the various components of the organization.
I'm reminded of the fox/hedgehog delineation. Very clearly, tech values would be a fox and USMC values would be a hedgehog.
However at the same time, I am reading your argument and thinking, having a bunch of random contradicting guidelines and hoping that the law of averages smooths out the error inherent, can't be better than a more thoughtful list of consistent, higher-level principles.
This isn't a jibe at Amazon, but I wouldn't call it Principles. Principles is something you adhere to when there's no financial gain involved. When defense contractors use the terms Values, Excellence, Honesty etc - it just undermines the effort.
There should be a better word to describe this, perhaps Weights and Constraints when making decisions at Amazon. It's difficult to come up with something as good as Azimov's laws but for humans.
Principles is something that you keep regardless if there is money on the table. If money plays any role in the decision process - it's called a contract.
I think a bit of that still holds true. Jeff has said repeatedly (most famously in the 1997 shareholder letter) that we will sacrifice short-term profits for long-term gain. And with that there's been many instance in just the time I've been here where we're practically begging the customer to do things that will save them money because it's the right thing to do. It builds trust.
Of course we think we're earn more money over the long run doing things this way. This is, after all, a business. But it's been a refreshing change of pace in that I don't hear any worry about that long term. It has always been, even in sales, "customer obsession", help them thrive. If we focus on our principles and adhere to that, then the business will grow itself.
Amazon doesn't have definitive proof that following these overall guidelines will make the company successful, but they have been following them to help with decision making and they've also made a lot of money.
To quote a movie: 'the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules'
A principle is just a foundational truth that you start a chain of reasoning or behavior from.
You can have principles for maximizing profits, principles for good software architecture, principles for increasing reliability of your vehicle.
These are principles for leadership, OP is conflating that with principles for moral living, or principles for ethical behavior, or something like that.
I know a lot of companies have ancronyms, bullet points, or a list of company culture principals. What's everyone's reaction to all of this? Do you take it seriously? Pretend to? Roll your eyes? Find value in them?
It's taken very seriously and used a lot internally. I've worked elsewhere with those silly acronyms and the like. I've never worked anywhere before that practiced what it preached. It was good to see.
This. Probably the most important single thing in my biz life.
They are anchors that are easily measureable. I used and constantly use them to prioritize work, provide constructive criticism, and most importantly know that I am right.
It has cut through next level bosses hard-to-understand decisions;
Even in my now easy life in retail it becomes the foundation for supervision; makes terminations easy (a task I now don't get upset at);
Plus i get great feedback when I personally live up to our values
But it's most useful at interpersonal conflicts about work.
I agree it feels out of place in that list. Most of the rest of the principles are prescriptive: "Do this" or "Take that action" or "Keep this in mind", whereas this one is an after-the-fact measurement. The rest of them are things you can wake up one day and decide to incorporate into your life. "Being right" is not such a thing. They should probably re-write it with something like "Use good judgment" or "Seek diverse perspectives."
The wording of this principle is probably the one that gets talked about the most internally. People always bring up changing it, but when they rolled out a new revision of the principles two years ago or so, this one stayed the same. It's a shame, because once properly explained it's probably one of my favorite principles.
It's not the only one, though. The last four are either commands ("Dive Deep") or a completion of a sentence starting with "Leaders" (e.g., "Leaders dive deep"). But "Frugality" and "Bias for Action" are just properties of good leaders. The tenses (or parts-of-sentence) are all different.
I'm not really sure why Amazon's leadership principles are on the first page, but since we're talking about Amazon,
Here's a video with RBC Capital's managing director Mark Mahaney talking about why amazon could be the first trillion dollar business.
I would say it is such a misleading principles. Don't believe it. The actual 'core' meaning of the principles is: work for Amazon without any complaint. It turns developers in Amazon out to be ruled by the higher leaders. Very capitalism.
I find a lot of arrogance in this Principles, at some point of view it is even evil. Have anybody knows of another company that throws their leadership principles to your face?
Because in general the principles are centered in make a more profitable enterprise while not taking care of many important human values. I don't think raising the bar is more important than having a team in harmony where everybody cares about everybody while at the same time is highly motivated for the project success.
I take Reed Hasting and Netflix a lot more seriously and their principles. They pay for performance. Amazon just grinds through as many people with low self esteem as possible and pays a poor salary.
Not from my experience and not from what I've seen on glassdoor. Can you cite? I found amazon engineers universally having low self esteem. Which makes sense, why w ould you want to work for a company that treats you so poorly?
Do these leadership or company principles ever truly have any effect on employees or products? I've seen them thrown around at my company on a few occasions, but they never feel like they drive much beyond trying to be one of those gaudy motivational posters.
At Amazon they are like a religion. I don't know if every group is like that, but someone very close to me works there and they tell me those leadership principles are a part of daily work and are explicitly mentioned in day-to-day activities. Amazon's leadership principles are also used during performance reviews, and to evaluate candidates in interviews.
That applies to Google more. Amazon folks tend to understand that it is just a job and do not spend most of their life on campus. There is definitely pride attached to working for Amazon but there are very few people sticking to working there over 5 years (not unheard of though).
It depends on how they're implemented. At my previous company, there was a small list of principles posted on the wall, such as, "make each other better," "show integrity." I was astonished one day when I realized that I had seen several people at different levels of the company actually try to make each other better. It inspired me, personally, and made me glad to work at that company.
Famously, IBM used to have their priorities:
1) Customers first
2) Employees second
3) Stock holders third
That's something that the CEO needs to take the lead on. When IBM has followed that, they have done really well (and you can see evidence of it in the dedication of Mythical Man Month)
All that said, this particular list of principles looks like so much pablum. It's too long and unfocused to be really useful, and I can't see it having much affect. My guess is that Amazon is having trouble finding people to hire lately, and that's why they keep coming up with experiments like this (another example is their foray into 4-day work weeks)
Just to clarify, as others have pointed out, the leadership principles at Amazon are in no way a new experiment. I don't know their origins but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they are nearly as old as the company itself (probably a few years younger).
They are deeply engrained in Amazon culture. They are brought up frequently. They are used as the basis for both hiring and promotion decisions.
Regardless of whether or not you (or employees) agree with them. I think what's interesting is that you call them out as too long to be useful. But my guess is +90% of salaried employees at Amazon could recite all of them and give examples of what they intend to convey. I suppose this is a testament to Amazon HR?
I credit HR to sharing them and making sure people hear about them on the way in, but I think a lot of their success has to do with the fact that they're easy to relate to and understand. They're not meaningless platitudes. Lots of companies have "values" like "integrity" and "commitment". But what does that mean? In what context? It's vague.
Customer Obsession is pretty obvious. Earn Trust. These are simple. And while the descriptions of them can get pretty wordy, everyone can tell you what they mean because they're easy to identify with.
I also thing that what they do is give people a lot of empowerment to make decisions, and that makes them attractive. 14 principles that are easy to understand and appeal to people's good will. If you're acting with the principles in mind, you cannot go wrong.
They get discussed in almost every circumstance, every meeting. Especially the customer focus one. It really does seem to work, from my perspective.
I now work for a relatively new division at another company, one staffed with a lot of ex-AWS staff. One of the earliest things they did there is work with employees from a few different previous companies to figure out our own values, and we've proceeded to apply them to the business in similar fashion. First and foremost among them being one focusing on the customer.
Happy customers come back, and are also likely to talk about it to their friends. You might take a hit to your bottom line now, but you'll make it back in the long run with repeat business from the customer.
The only one I ever had an issue with there was frugality. I get why it's there, and the intention, but it leads to something we'd internally refer to as "Frupidity". Frupidity is where in the interests of frugality, the company would do something really stupid, or that would ultimately end up costing them more money.
It also became the last recourse of the bad manager. "we're not going to do this, because frugality" and you then won't be able to get them to budge an inch regardless of what data you bring. It especially will end up being a local to their team only frugality.
They are contradictory enough that you can get dinged on one for following another at review time.
Frugality means putting up with lousy hardware and cramming people into working environments to the point where people start bringing up OHSA w.r.t. number of toilets.
Customer obsession means getting an email about a feature used by a couple percent of users and having to spend a week scrambling because the strategic decision you made (to drop the feature in a major release because you need to get it out) has now been declared wrong. Sev-S was a popular term (S-team being Jeff and his directs).
Bias for action means break extremely important OS features that support multiple products because of pure incompetence. Note that this should really conflict with customer obsession and are right a lot, but oh well.
One thing I found odd was that are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff.
My less snarky response would be that they do spread this stuff around. It has some positive impacts around things like customer obsession, which Amazon is great at. Bias for action can be a good motivator for the right type of person, see something wrong and you go fix it. That said it's not problem free. Frugality is made fun of a lot, because it often goes from sensibly frugal to just cheap.
On almost all your points, I do agree with you. But for one:
> are right a lot/disagree and commit don't seem to matter if the opposing argument is your manager wanting to do other stuff
"Disagree and commit" means that when you don't agree with the decision being made, you make that clear, you state why, but then you commit to the decision that was made and work with your team to achieve the goals. It means you don't whine throughout the project that it wasn't done the right way, and you don't bullshit with "I told you so" later if you turn out to be correct.
If your manager makes the call that it's going to be done in way X, you disagree with him politely, then you commit to doing it way X.
What I find far more interesting about the leadership principles is that they recently dropped one: "Vocally self-critical". Oh, that's really just part of 'Earn Trust', apparently, but I'll bet in two more years that phrase isn't even part of the Earn Trust description anymore.
am amzn shopper. for a data driven company these 10 commandments are a priori? are the results of decades clinical research? is there an extensive bibliogrpahy? peer review? or is this newspeak? can't amzn do better? a ted talk has more data. thats my backbone. i disagree and i am committed to emoticons. :)
Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations.
I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.
No, really. Principles not tested in the fire mean nothing (i.e. "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg"). I know how much grinding I put in and I'd be happy to strap a Fitbit to Bezos and run a day shift side by side.
Yea, the video you want to see is a month in when he really should be taking a sick day, but San Bernardino's hot as shit and he can barely afford to keep the AC on, and his wife's eight months pregnant so maintaining health insurance is sorta important. That's Bias for Action!
> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.
I feel like there is a big difference between getting through some shifts, and looking at it for the next few years.
> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations.
There are several reasons for the salary differential. But, fundamentally, one issue is that some things don't scale linearly.
To use a simpler example: Richard and Maurice McDonald created a hamburger stand in 1948. They created the original recipes, came up with the original ideas, and opened the original stores. Apparently, they even started offering franchises. But their ability to grow McDonald's was limited. Ray Kroc managed to make McDonald's scale. Without the McDonald brothers, there was no restaurant to scale. Without Kroc, there was no chance that McDonalds would eventually have signs saying "billions served." What is the fairest way to allocate their rewards based on their contributions?
What about Billy Durant and Alfred Sloan ( https://steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1... )? Durant figured cars were going to be profitable. He managed to get loans to buy several car companies and called the combination General Motors. He actually created a good sized business. At some point, though, the banks lost their nerve and convinced Durant to turn over control of GM to Alfred Sloan. Sloan's book, My Years With General Motors describes his approach to R&D, accounting, marketing, and trying to organize the world's largest company in some sane way. Without Durant (and the bankers) there would be no GM. But without Sloan, GM would have never grown as large as it did. When a company gets that large and accumulates that much capital, how do you fairly divvy up the revenue? Without the people on the assembly line, there are no cars. But without the people in the board room, there's no assembly line.
I don't think Bezos is a god, or a saint, or even necessarily a good guy. But it is clear that without him, there would be no warehouses and no inventory. We live in a world where small teams of people can create hugely profitable companies. When it comes time to divvy up the revenue, how do you reflect the fact that companies don't necessarily scale linearly based on the effort and contributions of their founders and executives?
> When it comes time to divvy up the revenue, how do you reflect the fact that companies don't necessarily scale linearly based on the effort and contributions of their founders and executives?
Do I even have to spell it out? There shouldn't be a 100x factor between the lowest and highest salary. There's no degree of merit that should guarantee that privilege.
Merit doesn't scale linearly, if I wanted to use your language, but there's no reason income should follow the same model. I really want to know what's the reasoning for allowing such ridiculous income gaps. If there's money left at the end of the year and the company doesn't want to invest more (which should be the first thing to do?), why pay the executives even more when the employees would benefit far more from the bonuses.
There isn't a 100x difference in salary. Bezos salary is something like 80k. His income is derived almost entirely by stock grants, which are awarded based on company performance. The fact that he's a billionaire is because he founded the company.
> There shouldn't be a 100x factor between the lowest and highest salary. There's no degree of merit that should guarantee that privilege.
> Merit doesn't scale linearly, if I wanted to use your language, but there's no reason income should follow the same model.
Which is interesting, because it assumes pay is based on merit, but that it shouldn't necessarily mirror merit. I believe that's a consistent world view; but, to me at least, it's not obviously The One Correct View.
Basically, just because someone doesn't practice what they preach does not make the thing they preach any less valid.
To give an extreme example, if someone argues against domestic violence, then you find out they beat their wife, you don't suddenly go "gosh, clearly domestic violence is not bad, otherwise you wouldn't partake in it!"
> To give an extreme example, if someone argues against domestic violence, then you find out they beat their wife, you don't suddenly go "gosh, clearly domestic violence is not bad, otherwise you wouldn't partake in it!"
No, but one would say "You are beating your wife, you are a hippocrite and have no moral authority to preach to me what I should or should not do".
If the Amazon leadership is "beating their wifes", they have lost the moral authority to lead the Amazon staff.
Now I really don't think this is completely fair or that you have to pay this much to attract top talent [0]...
but I think I can see a different reason why top executives are paid like this.
It is the same as with pro sports, e.g. soccer where the top players in the big leagues earn more money than they know what to do with, decently good ones seems to earn a living and everyone else is sponsoring by paying for their kids to play on a team etc etc.
Actually a bit of the same thing as lotteries:
Big payouts to a few more (lottery) or less (CEO) randomly selected individuals to make sure everyone else keeps putting in money or effort.
[0]: IIRC Norways pension fund have done fairly well even if their experts are paid fairly normal salaries.
> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center
It's not quite the same, but I do recall that in an interview on a late night show (probably Leno), Bezos referred to shipping things out of his garage when the company started. The story he told was about finally having enough profit to buy a table and save his and his co-founders' knees.
> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations.
> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.
Sometimes I just have to sit and marvel at how many layers of ideology some of you folks are on.
Looking at his comment history I'm started to think I misread irony for sincerity, but its still not clear to me where that's delimited.
The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You shouldn't have to "test" the ethicality of overworking your employees or paying yourself a huge amount of money while your worker' wages stagnate. Then again, I'm a socialist and find the entire idea of these companies to be ethically compromised because they aren't worker coops.
lol thanks for popping in. It sounded like he was being derisive, but not sarcastic. Sounded like he was legitemately trying to level a critique about Bezos not dogfooding, in other words (instead the fact that he's a garbage human being). Fair enough if I'm wrong, but the same kind of shit has and will continue to be said here in complete sincerity.
I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that to my reports; my compensation is fair; and I would escalate immediately if I ever saw anyone abused, mistreated, or cheated.
Amazon's a big company and I'm sure there's terrible managers out there and true harrowing stories. And there are problems, here and there, and things I'd love to change. But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now.
Having worked in AWS Data Centres in Australia and India, I'm curious to know why you think the average DC technician leaves after 9 months?
Gotta love a work-life balance that forces you to work weekends and public holidays!
The culture _IS_ the issue at Amazon - you either learn to put up with the BS metrics your managers push down your throat or you leave for somewhere that treats you like a human being.
Having worked in AWS DCO- there's a lot of factors.
You were under a shit manager. APAC Regions manager is inept. Dublin was also filled with fucking idiots.
DCO's upper management in general is a fuckfest of people who want to play big man but have no idea what metrics ARE. They have no basic grasp of math nor do they know how to find what they need. I'd be shocked if they could tell you what an average value is from a set of numbers.
That said- there was a huge fucking technical gulf between the average DT and an engineer. So many DTs wanted to be SDEs or Sysengs, but their real world technical competency is that of a junior sysadmin at best so they saw no real room for promotion.
These days, automation removes the learning part of it. AWS back in the day- you could have techs that would qualify as mid level sysadmins at other companies. Today- the scale is so huge and the fleet so automated that it's mostly just throwing motherboards at problems and swapping harddrives. They want to turn the datacenter work into the equivalent of warehouse work so that they can hire any body off the street can do the job. The hilarious irony is that you now get former aws datatechs with it on their resume entering the technical market who have no business doing so.
Finally- I think it's an issue of just large companies in general. As the group grows, you inevitably hire assholes who make asshole moves and poison the corporate environment. Amazon grew so fast and hired so fast- there's no way that this could be avoided.
DCO just kinda sucked if you were less than a level5.
if this is real i see they will have issues in future they charge very well for the service they provide so i assume they should have good engineers stick to them for long term growth.
I think the point being made is that their automation is at a point where they don't need good engineers on data centre ops. Anything which requires skill to diagnose and fix is software defined and managed remotely, which leaves nothing much more than racking servers and swapping out the hard disk with a blinking light on its caddy.
I'm being a touch quarrelsome, but wouldn't a data center job often inherently require working on weekends and holidays? Curious here about the nature of data center jobs in general and in what specific ways Amazon would be worse than normal (if any).
Yes most datacenter work (in general) is 24/7 three shifts with maybe weekends on call and holidays. Depends really on what country you're in, probably France is better because it has laws favouring the employee and a 35 hour work week.
Do you think those articles about conditions in the warehouses are lying ? If so, why ?
What I mean to say is, the odds of those conditions being either unintentional or just local aberrations seems rather small given the widespread articles about it from around the world. Germany, UK, US, ... everywhere workers are complaining about things like sick people getting fired, mandatory unpaid overtime, constant tracking of everything, ...
I can't speak for any other experience than my own. I suspect some or most of the stories have truth to them; one day I hope to work a shift and find out for myself.
> But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now.
Ex Amazon SDE here. Did you fail to notice the incredible turnover rate among engineers? Most stay less than 18 months. (I've seen the real numbers from tools that mine employee IDs and join date).
Actually, average tenure at Amazon is closer to 12 months. Google is pretty close to that. Tech sector is notorious for it's low tenure. It's easier to get paid bt job hopping then promotions.
From what I've seen inside Amazon, upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples, so a bad VP, director or manager could cause a lot of damage to those beneath them.
I was lucky enough to work in a really great environment with a management chain who cared deeply about the people under them, but I worked with unpleasant and bullying managers from other divisions, and chatted to people who'd fallen out of favour and had their manager absolutely grind them down until they left.
But, overall, I'm not foolish enough to believe that this is particularly unique to Amazon, and I've heard far worse stories from pretty much every other sector of employment.
Come on dude, this is just embarrassing. Amazon has created very real value for a wide variety of customers and for shareholders.
Off the top of my head:
- Amazon online shopping
- AWS
- Kindle e-reader
- Alexa
I do not work for Amazon, but I do live in Seattle and see thousands of Amazon employees walking around SLU at lunch time. They generally appear happy. Im sure there's terrible exceptions amongst the many thousands, but I do not understand this hyperbolic condemnation in your comment.
I worked there for a couple years, and I still live in Seattle.
If possible, I will not work there again.
It was not a bad place, but it was also not a good place. It took leaving (which I almost didn't do) to realize that second part. That's largely why I won't go back. There's a strong commitment within the company to the idea that you're part of something bigger, and that being part of that makes sacrificing comp, nights, weekends, and innumerable other things worth it. It was deeply satisfying in a local extrema sort of way.
This is silly. The pay is really good, we have nothing to complain about. And everyone is responsible for managing their own work life balance. If a team is pushing you too hard, find a team that you can handle. It's a big company. It can only get to you if you let it.
I work for Amazon, and I personally am a huge fan of the "LPs" . I consistently find myself mentally consulting them when I'm not sure what to do in a particular situation. I also think it really helps to work in an environment where everyone shares the same core values.