> No, you can do anything you want and it won't show up in the SEC/Wall Street reported metrics, but you better believe Amazon has faster-acting internal metrics than that.
How would amazon metrics be faster? The main point is that a lot of large/systemic changes ("pay off tech debt") can take a long time to show up in any metric, giving you cover to get promoted as people don't think of timestamped metrics as time-delayed as they actually are.
Let's say you have internal metrics around feature cycle time.
If that number is getting ugly, you might be able to get some tech debt projects going. If you spend 3 months just on tech debt, ship 0 features, and then still have just as bad a feature cycle time in the 3 months after that as in the 3 months before... that can get noticed. And it's not gonna look great.
Whether or not your org does notice that or not is a question about the sort of company you're working for. The original article here assumes you're working at a fairly inefficient and unmotivated one.
The 3 years he quotes is from his perspective, which is from the view of "what company-spanning initiatives are we going to tackle" or "what teams and projects do we need to bootstrap or expand on?". It takes years for these things to get done and have the desired impact on the bottom line, but within those years are individuals and teams growing their respective businesses. Those businesses are absolutely monitored yearly/quarterly/weekly at some level of abstraction in the company.
How long it takes for work to have impact depends greatly on the scope of that work and the level of abstraction you're viewing the work at.
Part of the problem here is the place in the blog ascribes value to where you are rather than what you did. If nobody is asking how you influenced the current state of being but is instead just evaluating the person presiding over current success, then the behavior described is unsurprising.
How would amazon metrics be faster? The main point is that a lot of large/systemic changes ("pay off tech debt") can take a long time to show up in any metric, giving you cover to get promoted as people don't think of timestamped metrics as time-delayed as they actually are.