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.

Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda.

My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company.

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 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.

We're witnessing in real time, in the USA, that what matters is the coherent mesh of individual principles, and not some words on a page somewhere.

I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra……….

Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up

Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.

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 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?

please don't turn this into another blind/reddit forum. I suggest refraining from making broad claims like "80% of corporate workers are visa workers" without actual data.

Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?

Whats the next amazon?

That’s bullshit … just another scaremongering post against employees with some kind of visa. Leadership depends upon individuals not upon their immigration status. From direct experience I can say there are leaders and non leaders on bothe sides. BTW ec2 was first conceived and made in South Africa.

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.

In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer.

When I was working at Amazon I did not like this principle. In my experience it led to people arguing: because whoever did not “win” the argument would not be a leader.

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.

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.

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

I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better. AWS is particularly well-placed for this because its mission is to give the people what they want in exchange for money, rather than to sell the people to other people or radicalize grandma for clicks, so it doesn't have some of the suspicious ethical positions that burden other places in the space.

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.

To be clear, I'm not saying it has to be literally Paxos as a service. There's a bunch of ways you can take operations from different sources in a distributed system and produce a consensus view of what happened first. But aside from trivial and low-performance options (e.g. everyone contends on a single DynamoDB item and uses conditional writes) Amazon hasn't made any of the possibilities available.

Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this.