Amazon's Leadership Principles
amazon.jobs
amazon.jobs
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 stopped buying from Amazon after reading about how they treat their warehouse employees.
To me, Amazon just represents monopolistic corporate greed, with no aspiration of caring even just a little bit about anything else.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...
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.
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.
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.
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.
What conclusion you or the OP choose to draw from that is a different question.
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.
It was also a union job with decent pay/benefits and seemingly less of a grind than the Amazon FCs.
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.
Selling assorted junk from China and some books with a minimum of friction for the customer is just aligned with that goal.
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.
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.
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.
Also this user has only made 2 comments in a year? That's worse than my throwaways
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.
Just tone down on the principle force-feeding.
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 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?
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.
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...
> 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.
I have confidence that we're nowhere near the ceiling for AMZN, if that says anything.
EDIT: Whoops
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.
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.
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.
That said, ya, I don't think they were meant for anything else but Amazon.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1...
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To quote a movie: 'the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules'
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.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS.)
Principles are foundational. How you apply them is subject to interpretation and context.
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.
How is this even a principle ?
Just "be right", a lot ?
Plenty of valid complaints about Amazon. Pay isn't one of them.
Famously, IBM used to have their priorities:
1) Customers first
2) Employees second
3) Stock holders third
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)
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.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Dogfooding is a principle I'll never abandon.
> 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.
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.
I feel like there is a big difference between getting through some shifts, and looking at it for the next few years.
It's a farce.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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 shouldn't be a 100x difference in income between People.
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I found it from one of your previous replies:
> 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.
That's a political argument, not a valid business argument.
"Leaders" take a huge salary because they can.