Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

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> Jeff Bezos has all these incredibly intelligent, experienced domain experts surrounding him at huge meetings, and on a daily basis he thinks of shit that they never saw coming.

This isn't a story about Bezos' genius. It's a story about bad corporate culture.

What's really happening is that people are afraid to think in the presence of the boss -- not just afraid to express their thoughts, but afraid to have them. All the boss has to do in those meetings is state the obvious, and all the courtiers fall around in awe.

And indeed it's explicit in this story as well: note the "jury of VPs" who wait for a clue from the boss to know whether they can laugh, and the people who come back from a meeting with the boss "licking their wounds" and going back to "a cave".

Obviously Bezos is very smart; it's possible he's "the smartest guy in the room" most times; and it's likely he doesn't have a lot of patience for fools. But what this shows is people are terrified of him, and he likes it, or at least he doesn't do much to correct it.

> What's really happening is that people are afraid to think in the presence of the boss

Is it too much to ask they do the thinking before meeting him? It seems clear to me that the process that Bezos has institutionalized for meetings at Amazon aims to achieve exactly that.

A person that is senior enough to report or present to Bezos is probably involved in taking huge, high-pressure decisions. If one can handle those, one can handle a meeting with Bezos, and vice-versa.

I think the point is they may have had the thought already, but are afraid to express it, for fear of getting part of it wrong and suffering a reappraisal.

Yes I read this at the time and felt exactly as you do. There's no evidence of special intelligence in the story he tells. It's a story only someone who has been ever-so-slightly brainwashed could tell.

There is of course evidence of Bezos' intelligence in the fact of Amazon.

In how far is the success of Amazon(I suppose that success is what you mean by 'the fact of Amazon') to be associated with intelligence? Might there be some survivorship bias or halo effect at work? Nassim Taleb writes that if you place a sufficiently large number of monkeys in front of typewriters, one will end up writing the Iliad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Taleb does not get the credit for that!

Thanks for letting me know!

I love the response quote, “Now, thanks to the internet, we know that is not true.”

And yet they continue to go from strength to strength. I think you're right, and that the logical outcome should be poor company performance, but clearly that's not the case.

> the logical outcome should be poor company performance, but clearly that's not the case.

But how many years have passed for us to reach this conclusion? The same was said about Richard Fuld and Lehman Brothers under his leadership but it dint end well.

To clarify, I am not predicting a poor performance by Amazon here but to think that they are infallible just because they are doing great now is incorrect. When and if they falter these stories will provide ample ammunition for people who "dint see it coming".

A healthy work environment is not economically optimal. Not even close. It is optimal to take as much from your employees as possible and to give them as little as possible in return; the opposite of a healthy environment and healthy workforce. Amazon practices this efficiency behind the developer console as much as they do in their warehouses. They just can't treat their developers quite as bad as the warehouse workers have it yet because of a temporary market inefficiency -- a dearth of skilled developers.

The workplace is an area where if we let the market do its work, it causes social and moral catastrophe and forces all but the tiny few at the top to live in complete misery, which is why we fought and died over hundreds of years against optimal economic efficiency for worker protections, unions, weekends, worker's compensation, overtime pay, etc.

It's hard to say actually - sorta like "google is super successful and gives out outlandish perks/benefits to its employees ergo it's good to provide such perks/benefits".

Where is the direction of causality here, and is there even such? Maybe the perks in the above example actually harm google but their basic business is so strong as to cover for it (just an example, that's not what I'm actually arguing)?

And yet they built Lightsail instead of fixing Beanstalk to actually compete with GAE/Heroku. The mind reels.

What do you find wrong with Beanstalk that is addressed by GAE/Heroku?

Three clicks and my github commits on master trigger builds and deploys.

Beanstalk requires manually setting up lambda functions and other nonsense to trigger stuff.

It's surely a story of successful corporate culture ? Maybe Amazon just have a very clear focus, driven by Bezos.

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