Amazon announce two new leadership principles
aboutamazon.com
aboutamazon.com
Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
Changing Amazon's corporate culture at this point has to be like relocating the Alps.
Some of this is inherent due to what Amazon's business is, but a big chunk of it is that Microsoft outsources essentially every job that's not at the absolute core of their business. Anything outside of that is outsourced to vendors. Microsoft's management of these vendors is basically "make us happy as cheaply as possible or you're fired" and the results for the employees of those companies is about what you'd expect.
We're already seeing things like people getting hired and then PIPed within months so that their managers can avoid firing the reports they like...
In light of "The Great Resignation", and increasing awareness and activism around work/life balance, socially conscious employers, etc. this kind of move is required. At worst, it's a survival mechanism. A more charitable take is that leadership actually wants to change things.
In either case, if they actually implement this, it's good for employees even if leadership was forced to do this by the current climate.
Veronica: There is no program to green the building.
Ted: Yeah there is. They made a commercial about it.
Veronica: I didn't say there wasn't a commercial about greening the building. I said there is no program to green the building.
Ted: So it's all a lie?
Veronica: They prefer to look at it as a dream.
Ted: But one they're not working towards?
Veronica: Are you working toward all your dreams, Ted? Then stop pointing fingers.
Then again, this could just be PR mumbo jumbo.
It's just PR mumbo jumbo until they consistently display these principles (and let their stock price take a hit because of them, if that's what it takes).
Even if "leadership principles" are currently super important in Amazon's culture, there's going to be massive inertia around behaviors and attitudes that satisfied the older set but violate the new ones.
For instance, are they going to immediately scrap their automated system that evaluates and terminates workers without human intervention (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-...), because it clearly violates these new principles?
If I said "I want to be more Earth-friendly" and decide to add reusable grocery bags to my regimen, I'd hope that people wouldn't lambaste me for not yet going vegan, selling my car, and doing away with my AC unit.
If there were no additional changes beyond my shopping bags, then sure, say that I was spouting nonsense. There's a lot to be said for consistent incremental progress toward a goal, though.
(The automated system is a great example, though, of a system ostensibly working against that goal. Much like me wanting to be Earth-friendly, then buying a new Hummer)
They announced the leadership principles, but they announced no change at all.
If I recall correctly, amazon also likes to tell it's employees that first they need to deliver work at the next level, and then and only then are they considered for the promotion. At best, all I'm seeing here is the exact opposite.
[1] I say that as someone who has no first hand knowledge of the inner workings of Amazon.
When your reputation in the industry is so bad that potential hires don't even want to start a conversation with you, then you definitely have a problem as an employer. With this new principle, perhaps Amazon is recognizing this as a real problem with respect to recruitment and retention of people with experience.
The real choices here seems to be:
- amazon is “stupid” and does not recognize it as a problem
- amazon is well aware, but does not care, since it benefits them in some way
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...
Given Amazon's egregious attrition rate and their yearly decimation policy, it's not very likely that they are not aware of what they are doing
Maybe I was mostly unlucky, but it left a poor experience on me, and I have no desire to work at Amazon. On the other hand, I had really good experiences at Microsoft. shrugs
At this point I have no intention to apply or reply to any recruiter looking for Amazon candidates. It seems as though the majority of their principals are lip service, or I've been unlucky enough to find areas of AWS that I would clearly not want to work in anyway.
Help them recognize it.
Seems like selecting leaders who are gullible enough to believe these are all already true about Amazon would be a useful technique for screening out critical thinkers who would argue against immoral business decisions.
With a new CEO, the more charitable version seems not impossible.
ah, ok, now Don't Be Evil makes more sense
Fun fact: they scrapped that motto without fanfare just around the time the company went full speed towards where it's going now.
Google hasn't listed Don't Be Evil as a principle in many years now.
That's why it was scrapped, and the following new principles were listed:
* Respect the opportunity (wtf?)
* Respect the user (lol)
* Respect each other (ahahaha)
Hope it makes sense now :)
It's like a shark telling you it's gone vegan.
Want to take action? "Bias for action". Want to sit on a decision? "Dive deep". Want to cut costs? "Frugality". Want to invest more? "Think big".
I agree, from my own time at Amazon, that leadership principles are baked into performance evaluations and promotion. The problem is that, rather than looking at the leadership principles to guide future actions, people take whatever it is they did over the past six months and stick leadership principle labels on those.
However, the problem with their Leadership Principles is their leadership, not their principles.
Loser: principles are Orwellian doublespeak
Clueless: believe the principles
Sociopath: principles as needed for my advantage
https://philosophyinhell.substack.com/p/sociopaths-clueless-...
“Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others.”
― Groucho Marx
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1185-those-are-my-principle...
"Not the worst employer" is much more realistic.
Leadership principles, though in tension with each other (and so, some argue they really shouldn't be classified as "principles" but rather "values" [2]), permeates the culture of performance and team building at Amazon; and that makes me think this is not only a welcome but potentially a company-defining change.
[0] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2020-letter-to...
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tale-two-platforms-tim-o-reil...
The sarcastic view is that this is just a facade. However, Amazon has historically took its principles very seriously. They believe that the principles made them who they are. Adding something there that they don’t intend to pursue could risk the integrity of this system as a whole
> Strive to be the world best employer
> The sarcastic view is that this is just a facade.
Given the horror stories from the people who work in the fulfilment centres and deliver for them, I'm going to take the sarcastic view.
Out of context those sound like extreme accusations but Amazon’s policies forcing leaders to hire to fire and completely faceless and automated warehouse worker firing and scheduling and regular brand hijakcing like the Klein bottle one on the front page here a couple days ago show that it’s not cynical to distrust Amazon. It’s more like fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Okay, simple enough!
To this day it is BY FAR the worst experience I’ve ever had in a loop. Everyone was extremely toxic, at least half of the people interviewing me that day were clearly trying to make me feel like shit, and it seemed like the entire goal was to keep me disoriented.
About halfway through the day (it was at least 6-7 hours of interviews straight), I should have just left as it was clear I wasn’t going to get an offer.
In full disclosure, I was under qualified for the job given that it would have been my first job out of college, but I assume that should have been caught well before a full day loop where some of the folks were just using me as a punching bag.
My wife wants me to send the resume, because I do need a job, but I already sent several resumes to Amazon (at their own request even!), got interviewed only twice, and both interviews were TERRIBLE.
First interview at Amazon, the interviewer actually didn't show up, so they setup another random guy to interview me, and he had no idea what was going on, so it was just a awkward phone talk for 1 hour.
Second time Amazon had flown people from all over the world to their Brazillian HQ and asked me and a few other candidates to go there get interviewed.
It not only matched your experience, but they managed to out-do themselves in some ways:
1. Some interviewers arrived on the room late, and this caused issues.
2. All of them asked the exact same question, that it was pointless to ask (they wanted me to show my leadership principles in solving conflicts in a past large team, when I told them multiple times I didn't had a past large team in first place).
3. They litearlly forgot me in a room, everyone left the floor, the work day was ending, people left the building, and I was forgotten there for 3 hours, literally, no idea how to even try to leave on my own, until one HR guy showed up, said sorry, gave a bullshit excuse and guided me to the exit of the building.
Is this true of individual contributors, or people looking to go into management? I don't think it's good either way, but it crosses into absurdity if it's the former.
There are really only about 8 or 10 that they expect SDEs to demonstrate.
You won't forget them if you end up working there. They're used as rhetorical jabs when people want to win arguments.
Someone more creative than I am could probably do a great comedy sketch in the vein of Darmok using nothing but the leadership principles as dialogue.
this would explain why everyone I know that was about to start working there suddenly started parroting this bullshit nearly endlessly whenever anyone mentioned Amazon
Last few words mean identify low performers and let them to find opportunity elsewhere.
1. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
2. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
seem really different in tone relative to the other ones. Everything else sounds like a directive that one cannot disobey, while the confident tone goes down in #1. It's like someone talking tough on certain things, but then in another topic lowers his/her voice and goes slightly quieter
#2 doesn't exactly sound as much of a guiding principle. I can see how one could use it as one, but it sounds more like a fact—a piece of information that is just true regardless of it being a leadership principle or not
I'm at least glad they recognize the issues and are trying to make a statement on it. Hoping that they act on it
I too liked them.
>seem really different in tone relative to the other ones.
Well the downfall of Amazon has started. Yes the 2 do stand out and in my opinion.
>They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun.
Fun at work? Which idiot came up with this? The definition of work is, what is _not_ fun. While it is critical to make work as tolerable as one can. Aiming to make it fun is either an exercise in naivety which will infantalize the workforce, or an act of insincerity.
I feel like this generalizes to a lot more than just amazon principles.
Doesn't "disagree and commit" mean the opposite? I.e., that further discussion is pointless, but a decision has to be made now, and one party budges in favor of the other party?
so you’re right here. not right when saying that further discussion would be pointless.
usually disagree and commit is used as a forcing factor by higher ups when the drone cannot make up their minds.
Here is an example: “Insist on the highest standards” and “Bias for action”. If you have bias for action and want to get shit done you will be dinged for some technically or how the design could have used more work. If you insist in the highest standards you will be dinged for analysis paralysis and told you don’t have bias for action.
also, people use "bias for action" as an excuse to basically do the first thing they can think off. When you push back they will want you to "disagree and commit" and after that when something, anything is delivered the same ppl are gonna claim they were right. In fact they are "right a lot"
They have a long way to go on this one:
1) Many of the headquarters / office jobs require super long hours and are high stress. Employee turnover is high and mental health issues are common.
2) Warehouse and delivery jobs are known for demanding quotas that are practically unrealistic. Working conditions are terrible and management is unsympathetic.
3) In nearly all environments, employees are seen as a replaceable commodity to be exploited, pushed to the limit, and then replaced with new blood after burnout or turnover.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc
(The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)
The first few slides call out that Enron's main 'corporate value' was integrity. https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf
> In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average. In creative work, the best are 10x better than the average, so huge premium on creating effective teams of the best
Pulled from their asses
> Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues
Well, NO. Having smart and competent colleagues is for sure desirable but it is just one trait (Maybe not the most important one)
> Netflix Vacation Policy and Tracking “there is no policy or tracking”
This is a huge huge red-flag.One of the reasons (among many) is that people tend to overestimate their contribution to team and underestimate their peers' .So when Susy takes 2 weeks off (deservedly according to her) you get pissed because you think you have done 2X as much as her and you only took one week off. And this is the tamest of the complications.Vacations should be like salaries, they need to be spelled out very clearly and not subject to ambiguous "rules".
> Highly‐Aligned Loosely‐Coupled teamwork effectiveness is dependent on high performance people and good context. Goal is to be Big and Fast and Flexible.
Thank God they were free of corporate mumbo-jumbo.
Most of the slides are in a similar vein. They want to justify culling people indiscriminately (and they are withing their rights) but they are not being cool, innovative or different because of that. They are just another company which wants to extract as much value from their employees as possible while minimizing the cost.
This is kind of like the "Seinfeld isn't funny" trope.
You may or may not agree with their approach (and apparently it has changed a bit from when it was written - including the head of HR who pushed these ideas being semi-forced out!) but Netflix should get a bunch of credit for innovating on corporate culture.
That said, I stand by the claim that you can draw a causal line from the publishing of the Netflix culture deck and the widespread adoption of "Unlimited PTO" for example. NF wasn't the first, for sure, but their deck gained mindshare with a generation of SV executives and implemented the idea at their companies.
Similarly, I'd posit Spotify and Valve had as similar impact as major points of reference. That doesn't mean Drucker doesn't exist, but they are part of the cannon of SV company building Lore.
Susy can still take two weeks to your one while appearing to do less work because she's a better negotiator
You could say instead "performance that would be perfectly adequate at most other companies is a firing offense here." That actually means something. I don't like that one, but at least it has a meaning.
Everything ELSE about this presentation is nice, but it's weird to write all that great information about how "mottos chiseled in stone in the front gate are useless" and then write "we only employ stars!"
Amazon has huge issues to overcome in the near future. I have no doubt the quality issue with their products is going to reach boiling point in the same way it has with warehouse conditions.
Let's see.
Could we take a step back and realize this is pure PR/HR speak to select/attract certain kind of candidates?
Maybe, just maybe, the new CEO will care about higher principles just a little bit more than Jeff did.
Jeff gets the praise for founding Amazon. This guy gets the blame if ANYTHING goes wrong. He may not even be able to control the company (see Jeff Immelt).
As another example, One of Comcast's values is 'Doing the right thing and acting with integrity'. Both from my personal experiences as well as what we see in their other behaviors (Tweeting support for LGBTQ+ yet donating over 1mil to anti LGBTQ+ politicians since 2019, Absolutely kafkaesque fraud department policies, continuing the union-busting and liability-dodging layered contractor system...) one can draw their own conclusions as to whether it's PR fluff or not.
This is also on the heels of the Teamsters announcing their intent to try and unionize Amazon. It smells reactionary to me.
Separately, it makes me curious how individual Amazon managers, and the company as a whole, jive these principles with many of the public, consumer-facing concerns raised nowadays. Things like fake reviews and mixed, counterfeit stock. No doubt there ARE good reasons if one was privy to the whole view, and odds are there are very serious efforts (past and present) to improve things. It's just a good opportunity to reflect on how you can have an organization with great leaders, admirable stated values (that most employees probably take to heart), and still have fundamental, mission-critical issues at play that outwardly appear to be being ignored.
The only place I’ve seen anyone mention these “fundamental mission-critical issues” is HN. My family and friends are Prime subscribers, and I’ve not had an issue in 20 years of Amazon buying.
"Yeah, but success brings the responsibility to work over the weekend. Plus, being the best employer means helping employees grow, and you'll get plenty of time to grow Saturday."
These sound like banal corporate platitudes to me. Maybe an attempt to put an imprint on post-Bezos culture.
The new principles:
* Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
* Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
I don't work at Amazon, but it's my understanding that they take their leadership principles seriously and use them as they make decisions every day. They do not live up to these two new principles today, but this does seem like a significant step.
Tackling abhorrent amounts of waste and damage to the environment is difficult [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-fa...
Have you worked at Amazon? They reference these constantly in meetings, structure performance reviews around them, there's a lot of edifice built around them. So adding new ones is a pretty big deal internally.
The phrasing is interesting on this one. Amazon's leadership principles have historically been commandment-style edicts followed with unabashed zeal, but this new principle basically says "We'll try"
Also - Amazon has used similar wording with regards to their most famous principle (customer obsession). “ Our vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company”
You can't fail to try.
Does this value annoy anyone else? It screams to me that the only people whose opinions are respected are the ones in leadership positions.
As an engineer the things I'm "right" about are often meaningless. When shit's started to really hit the fan and we're busy putting put production fires nobody cares. But for some perverse reason people still remember the architecture astronaut who devised said mess as being right. And I'm the one who's not a team player and just being difficult.
I think this one's for the managers and "rockstar" engineers.
great leaders frequently change their mind based on new information. so, by definition you are either right because you changed your mind or dumb for sticking with the wrong thing.
that’s some revisionist BS right there, but can you trust someone that is not right? like a LOT!
"Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."
Work to disconfirm their beliefs - this is the key. It shouldn't be "Are Right, A Lot" but more "Get's Right, Consistently." In practive, this means working to check your assumptions and actually ensure you're ... right.
I think I’d have more respect for Amazon if they were just honest. It’s clear that they’re not the “best employer” in the world, and furthermore I don’t think they ever can be - their business relies on a fleet of low-paid workers doing manual labour.
Amazon should fix those conditions first rather than spitting out more of these high-minded, virtue-signaling platitudes.
If you want to build back trust start there.
Best of luck to them. I'm considering new positions, but not with AWS: if I interview with AWS it'll just be for a stronger position negotiating with other employers. Too many red flags at Amazon.
"Frugality Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."
1. Being concerned about literally running out of people to hire. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...
2. A growing, bipartisan consensus in DC about the need for new anti-trust legislation, and also Amazon's concern about how 'mean' FTC Commissioner Lina Khan is (lol). https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22557456/amazon-lina-khan...
1. That’s just too many to remember, let alone navigate.
2. Seems to violate “invent & simplify”
Very smart of them to push for a diverse workforce, weak collective feeling so worse at labor organizing.
* Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
* Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
That said, these are not objectives. They are more like vision statements. I assume goals a measures are derived off of these and updated over time.
It doesn't sound like an exciting place to work, overall.
What a strange thing to say in an official corporate document...
Some companies howl endlessly about diversity (say) but the signal is very different when every single executive and manager is a white guy with the same privileged (not self made, parents paid their whole way) background.
This basically authorizes firing of employees based on their performance or am I reading this wrong?
Who are their customers? Really? Pretty sure it's not Joe Nobody like me, just some random shopper (who, in my case, no longer buys anything except second-hand books on Amazon because of the counterfeiting and so on).
Are their sellers the real customers? You hear so many stories about sellers being fucked over (like Cliff Stoll, recently fucked over) though. Is it the big sellers? Just who exactly are these customers they're so intent on being trusted by?
Or is it that I can trust them; I can trust them to basically not give a fuck, up to and including (fortunately) refunding me when the box turns up broken or full of counterfeit.
Going to need to see some metrics though, then we can set goals on them, isn't that how Amazon.com went from garage to world concerns ...
No?
Okay.
Quality Hotels
Amazon as Earth's Best Employer
Should not be applied to employee salaries and benefits and work environment.
Just because one is the emphasis doesn't mean the other is not important either.
Are we likely to see Amazon get evicted from the pantheon of FAANG? I remember 5? 10? years ago the term FAANG hadn't been coined yet. Instead the term being thrown around was "Big 4", referring to Google, Facebook, Amazon, and depending on who you ask, either Apple, Microsoft, or Twitter.
Now Apple is a steady member of FAANG, Netflix joined out of left field, Microsoft got evicted (unless you use the extended FAANGMULA term that seems to be getting some steam), and Twitter seems to have been long left behind.