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Comment by ikiris | Hacker News Reader

From what I've heard from their former employees (engineer / corporate, not warehouse), the best employer bit is laughable

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I've got a personal email from a manager at AWS still sitting in my inbox, and I don't want to reply to it because I have heard so many horror stories from former Amazon employees.

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.

Tell them that their reputation is so bad that you'll only continue the discussion if they pay you $1000 for your time.

Help them recognize it.

I've interviewed with them 2 times, and had poor experiences each time. I'm sure I had my own imperfections surface during the interviews, but I've experienced hundreds of interviews at other companies, and I can safely say these were poor.

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

I've had similar experiences. I interviewed for three different roles and backed out of all of them. The hiring managers ranged from OK to egotistical, so it's ironic that one of the new principal is "lead with empathy". What was interesting during my process was that, by the second time, I started to call out Amazon employees for not abiding by the principals they asked me to understand prior to interviewing. Not only did they not "earn my trust" during the process by not following through on expectations they set for timelines in every instance, but when I brought this up ("have a backbone") the employees seemed to take offense that I'd have the nerve.

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.

“perhaps Amazon is recognizing this as a real problem”

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

It could simply be that it is not a problem yet, but is becoming one.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

You should have linked to the bill that just came out of the Judiciary Committee

> amazon is well aware, but does not care, since it benefits them in some way

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

In all fairness, maybe that's why they're adding this: the workplace culture and irresponsibility of Amazon are the main things I hear criticized a lot, so this could be them trying to actually address that. I know Amazon, more than most companies, actually rates engineers along these axes.

Then again, this could just be PR mumbo jumbo.

> 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?

I dunno. Everything takes time, and I think it's more fair to evaluate them on incremental progress.

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)

> In all fairness, maybe that's why they're adding this: the workplace culture and irresponsibility of Amazon are the main things I hear criticized a lot, so this could be them trying to actually address that.

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.

Should savvy readers interpret all of their principles as Orwellian doublespeak?

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.

You don't bother to list new principles if you're already living up to them. Charitably, they are an attempt to refocus the company so these are lived up to in the future. Cynically, they are an attempt to use words to avoid needing to change anything in how Amazon operates.

With a new CEO, the more charitable version seems not impossible.

> You don't bother to list new principles if you're already living up to them.

ah, ok, now Don't Be Evil makes more sense

Don't Be Evil wasn't a new principle. It was a foundational one, on which the company grew.

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 :)

Don't Be Evil was always on the cynical, "words over actions" side.

It wasn't always that way. It's had a pretty good run.

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.

Leadership principles aren't worth anything; it's just nice PR.

It's like a shark telling you it's gone vegan.

Amazon uses leadership principles extensively internally when doing performance evaluations and promotions, and they are baked into nearly every decision, both product and technical. Of course much of this depends on one's interpretation of the principles, but they are definitely not "just nice PR".

The problem is that the leadership principles are sufficiently vague and contradictory, so like any good religious text, they can be used to justify anything by picking and choosing something that supports whatever it is you were going to do anyway.

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.

Which leadership principle leads to inventory comingling and listing hijacks? Actually typing that makes it sound snarky, but it's a real question. These are real problems and I'm interested in the reason they aren't top priorities to end, despite all the trouble they've caused. I assume there's some value behind the decisions that are made, and I'm curious to know what that is.

If there's a flaw in the façade of a house, don't blame the foundation.

Which leadership principles are about having their warehouse employees urinate in bottles?

I'd speculate that "customer obsession" and "insist on the highest standards" are used to justify many decisions that are hard on employees. Now there is a counterbalance to those.

It's always Deliver Results.

Frugality.

Principles aren't a bad thing, it's good to write down something we expect everyone to be aligned to.

However, the problem with their Leadership Principles is their leadership, not their principles.

In the Gervais Principle sense:

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...

To give intent the broadest benefit of the doubt, maybe that's why they wanted to encode the goal in a principle.

Changing Amazon's corporate culture at this point has to be like relocating the Alps.

Yeah, in 2021, employees increasingly expect this from their employers. Of course this could just be for optics and to claim "see, we care", but I think interpretation misses the broader context.

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.

Ballmer -> Nadella shows that it is possible.

Curious on folks who have been at both places. My impression is that Microsoft runs a more centralized culture than Amazon?

Well, the biggest difference is probably scale. Amazon has roughly 10x the number of direct employees as Microsoft spread throughout a much wider range of job types.

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.

The culture will slowly rot as the company gets larger and as the real visionaries (good or bad) become increasingly disconnected from the boots on the ground.

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...

Well it does say “strive”. Like I’m striving to get on the olympics pole vaulting team by watching it on TV.

It really reminds me of this exchange from Better Off Ted:

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.

Probably why it's a leadership principle now. When I started there, the first thing I noticed, reading the LPs, was a conspicuous lack of anything employee-centric, which most other big companies have somewhere in their mission statement.

I wonder if "best employer" is even possible for a company at the scale of Amazon. The wants and needs of different members of staff will conflict with one another at scale. What's a great employer for one person is an overly bureaucratic micromanagement nightmare for another. Unless the company is capable of managing every person who works there on an entirely individual basis the goal of "best employer" is ultimately a futile one.

"Not the worst employer" is much more realistic.

First thought here as well. On the other hand, that’s a new principle and would require massive changes[1] in the near future if the leaders at the top really mean it.

[1] I say that as someone who has no first hand knowledge of the inner workings of Amazon.

Maybe that's why they added it?

I can recall horror stories from their engineers when I was in grad school (around 2004 or so). So I think it is well entrenched.

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