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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

Some of the Amazonians I know have been there for several years or more and love it. They have thrived there, and have great stories to tell. Other people I know that have gone to Amazon ran away screaming, often in <= 2 years.

One common theme I've heard on both sides is that where you wind up matters a lot. The people and org structure around you can have a large impact. But I'm also convinced that personality is a key part of this as well. My bet is that some people are a good fit for Amazon, and many people just aren't.

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The healthy places I’ve worked have had a variety of personalities and personality types. Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive, but were great communicators that had an endless supply of tasks to do that they were quite competent at. As such, they provided great support to their teams and improved the culture.

> Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive,

Type B? Is that an established concept?

Not an expert on these types of things but I think that there’s this notion of a type A personality that gets overly glorified in the self-help and corporate productivity realms...at least from what I’ve noticed. I’ve found it to be silly though because I’ve also noticed top workers that are perfectly calm, easy to talk to, and not competitive in the slightest.

And yes, these types of subjective things can be argued eternally but these have been my observations and experience.

> not competitive in the slightest.

I prefer collaborating and building a team. I find people who “like to complete” to be short sighted, and often produce bad work over the long run - they already think they are “the best” and often don’t improve in a broader picture. The cup is already full so to speak.

Almost all paths are for “type A”s in the tech world.

Seems people didn’t learn anything from MoneyBall.

For real, splitting personalities in 2 types is such a reductionist approach that the only ones who take it seriously are the self-help coaches

MBTI is debatable, but it tries to be a better measure than just A/B

type A/B is an unscientific concept that is mainly used by a subset of people to justify their neurotic behavior

So basically people with a superiority complex

I don’t know where these terms come from, but I’ve heard it as Type A is organized, disciplined, uptight and Type B is disorganized, undisciplined, laid back

I have seen many of these type of people in a large organisation, they are not really Type B, more like a Generalist. They dont excel in any single one thing, but they are good to decent in nearly everything. They also act like oil in the whole gigantic machine, smoothing out everything so Type A ( or so in this context ) could concentrate on their work. The many small things that are hidden within an organisation, and in daily communications when they helped but could not be accurately measured.

They are, in effect, the 10x people. Because of their presence they made things around them far more productive, while they themselves might not be as productive. Most, if not all middle management aren't very good at understanding this.

Your esteem for Generalists made me think of glial cells.

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

> One common theme I've heard on both sides is that where you wind up matters a lot. The people and org structure around you can have a large impact.

This would seem to indicate a complete absolution of leadership and responsibility from senior management for how their company is run.

Delegating so much cultural autonomy downwards might mean they can avoid the hard work of building a cohesive org, but the costs are that everyone now knows that if you apply to work there, you're playing a lottery. Worse, if you lose that lottery, then the company won't have your back.

At more well-functioning companies, if you get hired into a team and it's not working out, they'll try and work out where you might be happier (and useful!) and consciously try and help you move teams. But that requires a perspective that doesn't treat staff engineers as a commodity.

>One common theme I've heard on both sides is that where you wind up matters a lot. The people and org structure around you can have a large impact.

I believe this to be true for all large tech companies. For example, most promotion programs require you to have impact outside your team, which means that anyone landing into an infrastructure team is immediately in a better position than 90% of the company when it comes to recognition.

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