Jeff Bezos Taught Me When to Quit
chrisfharvey.com
chrisfharvey.com
Survivorship bias. Other people have followed their hearts and the universe didn't take care of them, but their posts aren't likely to be posted on HN and upvoted to the front page.
So ... he was in a hot job market, had a bad boss, a job where he didn't seem to be learning anything and a low salary. The course of action seems pretty clear to me. I don't think he needed "Jeff Bezos'" call to action to help him on this one. Quitting less than 2 months into a job does seem harsh (not sure if I'd do it) - if he waited a year or so, the tech boom would be over and then things would be different. So, perhaps he did get lucky with the timing.
I think it's also ok to just leave something like that off the resume. Especially after you've had some other job.
But if you're there for a substantial amount of time (say, 3 months or more) that's harder to explain, and I think you need to keep it on your resume for a lot longer.
Who cares about survivorship bias? If we don't try, we will not know which way our luck will fall. I'd rather thy and fail, and try and fail again and again than condemn myself to mediocrity on the basis of fear of failure.
The family of the person doing the trying?
I agree that it's better to be struggling to do something that you love than hating doing something you find boring ("I'd rather fight and die on my feet than live on my knees" or some such.) but you're also asking people around you to make a sacrifice.
As for family, it's true that there will always be people who don't have an appetite for risk. However, I also think that if you build risk mitigation strategies into your family unit then the family can become a bit of a safety net, rather than something that drags everyone down. This may not be possible in all environments but I think it is often possible enough with a little creativity, that it can be done.
For example, when I am making money, my wife's income is strictly used to purchase luxuries, or saved. When I am not making money, that's a safety net. Similarly when she's not making money but I am we can live ok. But we can't do this without economizing in a lot of areas and being aware of risk.
Leaving was recognition that the universe was indifferent to the whole matter and I had best figure out how to take myself. I'm a lot closer to that then I ever would have been there. And I've wasted a lot less time on anxiety and resentment over things I couldn't control or understand.
I cringed at the "universe took care of me" bit because I find that those who are most vulnerable to hardship or uncertainty tend to have this take on life. The author made an educated decision. The universe didn't even know the decision was being made.
Other people quit jobs they hated, got worse jobs. Quit those, perhaps worse or perhaps better. But eventually they found a job they liked. And they stayed there.
Good for him. It's a good story.
And, in anticipation of the standard reply on this, we cannot assume such people don't also have MBAs or PhDs in Social sciences. The cards just don't fall right every time. To paraphrase another HN discussionf from a few days back, a series of fortunate accidents allow certain people to become wildly (or at least comfortably) successful. The same chain of accidents, playing out differently for others, draw them in the other direction.
If there is a second, standard reply to this idea, it usually has to do with inherited ability (or innate talent) versus disease. So we should also explicitly not assume the people I'm describing have any such disabilities. Those would be additional forces, but plently of able, coherent people never nail a full-on life-hack, in the long-term.
Heh, replace "MBA" with "engineer" and this was my Amazon experience circa 2011. I was 2 years into the company, getting rave reviews and kudos from management, with pitifiul 1% "raises" a year... and then I found out they're paying a fresh undergrad more than I was making.
Oh, and verbal promises of an upcoming promotion... and then nothing come review-time.
[cue sad trombone]
I did the same thing as author, except I found a 30% raise at another company before leaving ;) Damn it felt good when I gave notice.
For those not in the know: Amazon's attrition rate is sky-high, and while management acknowledges this and has some token measures to try and mitigate it, nothing major is being done (i.e., none of the big, big reasons people quit are ever addressed - pay, advancement, on-call stress, etc).
Now that I've got some distance between myself and Amazon, I consider the whole thing a learning experience. 'Twas my first job out of college, and I suppose learning to read poor advancement, bad pay, and bad management at that stage of my career was better than doing it later.
Also, in their defense, they do in fact try to address this: for example, a couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce oncall pages company-wide.
(Yes, I work at Amazon)
> "Amazon is a giant company, so this statement is kind of broad"
It really isn't. Amazon's attrition problems are company-wide, and not limited to a few bad orgs. Amazon's on-call problems are also company-wide, with only a minority of teams spared from it (actually, I was on one of those teams, thank God). Amazon's policy of not readjusting employee compensation to fit a rising market is also company-wide. So yes, they are a huge company, but that is not a defense.
I was a returning intern, so I knew a lot of fellow ex-interns returning full-time. My opinion of Amazon is formed by both my own experience and also a whole lot of commiseration with others from across the company stretching over every org.
In fact, of all the interns I returned with, only 3 remain, 3 years in. In fact, several quit without even fulfilling their first year. They willingly handed back their signing bonus clawbacks (+tax!) just to GTFO.
My impression is that senior-level engineers see a whole different world. SDE1/2 employees are just cogs, but SDE3 and up are treated like Faberge eggs. Unfortunately, I was only a lowly SDE1.
> "just like with any other giant company (insert Yahoo, Oracle, etc. here)."
Amazon is trying to hire at the level of Facebook and Google. Comparing oneself to Yahoo and Oracle (both known for being particularly poorly managed, and the latter having a reputation for being a bit of a code sweatshop) is not praise.
Hell, Amazon's hiring process may be harder than Google's. A full-day of 5-6 interviews, including lunch interviews, with a single member of the group having full veto rights over all other interviewers. It's a wonder they have anyone passing said gauntlet. With that high of a hiring bar, new hires trickle in, and the attrition rate pretty much negates any hiring anybody does.
> "a couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce oncall pages company-wide."
Platitudes. I was there. Nothing actually changed. I know a few sub-orgs had actual drives to decrease technical debt and drive down operational pain, but for everyone else it didn't do squat.
Amazon's on-call misery stems from the high attrition rate. It's a vicious cycle. Most teams accumulate technical debt since they are constantly under-resourced, what with people leaving all the damned time. Most teams I've seen have perpetual open headcount, and never enough hands to really root-cause and fix the chronic problems that are waking up their on-calls at 5am on a Saturday.
Combined with upper management that keeps trying to drive features and this is a recipe for disaster. The pace at Amazon is relentless (which is often good), but it affords almost no opportunities to refactor, redesign, rearchitect for better operational performance. Hell, if you want a prime example of this, look at how the Catalog systems are set up. It's like a brick wall extended by wooden beams extended by rebar extended by I-beams.
Additionally it's a bit of an inspiring story.
There's another time and place to quit too which seems to me to be touched on in the article. If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity. It's usually better to quit and later re-apply than to try to work your way up within a company. I saw this at Microsoft and have reason to believe it happens everwhere else.
As a bit of MSFT-specific advice, if you're in the dev/test/pm org and an IC and feel this way, you should make sure that you're having a regular (e.g. every six months) 1:1 with your manager's manager. During that, you should try to get a deeper understanding of what the next level means. There are certain levels (63, 65, 68) whose promotions are significantly different than the other levels and can be intimidating, particularly to first-time leads. For example, at 63, your lead might have to justify the promo to your PUM, and at 65, your lead has to convince your discipline manager to justify it not only to your PUM but has to provide enough info about your comparable work to have it justified with all the discipline managers across your division at the calibration meeting.
Unless you are in an extraordinarily technically deep area (e.g. compiler frontend, database internals), you should not expect your lead to be an amazing manager. If they were, they'd have left you behind and be a manager of managers within ~3 years because there aren't nearly enough of those to go around.
In fact there was only one way to do it: get a job somewhere else, and then apply back. Things were so bad at one point that HR was actually recommending this as a career path.
The temp positions are much more lax in almost all groups. The individual with budgetary authority has nearly complete control over the vendor choice and individual hires, so long as they don't do anything unethical. So, if you can sell to that person that you are qualified, smart, and motivated, they will probably give you a chance. It's typically only a 6-11 month commitment, anyway, and so many of the contractors are checked out that anybody with a spark of enthusiasm really shines in the interview process.
All companies are both predator and prey. With inscrutable insider rules like this Microsoft cannot move fast enough to survive as either.
Seems I was right about Sun, not sure yet about Microsoft. I now think Oracle is in a better position than they used to be.
One of the major things I noted was that Microsoft, despite a major institutional aversion, has been slowly developing and expanding services businesses. They have continued to do this, for example now offering to host Linux VPS's via Azure. Their services offerings in 2003 were more anemic than they are today. They are on the right track to deal both with open source competition and long-extended upgrade cycles.
I don't think Microsoft is about to die. They may be cut down to size but I think their offerings are large and diverse enough that they are more likely to be pressured to evolve than disappear. Many businesses in fact do this, see IBM's transformation into one of the world's largest IT services firms in the world.
1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves
2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These are important because they are a hedge against open source software and upgrade cycles that extend as hardware matures.
3) Lack of vertical integration/insularity
4) Organizational awareness of issues.
Sun scored relatively low on these, Oracle depended on how heavily you rated customer satisfaction and customer perceptions, and Microsoft scored high on everything but healthy services businesses, but there they were growing and trying lots of things.
And at least there _are_ guidelines. Have you ever worked at a small company? There are certainly exceptions (I'd gamble that Fog Creek is one), but most of the ones I've worked at or for have had salary and promotion schemes that basically came down to some mix of hiring manager's whim, highest priority for the company today, your public visibility before joining, and whether you have some family connection to the owners.
Exactly, the lesson i learnt. Most of the times, once you are within an organization, switching roles/jobs/responsibilities is pretty impossible. I am not sure exactly how and why this works out to be so, but would probably blame it on social group-think and the fear of the unknown being amplified, when every individual states and restates the uncertainty. It's as if when it's time to make a decision, the number of people agreeing something is uncertain multiplies the actual uncertainty/risk. I don't understand how groups of people make decisions in that manner, but then i never was good with people.
I did however, continue to stick my neck out.
Suppose you were hired to do X, and after doing X for a few years, you have developed the skill to do Y instead. But that skill does not guarantee that your current employer will have an opening for a job doing Y. Even if they do have the opening, from their point of view, if they let you transfer, they will definitely need to hire a replacement X, and you might turn out to suck at Y. So a rational manager will feel a strong pressure to leave well enough alone and let you keep doing X.
There are a variety of ways for an employee to escape this situation, but the simplest one is just to find another company with an opening for Y.
"Yeah, my managers suck. I should fix that. But you know, they're extracting enough value out of you for me so that I'm OK with them sucking. I don't really care about lowly workers"
It's a valid stance, but I'd rather work under a CEO who actually cares that the managers perform well, too.
High turnover, on the other hand, is a good signal of failed management, and if you can find another job, then you'll probably do better that way.
There your right. But a non existant turn-over tends to be a sign for an unflexible and counter-innovative bureacratic culture. Or a good working climate. Hard to tell from the outside. And once you're in and can tell, well it could already be too late!
I think everyone should quit or get fired from a job at least once in their life. People talk about starting this or wishing things were better, but until you've gone through the utter terror of quitting/being fired, you never know how resilient you can be moving on to the next challenge.
It's kind of like starting a business. You can talk all you want, but until you do it (or it happens to you), you don't get it.
The universe might have taken care of him, but that is because he realized it's not about how you fall down (even if you jump down), it's how you get up. If you keep getting up, the universe WILL help you out.
Amazon is a great company and with effort you would have climbed the ladders there if you were good enough. Jeff Bezos -is- a smart guy and he is taking the company in the right direction as opposed to Yahoo!, which is a giant of yesterday.
You had been there for six weeks and had a problem with someone else being hired who got paid more? Why did she get paid more? I've been in the industry long enough to know that salaries are never equal. They are part of the negotiations and are often affected by the situation the new employee is in. A lot of companies pay more for certain employees because of their background situation. If an employee is qualified and shows promise, then companies often offer a supporting hand, because otherwise the employee simply could not afford to work there. A lot of companies pay more to an employee if the employee asks for it when it is about 'their value' and not about value of someone else.
It was incredibly stupid to complain that someone else is getting paid more, when you had been there for six weeks. You didn't sound much smarter than your boss there.
I would never allow a new employee march in after six weeks and ask for a raise, unless they invented the next iPhone or iPad. You did spreadsheets. You would have gotten a 'no' from any and every executive I know of.
When I set pay, I'm strongly committed to rewarding people based on the work they do and how well they do it, not how resistant they are to me screwing around with them in negotiations.
It was reasonable to ask for the raise; it could be that the boss (or some other part of Amazon) had made a mistake. By asking, the guy discovered that the boss had no interest in being fair to his employees. That's certainly something worth quitting over.
Given he was about to quit anyway if he wasn't offered a raise, there was no harm to asking.
There's a difference between a bad boss and making a bad salary negotiation when you take a new job.
Nice post anyway, but it's a little bit like "I've seen it in the tea leaves".
Edit: typo
And finally, you have to ask for things to get them. If he just quit without asking, he'd never know if he could have gotten that raise instead. Now, he knows. At a different company, he might actually have gotten it.
I think he made exactly the right decision at each step, given the knowledge he had at that point.
Personally, I probably would have chosen to stick it out at that company until I found that second job, instead of quitting on the spot, but that's me. But the end result wouldn't be that different.
I don't want union work. When I hear people whine and bitch because they think they're worth as much as other employees...I don't know but it really makes me dislike them. I despise that mentality. Someone else negotiated better than you -- suck it up, crybaby.
The piece is at its core a whiny complaint, complaining of grievous injustice. That you try to explain it away as simple market forces is truly laughable. Yes, the attitude expressed in the piece is the foundation of unionization.
Anyway, it seems he is negotiating a better salary. The boss refused to deal so he walked. Good.
Unless you've got something lined up, or a lot of cash set aside, I'd advise being very conservative in this environment.
No doubt it often takes a lot of hard work and discipline. Sometimes just thinking about that being a possibility is too much for some people.
If you're not a superstar, and I'm as un-superstar (sic?) as you can get, and you've been around long enough, chances are you've held a job with shitty pay and shittier boss.
Whether you depart for greener pastures or try to stay put make the best out of your situation and work on improving yourself and the company, says a lot about you also.
Why? You will hate your job one day and probably sooner than later. It just happens, its part of the learning curve. I don't mean that you are always going to hate your job but you inevitably will end up in a situation with a crappy boss doing something you didn't realize you signed up for.
Your cushion will give you perspective. Instead of looking at your crappy job as your life raft and clinging on for dear life, you will be better equipped to realize you have options. If you really don't want to go to that job anymore, you can reasonably wake up and stop the next morning.
Another thing that nobody talks about is that having a cushion can inadvertently gain you more respect in your workplace. I used to work for a group where one of my work buddies was pretty financially independent (this doesn't mean fabulously rich) and unlike everyone else who was desperate to keep their job my work buddy would speak his mind to management. When projects were unreasonable he would tell them to take a hike. Well guess who got all the interesting work and respect.
Seriously build a cushion if you are new to the work world - it only makes your life better.