Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

This Hacker News discussion revolves around the internal culture, leadership principles, and operational focus of Amazon, with a particular emphasis on whether the company prioritizes customer satisfaction or financial gain, and how its stated principles translate into actual practice for employees.

Focus on Profit vs. Customer Obsession

A central theme is the debate about Amazon's primary driver: money versus customer well-being. Several users offer differing perspectives, with some contending that financial motives are paramount, while others cite their experience of a genuine focus on the customer.

"The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money." - petalmind
"This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager)." - x2tyfi
"In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer." - onboardthrow
"Many visa workers have families, and relocating an entire household, especially when children are involved is a huge emotional and logistical challenge. Its not easy" - sumedh
"I wish all companies would just state the obvious and list the first principle as "Make Money"." - hn_throwaway_99
"The reason I think it's important to list "make money" as the first, primary goal is that it makes it clear that all other goals are subservient to that one." - hn_throwaway_99
"This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?" - VaedaStrike
"Simply looking at check out you can see that customer obsession is false. Littering with tiny text and checkbox trying to trick you to subscribe to Amazon Prime." - phantomathkg
"It was at one time maybe, but like all things you have to adapt and move. I think the article got it right, we've shifted from buildings what's best for the customer to building what the customer *thinks* they want." - throwaway435675
"The biggest disconnect is that people who are NOT Amazonians believe these principles are the actual company values when in reality they are just a set of guidelines." - sangeeth96
"You are overlooking the part where you affect more than just your own behavior, but that of your colleagues. You also assume a linear function of productivity and stock price." - Muromec
"They all have one principle: make money. Everything else is negotiable." - stevage

The Nature and Application of Leadership Principles (LPs)

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Amazon's Leadership Principles (LPs). Users debate whether they are genuine guiding values, operational guidelines, or merely tools for control and manipulation within the company. Many feel the principles have been weaponized to suppress employee growth, justify cost-cutting, or enforce corporate mandates like returning to the office.

"when the lay-offs occurred, and people realized the "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" was absolute bullshit." - some_guy_nobel
"As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is _extremely_ limited. Citing _Ownership_ (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently _weaponised_ to limit promotions/pay-raises." - pvtmert
"In particular for "Ownership", the part about "They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team." does not at all mean what the author implies, and is well connected to the rest of the description instead, about weighing your decisions against the impact it has beyond your team." - iLoveOncall
"Sure, but how can you weigh the impact your decisions have across the entire company if you don't know what's happening in the rest of the company. You can't make good decisions when you're blind to what's going on around you." - cperciva
"The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons. I can't remember any instance of someone saying a certain principle needs to be violated because it would lead to decrease in profits or market share." - diskzero
"Leadership Principles are inescapable at Amazon, whether or not you want to progress in your career, whether you know how to game it or not, those commandments are set in stone." - ignoramous
"The Leadership Principles are less "principles" and more "operational guidelines"." - cperciva
"If they are just recommendations, perhaps Amazon shouldn't require them in their recruitment and performance review processes :)" - pzmarzly
"They are selecting for people who will "play the game" or, even better, will believe proactively." - monkeydreams
"The problem with the LPs is they are all contradictory. You can make an argument for anything you want using LPs. Want to refactor something? Insist on the highest standards. Don't want to refactor something? Deliver results. It's all BS." - patrick451
"Bias for action" is fine, but, with age, the "measure twice, cut once" adage acquires some gravity." - smitty1e
"Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action" - pvtmert
"My time at Amazon made me realize that while LPs probably were written with the best intent during their inception, in practice in the more recent years, it ended up often misinterpreted and weaponized internally for personal gains or to speed things up to meet unrealistic deadlines and false promises." - sangeeth96
"I found there were groups of peeple who were very sincere about them and groups that were quite cynical." - diskzero
"There's also the principle "Are Right, a Lot". I think that's the main one that folks who are actually good in their roles might find themselves disagreeing with, as it puts a lot of pressure to never be wrong." - diskzero
"Anyone taking these leadership principles serious is fooling themselves." - some_guy_nobel
"My cynical take is that a company's stated values are exactly the opposite of the behavior you'll find most common in the company." - gtowey
"All organisations have principles. Beyond a certain size - and sometimes long before then - they're _never_ the stated ones." - TheOtherHobbes
"Values statements are usually somewhere between a wish list and propaganda." - gtowey

Employee Experience, Performance Reviews, and Career Stagnation

A significant theme is the negative employee experience, particularly concerning performance reviews, compensation, career progression, and a perceived increase in bureaucracy and "silent quitting." Users share stories of their own negative experiences with the performance review system (Forte), feeling that their contributions were overlooked, and that LPs were used to hinder advancement. There is also a sentiment that the company's culture has deteriorated over time, especially for longer-tenured employees compared to newer hires.

"As a \~4 year tenured L5, I agree. There is annual performance review system called Forte. During forte, each person is rated in each leadership principles (LPs) by their peers and manager, possibly from away-team members." - pvtmert
"I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog." - pvtmert
"Moreover, my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any _TPM_ in my org in my region either." - pvtmert
"It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile my 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked." - pvtmert
"Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can." - pvtmert
"Can definitely relate. There is no correlation to work complexity and quality in performance reviews from what I’ve seen. It’s often how much you are selling something and your director happens to be buying…" - dvdbloc
"You don’t see the problem with being a “four year L5”? That’s not to insult your skillset - just the nature of Amazon. There is a 99% probability that you are getting paid much less than new L5 hires." - scarface_74
"Why are you still there?" - scarface_74
"Great background and experience and you seem very driven and proactive. That someone like you doesn’t get recognised or rewarded reeks of piss poor leadership." - uxcolumbo
"Amazon is a cult, fullstop. My interview there was the most miserable, antagonistic one I have ever had. And even then they wanted you to regurgitate their principles as if the recruiter didn't over prep you on them." - bmitc
"I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better." - felixgallo
"Amazon's staff is about the size of 1800s London. There's no way anyone could understand all of what's going on, so people have to use judgement to assess what they know, proxy what they don't know, and move forward." - felixgallo
"Amazon has big enough global footprint of offices all over the world that even if someone loses their visa they can easily relocate back to their own country and work on the same projects from any of the massive offices there. And this actually happens all the time. Folks in Amazon move around as needed across border. The idea of h1-b servitude does not hold much relevance for companies like Amazon who have built massive offshore centers in the last few years." - la64710
"As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas From Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job." - Aurornis
"All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization." - hibikir
"It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things." - Aurornis
"Amazon is a far cry from the glory days of the past. 80% of corporate workers are visa workers that spend all of their time managing and maintaining the massive complexity inside the company. There is no leadership principles, its just low level grinding." - mikert89
"Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?" - mvdtnz
"It’s captured audience who will not push back as hard as they maybe should. That and depressing wages of course" - Muromec
"When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”." - JustExAWS
"For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will), your severance amount is decreased to a third of the original." - JustExAWS
"All of my coworkers on H1B were scared shitless it would happen to them." - JustExAWS
"We have a lot of unemployed American tech workers. There is no reason hire people on visas other than suppressing wages and getting what amounts to an indentured servant." - patrick451
"The "leaders are owners" bit is a great idea from the shareholders' perspective, but a bit of a raw deal for the employees." - apparent
"For that impossible extraordinary 80-hours-per-week double effort, my stock would go up... a dollar, right? Roughly 1-in-1.5-millionth of my 1.6 million dollars of stock." - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
"I think it's a joke. I think "stock incentivizes people to work harder" is a little joke that people tell each other so that labor will be pacified with company stock and leftists will bicker about co-ops instead of saying the quiet part which is that people just want more money" - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
"In early stage companies - ie private companies - your RSUs are Monopoly money that will statistically be worthless. In a public company, my RSUs are immediately available to liquidate (which I did)." - JustExAWS
"You could just work smarter instead of more and have a much larger effect on stock price." - Aeolun
"Ownership without corresponding property rights." - loosetypes
"I can’t help but think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra………. Before their heavy handed censorship machine ramped up" - OrvalWintermute
"Then there's the rather-hilarious tension between Amazon's "Climate Pledge" and "Yeeeah, forget that whole WFH thing. We're going to need you to sit in traffic for an hour a day so you can Zoom from the office rather than home."" - CamperBob2

Company Evolution and Structure

Several users comment on how Amazon has changed over time, with some suggesting that the company's culture and priorities have shifted significantly from its earlier days. There's a discussion about the effectiveness of Amazon's decentralized structure and its impact on decision-making and internal alignment.

"And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012" - htrp
"Amazon's staff is about the size of 1800s London. There's no way anyone could understand all of what's going on, so people have to use judgement to assess what they know, proxy what they don't know, and move forward." - felixgallo
"As far as Amazon's siloing goes -- it's not great, but it starts to look positively nonexistent when you consider the knives-out political infighting of its competitors." - felixgallo
"I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines." - sangeeth96
"Could it be that the principles themselves are less important than the structures that support them? For instance, Amazon's "Day 1" philosophy means that every team is responsible for owning its own services and operating them." - diskzero
"The Amazon of the 2020s is different from my Amazon of the 2010s or others earlier Amazons." - diskzero
"Could I ask how you think your experience would differ if you were an H1B holder versus a citizen/permanent resident?" - Muromec

The Problem-Solving and Innovation Dilemma

The discussion touches on Amazon's approach to innovation and problem-solving, particularly in the context of services like "Paxos as a service." Some users express frustration that Amazon hasn't released more of its internally developed tools, while others argue that the company is in a cost-cutting mode and not focused on new strategic initiatives. There's also a debate about the challenges of maintaining a "Day One" culture as the company grows.

"I also worked for Amazon for not far from a decade, and I don't think Colin's misunderstanding anything. His commentary on Ownership, as I read it, is that he would like to see Amazon take a broader tech-ecosystem role and act as steward/referee/high-standard-insister in order to help make the entire Internet better." - felixgallo
"I think he's completely correct, but I also think that AWS and Amazon are currently in a retrenching/cost-eliminating reactive mode, are trying to triage and assess the impact of (waves hands vaguely) all this, and are not currently thinking too hard about taking on new non-monetizable strategic leadership initiatives." - felixgallo
"“Paxos as a service” Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it." - lifeisstillgood
"To be clear, I'm not saying it has to be literally Paxos as a service. There's a bunch of ways you can take operations from different sources in a distributed system and produce a consensus view of what happened first. But aside from trivial and low-performance options (e.g. everyone contends on a single DynamoDB item and uses conditional writes) Amazon hasn't made _any_ of the possibilities available." - cperciva
"Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this." - xmprt
"I work at Amazon, and I can say that the article is misleading or wrong on large parts. The leadership principles are not just words on a page, they are used daily and are part of the culture." - iLoveOncall
"Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war" - ChrisArchitect

Broader Organizational and Human Nature Questions

The conversation expands to address fundamental questions about organizational design, power dynamics, and human motivation. Users ponder whether there's a solution to systemic issues like power consolidation within large organizations and if AI could offer a more objective governance model. The discussion also touches on the inherent limitations and complexities of human behavior in shaping corporate culture.

"All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization." - hibikir
"Has anyone solved this problem? Is anyone _trying_ to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)" - neilv
"An AI run organisation may solve it?" - AnotherGoodName
"So far, the majority of the "AI" adoption we're seeing since ChatGPT is reflecting some of those undesirable human motivations." - neilv
"The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s." - Aurornis
"You're asking if anyone has solved the problem... of human nature? I don't think it's at the top of most people's lists of action items." - o1bf2k25n8g5
"Maybe we can figure out a way to shape institutions to not only have an “executive branch” but some other institutions that can also govern it." - seer
"When leadership speaks topdown in principles, they want some kind of change to happen, so whatever being communicated can be presumed to not be there before." - Muromec
"The failure of incentives - the hard truth is that organisations that survive long enough all end up valuing only the survival of the organisation itself - and structure incentives accordingly." - seer
"Maybe it should go without saying, but sometime around the 90s or so, many companies tried to pretend that they had these lofty, societal goals, and they tried to pretend that making money was almost secondary." - hn_throwaway_99
"The only way the corporate executives of a corporation will ever pay attention to pleas and heartfelt advice from employees - even high-level well-trusted long-term employees - is if those employees are the controlling shareholders who have real voting power over the makeup of the corporate board." - photochemsyn
"Democratization of corporations - tiered somehow, as you probably want experienced senior engineers to have somewhat more votes than a new hire with six months on the job, so not 'one-person-one-vote' - would probably go a long way towards improving how corporations act in reality." - photochemsyn
"Yes, this would mean that shareholders lose control of the makeup of the corporate board - which is a very good idea, capital should always take a backseat to labor, as without labor, capital can't do that much." - photochemsyn
"I'm guessing shareholders would rather cut services and costs to increase profits on the short term, rather than listening to engineers inside the company who are saying, "look, if we let customers use these great internal tools we've built for our own needs, everyone will be happier and this will improve our services and bring in more customers."" - photochemsyn
"Again - labor is more important than capital for long-term survivability." - photochemsyn
"I wish all companies would just state the obvious and list the first principle as "Make Money"." - hn_throwaway_99