Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by ignoramous on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @08:06PM (#21876036)

> Amazon’s hard-driving company culture has come in for its share of criticism...

Byran Cantrill famously put Amazon on a pedestal for its Leadership Principles [0] but when I read his own startup's Values, they strike me an awful lot like Amazon's [1]?

> Other Bezos directives — among the most famous, teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — have shaped Amazon’s corporate structure. Former employees say it functions as a collection of startups, each with the resources and support of a mega corporation... They inform business plans, product ideas, hiring decisions, promotions and compensation... key attributes of Amazon’s culture, such as its emphasis on data-driven decision-making... At the corporate level, Amazon is composed of many small teams, each limited by the two-pizza rule, part of Bezos’ strategy to stay nimble and grow quickly.

AWS re:Invent this year had numerous presentations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] on exactly this.

> Some implementations can actually be quite toxic if you focus so deeply on one without some of the counterbalance.

This remains a problem for a section of employees. Outpouring of that emotion on Blind come year-end review is significant and sometimes there're folks complaining about it on news.yc, too [10].

[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9QMGAtxUlAc

[1] https://oxide.computer/principles/

[2] Marc Brooker, Amazon's approach to building resilient services, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KLxwhsJuZ44

[3] Peter Ramensky, Amazon's approach to high-availability deployment, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bCgD2bX1LI4

[4] Andy Troutman, Amazon's approach to running service-oriented teams, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/n1d20Yok000

[5] Colm MacCarthaigh, Amazon's approach to security during development, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NeR7FhHqDGQ

[6] Becky Weiss, Amazon's approach to failing successfully, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yQiRli2ZPxU

[7] Thomas Blood, Amazon's culture of innovation, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2ZQKPUD7vKE

[8] Andy Warfield and Seth Markle, Lessons from Amazon S3's culture of durability, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DzRyrvUF-C0

[9] Colm MacCarthaigh, Lessons from Amazon's highest available data-planes, https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2L1S0zfnIzo

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526

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Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by bcantrill on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @10:24PM (#21876560)

My criticism of Amazon's values are (1) they are (generally) not values and (2) they can be used to justify essentially any action. We tried to be mindful of that with Oxide's values which are very much values (and not management bromides or all-hands claptrap) and we are explicit about the fact that (as values) they can come into tension: we explicitly ask applicants to describe a time when two of our values have come into tension for them and how they've resolved it.[1] (The answers have honestly been incredible: many are deeply thoughtful, insightful and inspiring!)

So you may believe that we missed the mark, but Oxide's values are in contrast to Amazon's -- aligned only in the belief that a company's values should be articulated clearly and referred to frequently.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAK...

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Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by hitekker on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @11:03PM (#21876719)

Out of curiosity, what kind of research went into articulating Oxide’s culture?

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Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by bcantrill on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @01:04AM (#21877127)

Honestly, we just sat down and figured out the values that really bonded us: values that we deeply shared, not merely aspired to. There are some values in there that are subtler than they look -- but that the three of us hold very deeply...

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Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by hitekker on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @01:32AM (#21877218)

Thank you. Another follow-up if you don't mind: have you and the others considering ranking Oxide's values separately, and then coming together to determine their hierarchy? It would help a candidate to know which values are more deeply shared, equally shared, or less shared by their own leaders.

Gitlab describes this concept here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy

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Re:Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their ... by bcantrill on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @01:51AM (#21877295)

That's a great question, but honestly, we deeply share all of them -- so much so that it's very hard to rank them. And not because each is unequivocally good! Indeed, each of these values can be taken to excess and must be held on tension by the others. So it's hard to imagine any of them taken away -- or valued to the exclusion of the others. (With my apologies for the profoundly unhelpful answer!)

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