This is ridiculous because there can be many, many reasons for Amazon being successful while still making a lot of mistakes. You are conflating cause and effect here, how can we know if Amazon couldn't be even more innovative if they didn't do this?

> Or at the very least, it doesn’t hurt.

I think you missed this part of my comment. I don't conflate cause and effect. No do I conflate correlation and causation, which is what I think you meant to write.

> be even more innovative

So your premise is that the most innovative, productive company in the world could be more innovative?

The two things could be completely unrelated. We have zero evidence that this policy has any impact, positive or negative. Seems odd to frame the two as related.

Counterpoint - MSFT had stack ranking for years and stagnated until they ended the policy in 2013, followed by Nadella becoming CEO in 2014 and it’s hard to argue that MSFT hasn’t seen an incredible revival. One could draw a series of similar comparisons, from stack ranking had zero impact on the company performance, to stack ranking being the barrier to MSFT success, all the way to the removal of stack ranking actually CAUSED Nadella to be appointed CEO. We have just as much evidence for any of those possibilities.

What has Microsoft innovated? As far as I can tell, they turned into a cloud provider after AWS paved the way and wrung out some extra revenue by turning Office into a subscription.

So the whole innovation amounts to simply being a cloud provider?

I think a lot of people overestimate the importance of AWS. It's both funny and sad to see people think they need AWS for the most basic compute tasks that are easier and cheaper to accomplish without AWS.

There's actually many blogs and distributed services that use zero AWS, and have higher availability than AWS, and which don't have to provide a status update telling their customers that "even Netflix is down", passing the buck. When Netflix is down, my site's up, so that's a really bad excuse however you look at it.

I am using the dictionary definition of innovate.

>To begin or introduce (something new) for the first time.

>To begin or introduce something new.

>To introduce novelties or changes; -- sometimes with in or on.

I believe that qualifies AWS as an innovation, the context being comparing Amazon's innovative-ness to Microsoft's innovative-ness since they ended stack ranking.

> The two things could be completely unrelated

Yes. Could be unrelated, could be related. We can't run a clinical quality controlled experiment to make that determination.

My initial point was that Amazon has produced stunning innovation while maintaining this HR policy. So at the very least, it doesn't appear to have held the company back in a meaningful way.

Much of the framing of stack ranking in these comments is that it is deeply inhumane. Over time, this type of framing undermines our conception of what actually inhumanity looks like. For reference, China's treatment of the Uyghurs is inhumane. Malaysia's treatment of the Rohingya is inhumane.

This claim is a laughable, being made by wealthy, coddled people who are complaining about a company's approach to accountability. But here's the thing, if someone can get a job at Amazon, they can get a job at just about any company. Particularly in tech, which has seen an imbalance of labor supply and demand for going on 30 years. So I say again, if you don't like stack ranking, don't work at Amazon.

This is just whataboutism.

Yes, for any sort of maltreatment, you can identify somebody else engaging in worse. Precisely because of this fact, identifying somebody else worse tells you exactly nothing.

So your premise is that everything “the most innovative, productive company in the world” does is absolutely perfect and can’t have a single shortcoming?

I mean surely questioning current ways of working is how you stay innovative and respond to a changing world? it feels odd to imply they have reached peak innovation and should just stay the same.

Are you insinuating that there's some sort of cap on innovation?

Yes. For instance, natural resources, financial & human resources, time, and physical reality come to mind.

So if we consider every single (known) possible permutation of "ways to do something" do you really think that amazon is anywhere near the possible cap? I have my doubts, and this is even thinking we won't figure out some new way to bend physics to our will

It's pretty easy lol -

IBM was also once an innovative giant.

What worked then might not work now, the culture then might not be the same as the culture now, and the world then was different from the world now. The riches they have now are the results of the innovating they did 5-10 years ago. The next 5 years is a different question.

Criticisms of Amazon do need to overcome a fundamental problem.

Unfortunately, it's not this problem..or at least, that's not the biggest problem.

Criticizing Amazon because of the policies held in Team X is like saying 'The U.S. talks way too fast' after visiting New York (caveat, long time New Yorker here). Each state is different in the US. In the same way, each team is different in Amazon: the Whispersync team is much different than the Amazon FedCloud team, and both are much different than the fulfillment team.

Perhaps because it has grown so fast, and been so innovative, the company is not homogenous. So when you criticize policies..please criticize specific policies, and specific teams.

I do not work for Amazon, am not a shareholder, but I do have several friends that work there, on different teams.

Edited to add some thoughts on stack ranking...

I have been at a company that did formal stack ranking. I was never in the lower tiers..but I hated it, because I saw all the stress and drama caused by it. It pit team members against each other and disincentivized team mates helping each other. Stack ranking is also the reason I didn't sign on with one particular company (not Amazon).

I've also been at other companies that did what amounts to unofficial stack ranking: manager has a pool of $Xk to divide amongst pay raises on the team and must justify it by some kind of metrics.

Neither are good for teams, for the people at your company. What isn't good for the people at your company is not good for your company. People are what any company is made on. Innovation, hard-charging business, can cover this to some extent for a while (perhaps a long while), but it always takes a toll in the end.

Perhaps the best compensation structure I've seen (on paper) is at Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), in an article that's now 20 years old:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/30/fog-creek-compensa...

I'm curious to see if Glitch uses that, how it worked in practice, and what the thoughts are about it now - 20 years later.

The 6% URA goal is actually a company-wide directive from the S-team.

In this example, we actually see an individual org within the company trying to push against the company-wide policy.

economy is not just there for itself, it serves the community. Innovation and growth is also not a goal for itself. If a company fails at a fundamental task, like providing fair working conditions, then discussions about consequences in a democracy are needed. Then one can formulate policies, elect leaders and change the game.

Without AWS and the pandemic, is there an Amazon as we know today (regardless of its internal policies and culture)?

Hard to say. The problem with time series' is that you only get one realization ;)

But I think reducing Amazon to an Ecomm/AWS duality goes too far. That said, I would bet that, yes, Amazon would still have been extremely innovative.