“The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much.”

Hard pass.

So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess.

Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.

The key milestones for VP often are

- Luck landed them in a leadership spot on a project that was already successful or headed that way

- They didn't do anything to abruptly change that course

- They are skilled at managing up with the right words, phrases, actions

Then, they move up in the chain they are already in, where everything is very familiar. Goes well enough until they move outside that bubble.

This is indeed all too common but sadly not unbelievable. Most mid-to-higher manager roles are not to be effective with a mission necessarily (which would require "real skills"), but instead to hold responsibility over a particular function. If the proverbial storm hits the fan, these Directors/VPs can migrate to another company, bringing all their previous cronies with a nice title/pay bump.

Sounds rad as hell if you're a VP

Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you're on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director/VP roles.

I've watched these failsons get promoted to senior director/VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.

If I could go back to the 70s and re-do my character creation, I'd put all my skill points into Charisma and would have been a CEO by now. Why bother with Comp Eng and business degrees if I could have instead just "be liked".

What gets me is that they have no idea how awful they are at what they do.

That's probably a pre requisite

What’s worse is they don’t care.

This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.”

This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world.

I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.

Didn't Ryan hire him?

Steve Jobs hired John Sculley III. And then came back to rebuild the company.

Lines up with the sentiment about Flexport being a tech retirement home

Pretty provincial attitude probably propagated by some overpaid MAANG bro who doesn't realize that there's an entire industry of tech folks out there who aren't making $300K/yr TC. So if you are making that . . . a little humility is in order.

I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).

I'm saying for what you call a "retirement colony," there are dozens of businesses in which the vast majority of the tech industry actually work. Blind is where spoiled rich people complain about being rich in the wrong way.

Off topic, but wouldn't MANGA be a better aconym?

The problem with that is “manga” is also a japanese word for “comic book,” which could result in some confusion.

Why? If they were futzing with the wording of a powerpoint for months that is indeed bad. If they worked hard on getting answers to questions nobody else can answer that can be reasonable.

After all one can describe a phd defense as “a presentation which took years to prepare.”

I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.

Same thing at my company, only it was a former Microsoft employee who brought along all his buddies. They screwed up a bunch of stuff because they didn't understand our market or customers, and then all slowly got let go before having to contend with the full consequences of their bad decisions.

We're now in a multi year recovery process.

This hits so hard and so painfully. Had a VP from Amazon come into google Cloud and he seemed to have no clue about the ladder or discipline he was executive over. We had to explain his job to him several times.

He was an absolute incompetent in every sense of the word and fired high quality workers the entire time until he himself was fired.

You don't happen to work at Nokia do you? ;)

Felt this too with MSFT folks.

I never want to hear "rhythm of the business" again.

This practice of bringing in former reports or buddies is very common in the industry, both in startups and established companies.

You just have to look at the About us / Management/ Leadership page on the company web site and correlate a few names, current positions and positions in former companies, to get it.

I feel conflicted about the matter. I understand the appeal of bringing in people you know; they are a known quantity and involve less risk-taking than hiring an unknown person.

I can see it going super well if the new people brought in are liked and the culture from the older company is good. In our case, it was the opposite and tanked the team morale.

I've only seen it work poorly.

In my experience, the new top guy brings in his old lackeys because they complemented him, and made him look good, in the context of the top guy's previous company.

Hence they often turn out to be one dimensional, rather than rounded contributors - e.g great at bringing in projects on time even though everyone hates working with them, or great at technical due diligence/sniffing out skunk projects even though the new company's best work is in skunk projects.

>In my experience, the new top guy brings in his old lackeys because they complemented him

I think you mean they complimented him. If they had complemented him, things would have gone well.

I just meant that you can detect the practice by the bios on corp websites, not whether it was good or bad.

This is not business, it’s loyalty and empire building, at the expense of the business.

Yeah, sounds like pretty standard nepotism.

One division where I work brought in a bunch of ex-Cisco folks. It’s odd but for some reason, they did really well here, even though Cisco is quite different than FAANG.

Seeing the same thing first hand with an ex-amazon exec

I had a similar experience.

I was told “Hey they’re all from <big company>!” as if it was a positive.

I wondered “How is it everyone of these guys buddies worked there and big company didn’t keep them?”

Learned pretty fast why they left / the other company didn’t keep them… (they were all smoke and mirrors and no results).

I don't like to look askance at alumni of particular employers, but I have had one too many a poor experience from ex-Amazon hired into leadership roles. The above matches my experience.

For me, the worst casualty as various lackeys followed arrival (also ex-Amazon) was the choking out of candidness. Second worst was turning the company into a document factory.

Can you elaborate on the document factory part?

Not OP, but have worked in a similar situation run by ex-Amazon leadership. Project leaders focus mainly on writing docs on their "ideas". These docs are then spread around to other project and org leaders. Most of their time is spent reading or commenting on these and planning meetings for feedback. Typically the last people to read these documents are engineers who then have to make sense of and build whatever was laid out in the documents. Many times after all this is done the project is then shelved or engineering shuts it down so it was a waste of time.

Project managers can then point to these documents as promotion material and take credit for "leadership".

Obviously I'm being a bit harsh here and that in no way represents the average - but it is something I've seen too often.

Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it.

The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented.

But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion).

I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.

Doc culture is better than the alternative. 95% of docs get thrown away because half-way through writing it you realize it cannot work. In the absence of the design doc, you will instead hand-wave your way through the design phase and realize the mistake after several people have wasted time actually implementing it. It is a very, very good thing to know whether your idea solves or does not solve the given problem, at the earliest opportunity.

I worked at a startup without any documentation. The cto knew everything, because he'd been in every meeting and made every decision. Everyone else became somewhat helpless due to lack of information.

There's a happy medium. Even a startup can do with some well-maintained READMEs. But the problem with startups is churn, which makes for docs that rapidly go out of date, and the only thing worse than no docs is out of date docs that lead you down the wrong path.

Do you mind saying more about "the choking out of candidness"?

I know they've got their "leadership principles" kool-aid [1] at the interview stage, but I always assumed that a seriously profitable and hard-working company (which they seem to be) wouldn't waste time mincing words.

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

With the incoming cabal there were many meetings of reading doxuments and solicitations for feedback. But it became apparent veey quickly that the confused muddle of documents were their wishes. Being candid, by say raising feasibility concerns, would only get you a fiesty rebuttal followed by being ostracized from future decision making.

What was a very social confident team at peace with asking vulnerable questions turned into a team where people took care to avoid trouble. The cabal preceding reading-meetings with gibberish, and after reading time received feedback of tense silence.

That sounds rather grim; I'm sorry you had to go through that.

It sounds like it just underscores the reality that, no matter what process a team uses, there's no substitute for psychological safety.

You have me at “document factory “. Writing a doc is good to convey your intentions. Revising a doc for the fucking 20 times because of unsettled sentences, paragraphs are a waste of time.