rating for Amazon.com

not. getting. better. posted on October 14, 2006

First off, go back and read "Company Won't Grow Up," since it already says most of what I would have said already. I don't agree with every single observation, but it's certainly close enough.

After 3+ years at Amazon in engineering and engineering mgmt roles, I find myself constantly surprised each day that

--anybody actually comes to work
--we sell and ship a single product

Let's look at some of the facts, shall we?

--Engineering life is dismal-unless-you're-shockingly-lucky and end up on just the right team. We ask engineers to wear an infinite number of hats, bad both because they aren't as good as (DBAs/SEs/Prod Mgrs) as they are as engineers, and they don't _want_ to do those jobs. The disconnect between what engineering life is actually like, and what management thinks it's like, is well-demonstrated by this blog post ( http://justinrudd.wordpress.com/2006/08/09/expanding-on-the-pain/) (disclaimer, I'm not Justin and don't know him, but wow, an Amazon employee actually speaks publicly). Presumably great engineers like writing software for a living. Too bad Amazon doesn't allow them to do that.

--Key keep-the-website-running programs are only staffed when mgmt thinks they're shiny and new projects. Hey, the system for scheduling content across the site isn't sexy, so let's have no full-time engineers on it. Hey, the home page isn't a shiny project - no full-time engineers.

--The vast, vast majority of higher-level managers are perfectly willing to pass everything downwards - they leave it to rank-and-file to say no (or to fail) rather than stopping the buck. Our focus on an "ownership culture" among our engineers makes this seem ok in the Amazon culture. It is not. Bias for action applies to managers too. Dude, you made VP already and you aren't getting Jeff's job, so you don't just have to impress him. Step up and lead.

--Our CEO is smart, insightful, capable of managing a massive amount of detail, and funny. He's also megalomaniacal, confident that he's the only person the company actually needs to retain in order to be successful, uninterested in listening to experts in areas he truly has no information about (see: compensation, corporate communications), and insistent in throwing money at random big bets using the meager profits from a company surviving on retail margins.

--We're almost all underpaid. That's not just a belief, it's a comparison of data from my own job hunt, many colleagues, etc. Microsoft, Google, and even startups have no trouble hiring our people away, because they either pay them a great deal more money _or_ pay the same and offer meaningful equity potential. We have a weird comp model that, if you do well in 2006, means you will have more stock in 2009 - and if you do badly in 2006, you still might get more stock in 2009.

--The "2-pizza team" model (decentralized innovation by engineering teams) fails in almost every case, because either a) the team is too integrated into other centralized programs to be able to work on their own, b) the decisions on where to innovate come from Jeff (and every once in a while an SVP) anyway, so what are you really deciding, c) their leaders are rarely trusted to make business leadership decisions anyway, d) the overhead of team evaluation is enervating and nonsensical, and e) most people in those positions fail to make the engineering/business transition [obviously part of why c) occurs, cue "bad apples spoiling the whole bunch" logic]. I don't know a single leader of one these teams, competent or not, who felt over a meaningful period of time that he was able to innovate in a standalone way. Now be an engineer on one of the teams: ouch.

--QA is a disaster area. There are several competent QA folks in the company, but we do nothing to make QA successful, hire political hacks to manage, provide no best practices or resources, etc. Only ignorance keeps the good ones.

--Current half-life of all corporate Seattle employees is ~22 months. At just over 3 years, I'm now in the senior 25%. I don't know how this would differ for engineering-only employees, so I won't gather a hunch, but we're a 10+-year-old company and our hiring boom has been going on long enough that it isn't just demographic effect. I was the second-most-senior person on a team of 20 after 2 years, when I moved on. No wonder nobody knows anything.

--Like most companies our size, reorgs happen often, with limited information, and with no evaluation of the future success or failure of those reorgs. Many happen when Jeff's back is turned, or in an attempt to impress him.

--If there's a reason to trust HR or any other supporting organization, or to believe that they're working for the good of the people they support, I haven't yet found it. I have found enough of the opposite to make me sad.

Amazon is an engineering company, run contrary to engineering best practices, micromanaged by a CEO and Finance. I can no longer encourage others to join. But hey, I think that proposal to read all of our e-mail ended up being denied, so that's a good sign.

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