Amazon's Leadership Principles: Legit or just cliche fluff?
Please only vote if you work for Amazon (AWS even better)
I don’t see why so many people struggle with frugality. In its simplest form, it means to not throw unlimited money at a situation that can be solved at least as well with less money. In the end this makes for a better product but requires more skill from the person/s handling the situation. This is especially true of the infrastructure at amazon where we stopped buying black box, proprietary hardware and instead buy cheaper commodity hardware that we build specialized software for and is a better fit for our needs.
What’s wrong with recycled hardware? You realize that you have all of AWS to use for free right? You could go provision an x1e.32xlarge as you cloud desktop that has 3.9TB of memory, 128 cores, 3.8TB SSD, and a 25G nic. What other companies are offering those to their engineers for a desktop? So how are you being treated like shit due to frugality?
I see this rule being discarded in our internal teams. Why do we have an entire team dedicated to building sshitty chat app when we could just use slack. Same for almost every other tool people use here really.
I’m not an employee, but currently interviewing with AWS. Coming from a startup background into a senior-ish role (L7) the LPs are a huge selling point. Whether or not everyone practices them, I would plan to use them to guide and justify my own actions. I do agree frugality is most bothersome and confusing. But is Re:Invent frugal? Obviously expensive but it’s likely great ROI. Just like infrastructure.
I’d wager that reinvent is very frugal. There’s not a lot of money spent on advertising AWS products outside of reinvent. We also charge $1800 to attend and last year there was 30k people. That’s $54MM in revenue from attendance at the event itself. There’s going to be more revenue from the booths and I’m sure there’s other revenue (plus the people who pay for AWS services after the event). I’d be really surprised if that wasn’t enough to pay for the costs of running the event.
They may make some money, but probably many or even most aren't playing that or even anything at all.
This poll is poorly done. The principles are rammed down our throats, so yes, they are legit in that sense. Whether there is anything done to back them up, they're usually used as fluff.
When you leave Amazon, you miss the leadership principles. They are a touchstone, a common vocabulary that teams can work with, it gets into the culture and into you, and you may not even realize it and take it for granted. Then you leave...
Amazon is cheap not frugal!
Doing good work is intuitive to good workers. It's not like people really consult the list of principles to make decisions.
Exactly
God I cringe every time someone seriously cites the leadership principles. They're such crap!
Especially bias for action. Nobody seems to practice that one
In AWS we Lived and Died by the Blade of these Various Principles. In Alexa they are a wall poster joke. AWS makes billions of dollars and Alexa spends billions of dollars. In my view, they’re woethwhile.
Interesting. Yeah, it's as if that one single "principal" completely undermines most of the rest. Anything worth doing requires resources, right?
Several of the principles are meant to be in conflict with one another. Different ones are more important to different situations and you must find the correct balance.