Amazon acquisition aftermath
As we move along in our regulatory process, I’m curious if anyone who has gone through an Amazon acquisition or who currently works at one of their wholly owned subsidiaries (Ring, Zoox, Kiva?) could give us some intel on how things change once a company is acquired by Amazon.
You get bananas if you weren’t already getting them. If you were already getting bananas, you get more bananas.
At an acquired company. It appears they were left alone for some time. Now it's being driven to fit the standard Amazon model with heavy PIP culture starting
You’ll have to eventually start adopting the internal Amazon tools and processes. The timeline for that will depend on how hard your leadership kicks their feet and makes a stink about it. From a process perspective they’ll likely start with culture stuff(doc writing, LPs, mechanisms, etc.) That part will likely happen quickly because it’s all fairly basic/common sense. This also is probably when they’ll do the PIP targets thing. If your leadership is good, they’ll push back on it- for example I believe Amazon Music(might be misremembering) didn’t do them for a while. They also likely will screw you with leveling. I saw people with 20 YoE who were SMEs get mapped to L5. Amazon managers will tell you this is fine, don’t believe them. You’ll be the same level as L5s with 3 YoE. Eventually you’ll probably have to adopt their hiring and promotion process. Internal promos are a pain in the ass. Hiring also has some weird parts in that it’s incredibly focused on behavioral interviews and impact. Since you’re probably slotted under devices, you’ll likely have to work with lab126. A lot of the hardware orgs are kind of a miss mash of random tools because the standard Amazon CICD tooling doesn’t offer a lot of flexibility with stuff like device testing or N-1 releases. Ring was still not using “Amazonian” tools for a solid 4-5 years post acquisition. TL;DR: you’re kinda fucked eventually but you’ll be ok for 2-3 years.
L5 is a terminal level
Is it? Ok, removed that part.
@OP, how are things at iRobot?
As you might imagine, I’m quite limited in what I can tell you. You can get a good picture if you read between the lines of our press releases tho. Our culture is pretty good, we don’t pip people for funsies here, I’m hoping our good points don’t change too fast post closing.
@iRobot, Seems cool. Mind referring me?
Nuts, I hadn't heard about this. Is my vacuum going to start reporting me for wrongthink now?
There’s no microphone on Roomba, so no.
For now
How’s the J9 Combo?
At an acquired company. They left us alone for as long as the founders/leadership were still around. Once the founders left, if your org is doing well, then other executives in Devices will fight over each other to try to get your org under theirs. Then there will be all kinds of process integration and the transformation into a proper Amazon org will be very fast.
Zoox was acquired in 2020. So far basically zero Amazon influence. Some small things, like not competing with Amazon offers for candidates.
It becomes a PIP factory