Is there lot of writing at Google/Fb/Msft (like Amazon)

You forgot COE

I think Amazon is almost unique in this. Other companies use PowerPoint and other presentation oriented approaches to meetings. I've worked a few places and it's only at Amazon that I've seen people file into a meeting room and spend the first half of the meeting reading a document. Personally I love it. I think we make better decisions as a result.

Insane amount of doc writing here.

Doc writing will be the reason I leave Amazon. I agree it’s important to truly dig deep into an issue and force people to consider all sides. I like the idea behind it. The doc review period at the beginning of a meeting is a great idea. However there are some teams here that take doc writing beyond what is necessary. Every little thing doesn’t require a 6pager or even a 1pager. Sometimes a bulleted summary is okay as well.

Translation: we make our PM's do actual work that can be measured and evaluated through the production of tangible artifacts. Worse those artifacts are in a form that requires you to think things through. You can't gloss over shit with some ambiguous but important sounding bullet point, you literally have to spell it out. And that damned Amazon writing style that prevents you using adjectives even makes you go back things up with data. This means you can't fake your way through the job by talking smooth and sounding smart while doing actually nothing such as you can get away with at XYZ Financial or even some of the other big tech firms. In my previous job people filled up their day going from meeting to meeting while producing very little, throwing around buzzwords and taking credit for other people's work. While a good PM will be effective in any environment, the Amazon environment makes it hard for a shitty one to hide.

There has to be a balance though. Most of the times , you end up writing docs just for the heck of it, when in reality you can actually get some implementation work done, but instead you spend time writing docs and convincing people. Doc writing works in some situations, but not always

Amazon has a document fetish like no other. It's not so much about the number of docs, as it is the culture around them. At Google, I write a lot of docs, but it's pretty informal. If it's a deep design doc, it's very specific, and if it's a general vision/approach thing, it's pretty chill. At Amazon, there was just no consistency about what pointless detail people got hung up on. Doc writers and their managers worked late into the evening, trying to taylor the doc's wording to appease specific people who will be in the meeting the next day. And of course, each iteration has a different audience, and each audience has its own case of "shiny object syndrome" coloring their biases. I disagree that the Amazon document fetish results in better decisions. The management chains I've worked at over there had no notion of long term thinking, so presenting any real initiative with the long term in mind (you know, the things that warrant a solid doc) resulted in a fucking dumpster fire.

L3 swe @ google. I write a design doc or two per month. The rule of thumb on my team is more than a weeks worth of work generally warrants a doc. Other orgs are different.

Amazon's writing culture came as a measure to prevent knowledge loss during attrition years. It's a standard practice in high capability maturity organizations such as SEI-CMM Level 5 companies. PPT replacement was just a PR gimmick.