I've now heard the same line from 5 separate startups over the last 3 years: "We made the mistake of hiring a bunch of leads from Amazon and Uber. They made our culture toxic and focused on empire building over solving problems." What's going on here? One of these friends was VP level. And I hear constant complaints about new hire Amazon managers at Meta. I've never worked with either.
Amazon = empire building. That’s the only thing Amazon managers know.
Empire building is slow intrusion on someone else's project .. and an incremental takeover of that person's resources and projects onto yours to increase your org headcount. There are many ways to do this. I can write a book on this.
Managers at places like Amazon and Uber and even Google, really any big business, have to adapt a lot to deal with the aspects of their company that are toxic and dysfunctional. You’ll find that ex-managers might initially bring those adaptations to a company where they’re not useful. For example, a manager coming from Amazon or Facebook to Google might try to focus on getting things done even at the expense of building strong relationships with their stakeholders, which is not a good strategy here.
Right. But I literally only hear complaints about Amazon and Uber. Not fb, Google, etc
Some guesses: - Lots of Amazon engineering managers are not actually engineers, instead they have TPM backgrounds - Amazon’s PIP culture means that management self-selects for unempathetic people
Two cancers competing for resources of a dwindling host
Amazon managers are conditioned to throw LPs around and push people to work overtime on fake urgency.
Amazon is and always will be the earth's shittiest employer. Glad I moved on from that dumpster fire a while back
I must be really lucky to never come into contact with these bad managers
Uber ads has such toxicity?
What exactly is empire building? Is it like trying to increase headcount?
Owning stuff, having more reports, more authority.