<story><title>Jeff Bezos&apos; management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon</title><url>https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Software engineers having &amp;quot;on call&amp;quot; schedules &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; is crazy to me. You shouldn&amp;#x27;t be writing code at 3am to fix a bug after working all day just to turn around and work the next day as well.</text></item><item><author>ecshafer</author><text>&amp;gt; The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.&lt;p&gt;I have never worked at Amazon. But I did work at a company that decided to implement microservices a la Amazon, even going so far as sharing Bezos&amp;#x27; famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect essentially happened over night. As people spun up more and more microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine that just destroyed people with on call schedules.</text></item><item><author>codingwagie</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago)&lt;p&gt;The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.&lt;p&gt;The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets.&lt;p&gt;If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions.&lt;p&gt;AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devbent</author><text>It works well of the company empowers engineers to write software that doesn&amp;#x27;t break all the time.&lt;p&gt;At HBO Max every incident had a full writeup and then &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; solutions were put in place to make the service more stable.&lt;p&gt;My team had around 3 incidents in 2 years.&lt;p&gt;If the cultural expectation is that the on call buzzer will never go off, and that it going off is a Bad Thing, then on call itself isn&amp;#x27;t a problem.&lt;p&gt;Or as I was fond of saying &amp;quot;my number one design criteria (for software) is that everyone gets to sleep through the night.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The customers win (stable service) and the engineers win (sleep).</text></comment>
<story><title>Jeff Bezos&apos; management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon</title><url>https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Software engineers having &amp;quot;on call&amp;quot; schedules &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; is crazy to me. You shouldn&amp;#x27;t be writing code at 3am to fix a bug after working all day just to turn around and work the next day as well.</text></item><item><author>ecshafer</author><text>&amp;gt; The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.&lt;p&gt;I have never worked at Amazon. But I did work at a company that decided to implement microservices a la Amazon, even going so far as sharing Bezos&amp;#x27; famous 2 pizza team memo. This effect essentially happened over night. As people spun up more and more microservices, things got more and more siloed, cross team collaboration was significantly more difficult, and things became an increasingly more complicated rube goldberg machine that just destroyed people with on call schedules.</text></item><item><author>codingwagie</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago)&lt;p&gt;The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.&lt;p&gt;The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets.&lt;p&gt;If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions.&lt;p&gt;AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crystal_revenge</author><text>Seriously! Working weekends in retail when I was young, one of the hallmarks of a &amp;quot;real, professional job&amp;quot; was not having to work nights&amp;#x2F;weekends when your routine schedule is during the day. It was a major motivator to get through school and get skilled.&lt;p&gt;Now I see young engineers from top-tier school working &amp;quot;on call&amp;quot; without complaint. I&amp;#x27;ve found ways to avoid such roles, but it always seemed ridiculous &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; completely unnecessary in a world where there are software engineers around the globe that could easily work full time support positions.</text></comment>