Amazon CEO Criticizes Manager Fiefdoms and Stresses the Need For 'Meritocracy' (businessinsider.com) 72
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pushing to cut bureaucracy by reducing management layers, according to a recording of a recent internal all-hands meeting obtained by Business Insider. Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by March-end, a process the company says is now complete and affected a "relatively small subset of employees."
"The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom," Jassy told employees, stressing that successful leaders "get the most done with the least amount of resources." Jassy has established a "No Bureaucracy" email alias that has received over a thousand suggestions, leading to more than 375 changes aimed at speeding operations. "It's a meritocracy," Jassy said, urging employees to "move fast and act like owners."
"The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom," Jassy told employees, stressing that successful leaders "get the most done with the least amount of resources." Jassy has established a "No Bureaucracy" email alias that has received over a thousand suggestions, leading to more than 375 changes aimed at speeding operations. "It's a meritocracy," Jassy said, urging employees to "move fast and act like owners."
The BS (Score:2)
The BS is strong with this one.
Re:The BS (Score:4, Informative)
I worked at a fortune 50 company for 10 years and I described it as a bunch of fiefdoms as well (Actually Game of Thrones was more accurate). Give a VP a pool of money and they want to recreate the wheel to prove their team is needed. The amount of duplication was crazy. Group B would be inspired by group A's work but never dare ask to leverage / lease (for infrastructure and maintenance) the existing tech stacks. It would show weakness and possibly too much overlap rendering Group B pointless. So much waste.
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The fiefdoms thing may be true, but this guy is saying he wants to deal with the problem of managers accruing large teams by... increasing the ratio of team members to managers? Yeah, it does seem like the BS is strong with that one.
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I worked at a Fortune 50 company for 17 years, not in any notable role, but I observed several interesting behavior patterns:
- A few managers, focused on exceptional results, sadly drove their unit to unfortunate questionable practices. Half the time this resulted in regulatory attention, disbanding the unit, paying the fines, apologizing for the errors, and offering the experience to the rest of the company as a lesson. Half of those were reconstituted and thrived by putting good practice and customer serv
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Somebody needs to glue two points on Bezo's and Jassy's head. [fandom.com]
read between the lines (Score:2)
I'm the boss (subtext: who actually doesn't accomplish a gd thing except to make the plebs) work harder or your all fired.
Confused... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused, maybe someone can help clear this up for me:
and
seem to be conflicting statements, am I misunderstanding something here? Wouldn't less managers to non-managers by definition mean that managers would have more people they are managing?
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Well there is a tree-height problem. If individual contributors are the leaves, front-line managers have only leaves as reports, and mid-level managers have a mix of both. Your organization's height determines the ratio of manager to individual contributors. Tall trees have as many managers than individual contributors, flat trees have more individual contributors.
At most companies, having managers that report to you makes you a higher level manager. Building up a fiefdom where you gather teams to report to
Re:Confused... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's another problem, those that excel at climbing the corporate ladder are sometimes not that good at actually managing. To put it another way, climbing beats managing so they climb. One wiseguy at college once told me as I was using my weight set:
Remember....as the muscle grows bigger the brain grows smaller.
At first I laughed, then I thought about it. I think he was just making a joke but if you spend your time making your muscles bigger, you aren't spending the time making your brain power increase. You lose in the long run because muscles only serve to attract teenage girls until you reach about 25. At age 30, you are just.a creepy old man while Farkwort,h the engineering student who lived down the hall and spent most of his time studying, is now ordering you around like a tea lady. You can see a similar effect with relatively quick turn around. Start doing crossword puzzles. After a time, you start getting much better at them. Spend the time on your brain, not mindless gratification.
I suspect a similar thing happens to a lot of CEOs. They got there because they were able to stand on the heads of their perceived lessors. When they get there, they are somewhat lost at how to actually manage people effectively because stepping on them is much different that actually managing them. The difference, I think, is lost of many of them.
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Just restate
"Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by March-end,"
by
"Amazon plans to decrease the number of managers by 6%* by March-end,"
* - You may substitute your preferred random amount here. Nothing changes.
Need a narrative or big picture initiative (Score:2)
Another "we restructured and it is the reason why our earnings and revenue are not growing fast enough"
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what they means is for peons(act like owners and have affairs) to produce 15% more so they can cut both employees and managers by 15%
Meritocracy's fatal flaw (Score:4, Interesting)
The executive staff uses garbage metrics for evaluation of merit, so their results are also garbage. And by garbage, I mean you can either game the system, or their results are so bad that they are no better at ranking than a random shuffle.
This is a common problem I've seen in tech companies, it's sad that tech companies never realize: Garbage In / Garbage Out
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People calling for "meritocracy" almost never stop to discuss HOW merit will be measured. They use flawed measures that are convenient to them. That was Young's point in popularizing the team, to begin with.
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Understanding where someone is at, what is slowing them down, what they need, how you can help. So you have to talk to them every day about such things.
The second sentence gives valuable hints to what is slowing them down and how you can help.
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Understanding where someone is at, what is slowing them down, what they need, how you can help. So you have to talk to them every day about such things.
The second sentence gives valuable hints to what is slowing them down and how you can help.
Please avoid management. Spare your would be subordinates the disaster.
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Oh, I've managed, and replaced someone like you several times now. It's amazing the productivity increase when you eliminate daily meetings with the boss and stop micro-managing.
If your employees need help and won't ask for it, then you are 100% of the problem. Talking with them once a week is fine when you have a functional relationship with your employees.
Daily meetings imply daily roadblocks, and are for people who have universally terrible employees, or are convinced they are the expert in all of their
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Oh, I've managed, and replaced someone like you several times now. It's amazing the productivity increase when you eliminate daily meetings with the boss and stop micro-managing.
LOL You confuse a brief chat with people with some kind theatrical team meeting and with micromanagement. Wrong on both accounts.
If your employees need help and won't ask for it, then you are 100% of the problem.
Again, you manufacture a false absurdity. Little chats and interactions have lead to employees feeling comfortable coming to me early on in a problem.
And early interaction, Me: "How's it going?" Them: "Trying to figure out X". Me: Have you looked at "Y".
After a couple of those, we have this, Them: "Hey, I'm having problems with Z, Amy suggestions?".
Talking with them once a week is fine when you have a functional relationship with your employees.
Another daily chat example, Me
Reward a metric you get that metric (Score:3)
The executive staff uses garbage metrics for evaluation of merit, so their results are also garbage. And by garbage, I mean you can either game the system, or their results are so bad that they are no better at ranking than a random shuffle. This is a common problem I've seen in tech companies, it's sad that tech companies never realize: Garbage In / Garbage Out
Management is hard. There are no magic bullets or shortcuts. I've seen many great developers promoted into management, resist doing management stuff and try to keep on spending significant time coding. They then lean on the bogus metrics and create a disaster. Been there. Seen that.
If you suffer the misfortune of being promoted into management. Suck it up learn managenent, do management. Talk to you people one on one every day to know where they are, what is slowing them down, what they need. This will g
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I've has the fortune of having a few excellent direct managers in my career. And they do pretty much what you describe.
I've also seen excellent managers removed from projects, removed from teams, or otherwise gone unrecognized for their contributions. Because it turns out that even managers can have their own bad managers. Generally the managers get worse the closer to the middle of the Org you go.
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You mean I can't figure out who is most productive by tracking lines of code? Number of commits? Number of PR comments?
Yeah as a middle manager myself, I deal with this stupidity regularly. My executives keep asking me to track these kinds of metrics. Nope, it makes no sense. You can't measure programmer productivity with such shallow measures. The only way you can really know who's good at what they do, is to know who they are and what they do.
So how do I handle these demands for metrics? I ignore them, an
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Figuring out which manager is not being productive is a lot more difficult. Because they don't actually produce anything. So how do you know who is a better manager?
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Figuring out which managers are not being productive, also requires knowing your people. A good manager will have a team that is productive and happy. If you know your people, you'll know whether the manager is doing well in his role.
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Precisely. There are some things that can't be measured through metrics.
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Just because scaling up is hard, doesn't make metrics magically work better.
Culture comes from the top. If your CEO thinks of people as "heads" that produce "metrics" they'll get...metrics. If they genuinely care about their team, the people will produce far more than what they would if they are measured on metrics. I can say this because I've seen it work, over and over. My teams are consistently seen as the best-performing teams in the company. It's not because they are so amazing, but because I treat the
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The flaw is worse then just trying to evaluate merit.
Every person has strengths and weaknesses that are unique. If you have a worker in the warehouse who may be under performing, he may be under-performing because the worker isn't challenged enough, where promoted to say management he may be much more effective. However, if you do that, the warehouse workers who are busting their balls to get promoted would be pissed, and unmotivated by such an action.
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It's not really the company's responsibility find your motivation. Unmotivated diamonds in the rough are a dime a dozen, to mix my metaphors.
I'd suggest focusing efforts on people that want to be there and that are ready to put in the work. Even if they aren't hiding away some latent genius for the job.
"move fast and act like owners." (Score:2)
"move fast and act like owners."
Or, it's always "Day 1", meaning you never learn from your past failures, because it's always "Day 1", so you keep repeating them.
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So if I'm acting like an owner - how quickly do my shares in the company vest?
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So if I'm acting like an owner - how quickly do my shares in the company vest?
They don't - you only get to act like an owner: do all the same work, but get none of the rewards.
The rewards only ever go to the overpaid asshole CEOs.
Act like owners (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hey Look, cutting Andy saves the company money and flattens the org.
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Get stoned and form a fascist state?
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And do not forget to order every Tom, Dick, and Harry in your organization to compose those 5 bullet points on things you did last week. People know it is bs, and so they will get 5 bullet pts of bs every week.
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RIFs (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick is at least 45 years old. Pretty soon it's going to need to get a shingles vaccine
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The myth of cutting middle (Score:1)
Management got started by IBM because they wanted to fire older workers without getting in trouble for age discrimination.
It doesn't make sense unless you consider how many older workers are out there. Sure would be nice if we hadn't just gutted the ability to enforce regulations and worker protections. Something I didn't say was that the older workers are often complicit in this behavior. They like the fact that they're higher up on the totem pole even if overall it negatively impacts them.
IBM uses the sam
I disagree (Score:2)
Thinking that through ... (Score:2)
stressing that successful leaders "get the most done with the least amount of resources."
To be the most successful, they should have no resources at all. /s
More correctly, I'd say that successful leaders make the most of the resource they have.
I have worked for a company like this (Score:2)
I think someone else got that memo too ... :-) (Score:2)
Move fast and act like owners.
That's the DOGE motto - engraved right there on the lobby floor. It just looks more heroic in Latin."
(Paraphrasing Veronica Palmer in Better Off Ted, "'Money before people.' That's the company motto ...")
urging employees to "move fast & act like owne (Score:2)
minus the profits and power.
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The best laugh of the day (Score:2)
Move fast and act like owners (Score:2)
I just ran to my desk and gave myself a 10 million dollar bonus.
How am I doing so far?
Managers learn from their bosses (Score:3)
If the CEO of a company found undesirable behaviour among the managers, the most likely reason is the CEO himself/herself behaved that way on his way up the management chain.
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Meritocracy.... maybe good for business. (Score:2)
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Hehehehe....that made me think of He-Boy getting married and telling his new wife she needs to reapply for the job every year. That'll will surely make her stick around.
Or telling ones kids, shape up you little cost centers or I'll fire you and get me some new kids. How long before they start playing with the He-Boy's gun collection.
Re: Meritocracy.... maybe good for business. (Score:2)
Large Corporations (Score:1)
Honestly, it's nothing short of a miracle that they accomplish ANYTHING.
It really seems like some kind of miracle that you can throw a shit ton of people together, give different groups missions, have them actively compete and fight against each other, and some how, some way, a product is shipped and profit is accumulated.
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Amazon sucks (Score:3)
Working for Amazon was so horrible that current and former employees shared horror stories on a website called thefaceofamazon which as been mysteriously taken down. So here is an archive.org link [archive.org].
A running theme is that managers were backstabbing assholes who frequently moved between projects and got rid of people they didn't like through micromanagement and internal review systems. They even had a "performance improvement plan" which was an arbitrary way a manager could have someone punished and gotten rid of. And HR didn't give a fuck about it either. Escalating complaints just made things worse. So basically a career in Amazon wasn't about merit or competency but about kissing the managers ass and blameshifting. Some stories also mention that they intentionally burned out or fired staff so they would leave before their share options matured.
So Amazon had a rotten culture. People there should welcome a fresh start if indeed this is one, because it sounds like it needed a revamp. But it's one thing to say and another thing to do.
I remember the same lecture... (Score:2)
Meritocrazy is nothing for companies (Score:2)
Meritocracy is nothing a company can use as organization form. The closest a company can do is just having an hierarchy and promoting people based on merit. But Meritocracy in volunteer projects is a mixture between "Who does things is right" and "You earned my trust to elevate your privileges in the project" based on the only visible part of a contributor, which are their contributions.
Look at Github, where strange usernames and Avatars built from single color squares come together in project without knowi
Move fast, act like owners (Score:2)
Except...you don't own anything.
Meritocracy is the perfect system (Score:2)
... when you have a perfect definition of merit, a perfect way of scoring that definition, and perfect people administering the scoring. Assuming all that, you'd have to be crazy "more meritocracy". Fail any of those conditions, and you have to examine any proposals of "meritocracy" critically.
Every system devised for running a company, good or bad, was an attempt to create a kind of meritocracy. The infamously backstabbing, empire-building culture Amazon is no exception. It comes from the practice relent
Bureaucracy stands in the way of disruption (Score:2)
Which is more desirable depends on the situation.
You want disruption when you're trying to introduce an entirely new product or service.
If you're just trying to flush the toilet, disruption isn't as fun.
Dog Whistle (Score:2)
This is a dog(e) whistle. Echoing the mantra of the Musk/Trump regime (Cut the waste, fraud, and abuse. Meritocracy! No DEI ) to show that Amazon is willing to go along with whatever plans they have for the nation.
Amazon wants to remain a power player. Showing the rulers that you support their goals is how you avoid being "regulated" and instead earn a place at the trough. You got to go along to get along -and it is a big cold world out there if you are all alone. Amazon needs the US government to prote
So... (Score:2)
"move fast and act like owners."
So I should call the CEO's assistant and tell them hold my calls, then get out of the building FAST before someone catches on? Then play golf and have a few martinis for lunch. Charge it to the company credit card. Anyone who wants to yell at me for it is fired.
Like that?