Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals
olshansky.substack.com
olshansky.substack.com
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
Good for them, I guess, but also has nothing to do with the reality
Lol, give up already. No shit SWE makes significantly more than UXD.
Ah, I guess you were claiming that I was a shit SWE out of left field (because I'm just comparing myself to my wife)? I don't really get your context, you are going need to spell it out for me.
> The word balance never came up. Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
In his next comment he explicitly confirms he wasn't even comparing to the FAANG companies but to his very own "crème de la crème" set of companies.
> I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
That was the context and this context was just so unrealistic and absurd.
It’s not bad pay, but most mid-caps should be competitive with the pay band in 2025. Amazon paid very well in 2023-2024, and paid well up through 2022.
The back dated pay structure with a 15% YoY stock growth assumption means that unless Amazon grows at 30%+ per year you would be better off at any other medium to large tech company.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.
It is from a career perspective - at least at AWS, a large portion of high calibre Engineering and Product Leadership left during that time period and the backfills for those roles just plain sucked.
> same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry
In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
Where does this come from? Maybe if you're drinking whatever (toxic) koolaid Amazon gave you, but Amazon has a lower profit-per-employee than Docusign: https://www.trueup.io/revenue-per-employee
Not exactly the steward of execution you think it is.
Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
So we come back to my previous statement/question. Above what profit amount should a company be obligated to keep (in their eyes) unproductive workers?
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...
to answer your question - company should have a right to fire 99% of the people if they want at any point in time and there should be no regulation of any kind against that ever.
what america should do is add $250k per year per employee tax for any employee hired outside of the US.
They take huge personal, family and financial risks to move for a job. When you are getting rid en-masse people, you are ruining local communities. There is a real societal cost.
It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive. Not to mention that once the company has established a reputation of a revolving door, then nobody gives a shit about it. They will exploit it for the short term and let it die.
Layoffs should the absolute last resort for a company due to the disruption they cause. If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
But can it not be the case the this /was/ the company's last resort? There's another option of moving people around and retraining them to do another function. What if that was considered and then rejected because there weren't enough departments growing to warrant that? Rhetorically, if they don't have the ability/opportunity to re-assign people, then what?
Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.
Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.
The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.
However, the "last resort" comment I made was a guess to their reasoning - it wasn't an authoritative explanation. My core point is that Amazon seems to think they can do the same, or about the same, or an acceptable amount less with fewer people. If that's the case, then from their perspective, they're overpaying on labor. That's it.
Beyond that, I agree with your larger point, with an asterisk on "overpaying", as I do think an American company should have an incentive to prevent laying off workers just to refill them with offshoring and hiring H1Bs, especially at Amazon's scale of profitability.
There's empathy involved in the revulsion toward this kind of process. Please take time to consider that not everyone fired is a $300k/year rockstar programmer who can just as easily walk over to Meta or Google for a job. I know of people who have uprooted their lives and work under the idea that if they do a good job they'll stay on, when in fact the reality is more like gambling and they could be fired at any point.
Ultimately even the most talented people are numbers on spreadsheet strewn aside at the end of the day as MBA capitalist hackers try to optimize every aspect of a short term numbers game to get ahead in stack ranking..
I’ve watched as incredibly talented and driven people are thrown by the wayside and ageism and lack of human decency or respect is has become the norm
Watching hardworking people and the middle class suffer because Billionaires, insane growth expectations, MBAs and Private Equity had burned this country to the ground…
And yes, don’t forget that those type As who worked on NASA missions - “Mission focused” as the article naively trumpets to get attention - once they get cancer, get a little past 50, have kids with needs ie suffer some through life - like all of us eventually do..they get on the chopping block - and are quickly forgotten trust me, I worked in Mission Control too once
Now, Amazon has never been an ethical company—and I’m sure its employees know that to one extent or another but they have indeed been a relentless one and that relentlessness and metric driven culture has driven the humanity out of the tech world (whatever little it had as Autistic or Nerdy edgelord billionaires fund ever more corrupt politics and misery for the masses) as our society is rewarded with even more shorter term thinking and an attention economy with the attention span of a Goldfish.. all these tech companies deserve worse than the skewering they got in HBOs Silicon Valley
Ok end of Rant.. hope some younger folks take heed and try to change up this shitty system
Look no further than the economies of France and Germany… both of those countries have very stringent regulations around layoffs. And none of whom have the dominance of American companies or breadth of unicorn startups.
Making firing difficult makes hiring difficult, which disincentives risk and innovation.
The leave/fire at-will contracts of most tech jobs in the US is a feature, not a bug.
> It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive.
Sometimes, but sometimes not. Layoffs are important to get rid of low performers who could be replaced with better talent, and they’re important to help companies adjust their labor to market conditions.
Or the one that has the world's largest startup economy? Or the one that has almost all of the world's top 20 companies by market cap?
[1]https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...
The reason there is excess capital is because of opportunistic and predatory behavior. Optimal capitalism, which other countries can't compete with (fully). This doesn't make it a net good for the American public, nor an optimal strategy for other economies.
And so do most who come to the Valley to be a part of it.
This strikes me as such an abjectly absurd thing to say that I can’t imagine we’ll come to a common conclusion on this.
And by the way, you’re writing this comment on a forum operated by one of the largest “predatory” sources of capital in the Valley.
Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.
If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.
France and Germany require a lot more bureaucratic red tape (documentation, severance pay, notice periods, and justification). I have not seen this personally in France, but I have in Germany and it was a nightmare. I will be very careful about hiring in Germany next time.
An incredible amount of capital is in the United States for a reason (you're on a website of those capital providers). While termination protocol is obviously not the only reason, it is undeniably one of the many that contribute to the States having the most favorable environment to build a high growth, innovative company.
Kidding aside, it’s a whole bunch of pieces. Including the dollar, including the friendly regulatory environment, including friendly tax treatment for founders (which European nations are starting to adopt), including small areas with lots of great schools, plus those schools helping to connect founders with capital, plus gobs of money running around looking for high risk opportunities, plus…
It’s not just the ability to fire someone, and it’s not just the dollar.
And if you're a loss making business like most startups, it's easier to lay people off even in Europe.
Loss of money? Layoffs normally have severance packages that are paid out to the employee - this can be seen as the company taking a monetary hit - though not proportional like you said. But what's the alternative here? 5x/10x'ing the severance package? I feel like that would make the job market even rougher as companies would be even more conservative with who and how much they hire.
Mental trauma? I mentioned it in another comment, but the employees after a layoff normally do have an increased fear of future layoffs which impact morale which would result in lower productivity.
Loss of residence / food? I'm coming up blank here.
I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.
Have business make responsibility more than ruthless sociopathy to grow, like any other era of business
People will Unionize or create laws where companies's fiduciary duty should be towards both employees and shareholders.
Well, this is all until Elon's Robots will change everything :)
Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
“Ascended Engineer”
“Archengineer”
“Their Excellency, Prime Engineer”
A junior engineer embarrassing a senior principal is a big no no.
At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.
I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.
cringe
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.