(Talking about amazon here, saw much less of this at MSFT. I saw other people leading other teams who were C & D players, so I presume my team was just particularly bad. Absolutely the most incompetent people I've worked with in 20 years of mostly working with startups where even really competent people have to struggle with immense difficulties and uncertainty, neither of which was present at Amazon, except to the extent created by incompetence, though this incompetence went all the way to the top. My boss and my bosses's boss and all the HR people I'd give an F. Still do, but bad design can still make for a good product financially (and it has gotten better.) (not that I had any say in the matter) I thought it looked like it was designed in the USSR.
I saw the Kindle at Amazon about a year(?) before it was announced and wanted to kill it on the spot. In fairness I can compare myself to gates. (Maybe google is better than both, but I've not worked there.) If you're a talented engineer, work for a startup, but if you need a big company and you're in the northwest, pick Microsoft before you pick Amazon. And that's in comparison to Microsoft (where I also worked) where this "metrics" religion was completely accepted as well. But HR and Management at were absolutely atrocious.
Stack ranking software#
Of course generalizations like this will have exceptions and I knew some groups who were lead by software developers who got promoted, and the AWS group seemed to be insulated from the amazon culture.
Stack ranking how to#
It isn't really scientific when, in advance, you decide that %10 should be on a firing track, %70 should be warned and %20 should be promoted- without regard to actual performance.īezos likes to run around claiming he only hires "A players", but what it ended up being was C & D players who didn't know how to program or understand technology, ranking their teams, almost completely based on office politics and ones ability to hype their work, rather than the actual technical quality of the work.
Microsoft and Amazon both seem to think it is "scientific". Do you use stack ranking? If the answer is yes then you know they aren't performance based. As someone who has seen stack ranking in action at Amazon and Microsoft both, this is an excellent interview question at any company you consider, especially one founded by ex-Amazon or ex-Microsoft employees.
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