Unlock the secrets of engineering excellence with insights from Amazon's culture. Learn how to navigate company politics, foster a culture of excellence, and make fast, informed decisions.
One of the best read this week! at least for me based on what I am going through. 100% escalation is not bad, if something is a company principle then there shouldn’t be exceptions.
Exactly, Anjana, that's why it's important that they put it into the company principles.
Otherwise, it's up to interpretation and different cultures would think about escalations differently.
I read some time ago the book "the culture map". It was insightful to see how different cultures would react differently to topics such as this. Some cultures prefer hierarchical organizations. Others flat organizations.
Note: Sometimes that book can seem like tagging everybody into a single behavior just based on the country they were born
Well, that depends on the nature of the requests and each person
What I know is that most people have their quotas, even if they are not formal bar-raisers. For instance, a senior engineer is usually pulled to design reviews of multiple teams. They'd go to 1-2, and if somebody else asks they just reject or push it to next week. Same for interviews you take.
Another approach is an on-call rotation. You create a group of people and each week one is the "on-call". Any requests during the week are handled by that person on-call.
I liked the idea of the escalation not as an evil, but a tool in the belt. It makes it a more collaborative process.
I also only now just learned what the whole bar raiser thing meant. I've heard it talked about but now I get it 😄. Seems like a concept that should be implemented in more places
Yeah, Amazon uses "bar-raising" broadly as anything that lifts the standards. But in particular, for these bar-raising programs, it's a specialized person in one process.
For instance, for any interview, there's one person who is the bar raiser and ensures the questions and the feedback from interviewers are appropriate for the level of expectations.
For our own growth, it's great because you become the "go-to person" for that particular process
Wish more engineers favored truth-seeking. I know, sometimes it's hard to reproduce an issue, and you're working on something else anyway, but the insights you gain from getting your hands dirty might uncover a lot more problems that need to be addressed than simply looking at the problem in isolation or by writing a simple reproducer test.
As for mechanisms, I've been advocating for automation for years now. For example, I've advocated for using custom Linter rules over people manually suggesting coding styles in PRs or PR templates over going back and forth multiple times because the author missed some key things in the description. Such automations do a big chunk of the work.
I'm happy you're growing immensely with the help of your company culture and the system you have in place for Amazon.
Love the examples you provided, thanks for sharing your experience, Akos!
I love learning about successful company cultures. Amazon is the one I see every day, and I find the parallelism with other principles talked in other places, like Atomic habits talking about systems.
Great read, Fran! I’ve heard a few times the story with Jeff Bezos uncomfortable phone call and forget the details. For Amazon those focus on customer service and satisfaction. Nice breakdown.
One of the best read this week! at least for me based on what I am going through. 100% escalation is not bad, if something is a company principle then there shouldn’t be exceptions.
Exactly, Anjana, that's why it's important that they put it into the company principles.
Otherwise, it's up to interpretation and different cultures would think about escalations differently.
I read some time ago the book "the culture map". It was insightful to see how different cultures would react differently to topics such as this. Some cultures prefer hierarchical organizations. Others flat organizations.
Note: Sometimes that book can seem like tagging everybody into a single behavior just based on the country they were born
Interesting concept about the bar raising people. How do they find the time to do it? Or they have X% of the week dedicated to bar raising?
Great article Fran!
Well, that depends on the nature of the requests and each person
What I know is that most people have their quotas, even if they are not formal bar-raisers. For instance, a senior engineer is usually pulled to design reviews of multiple teams. They'd go to 1-2, and if somebody else asks they just reject or push it to next week. Same for interviews you take.
Another approach is an on-call rotation. You create a group of people and each week one is the "on-call". Any requests during the week are handled by that person on-call.
Very cool, thanks for sharing Fran.
I liked the idea of the escalation not as an evil, but a tool in the belt. It makes it a more collaborative process.
I also only now just learned what the whole bar raiser thing meant. I've heard it talked about but now I get it 😄. Seems like a concept that should be implemented in more places
Yeah, Amazon uses "bar-raising" broadly as anything that lifts the standards. But in particular, for these bar-raising programs, it's a specialized person in one process.
For instance, for any interview, there's one person who is the bar raiser and ensures the questions and the feedback from interviewers are appropriate for the level of expectations.
For our own growth, it's great because you become the "go-to person" for that particular process
Wish more engineers favored truth-seeking. I know, sometimes it's hard to reproduce an issue, and you're working on something else anyway, but the insights you gain from getting your hands dirty might uncover a lot more problems that need to be addressed than simply looking at the problem in isolation or by writing a simple reproducer test.
As for mechanisms, I've been advocating for automation for years now. For example, I've advocated for using custom Linter rules over people manually suggesting coding styles in PRs or PR templates over going back and forth multiple times because the author missed some key things in the description. Such automations do a big chunk of the work.
I'm happy you're growing immensely with the help of your company culture and the system you have in place for Amazon.
Great work, Fran!
Love the examples you provided, thanks for sharing your experience, Akos!
I love learning about successful company cultures. Amazon is the one I see every day, and I find the parallelism with other principles talked in other places, like Atomic habits talking about systems.
Of course! Hope if everything turns out great I'll learn about the culture of an interesting company 🤞😊
Great read, Fran! I’ve heard a few times the story with Jeff Bezos uncomfortable phone call and forget the details. For Amazon those focus on customer service and satisfaction. Nice breakdown.