Amazon CEO Criticizes Manager Fiefdoms and Stresses the Need For 'Meritocracy' (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0176788179
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/22/018254/amazon-ceo-criticizes-manager-fiefdoms-and-stresses-the-need-for-meritocracy
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-manager-fiefdoms-2025-3
"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."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-manager-fiefdoms-2025-3
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:3, Insightful)
I'm confused, maybe someone can help clear this up for me:
> Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by March-end,
and
> "The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom,"
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?
Re: (Score:3)
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
Meritocracy's fatal flaw (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
Re: (Score:2)
That has always been it.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Merit is measured by daily communication with your team individually. 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. It takes your time. There is no shortcut. Do this and you will develop a reasonable understanding of everyone's abilities, relative merit. Remember when you were in their shoes, help them as you would have liked to have been helped when "surprises" arose during your development days. Prai
Reward a metric you get that metric (Score:2)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
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
"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.
Re: (Score:2)
So if I'm acting like an owner - how quickly do my shares in the company vest?
Act like owners (Score:3)
Is that really what you want your employees to do?
Re: (Score:2)
Hey Look, cutting Andy saves the company money and flattens the org.
Re: (Score:1)
Get stoned and form a fascist state?
RIFs (Score:4, Insightful)
This means they're getting ready to do rifs. Probably of older workers that they would be afraid of being sued for firing for age discrimination. IBM does the same thing every couple of years. Take somebody who's getting up there in the years, promote them to management while making them continue to do line work and then fire them under the excuse of trimming excess management.
The trick is at least 45 years old. Pretty soon it's going to need to get a shingles vaccine
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)
Jassy fosters this kind of behavior and then freaks out, because he is getting what he wants. Sometimes when you get when you want and you make your own company a battleground you find out that it is not the best for your company. By his own admission, the current way to get ahead at amazon is to create a fiefdom.
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.
The best laugh of the day (Score:2)
These people really do live in some kind of perceptual bubble that makes them think are on a higher level.
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?
The BS (Score:2)
The BS is strong with this one.
Re: (Score:3)
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 wast
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you see its like a pyramid... Oh... oh wait.
Re: (Score:1)
Somebody needs to [1]glue two points on Bezo's and Jassy's head. [fandom.com]
[1] https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss