Amazon to Google to Amazon (a2g2a), Part 1
Thoughts on boomeranging back to Amazon after working at Google
I recently boomeranged back to Amazon after 4 years at Google. Prior to my time at Google, I had spent 11+ years at Amazon. This is a collection of mini-articles I posted on LinkedIn as I encountered different things that got my attention. Just to be silly, I coined the hashtag a2g2a. Follow me on LinkedIn for more!
a2g2a: On Being a Boomerang
Being a Boomerang is a unique experience.
The first time you join a company, you really don’t know much about it other than things you read online and comments from your friends. You really don’t know if you’ll fit there. Starting in a new place is a leap of faith. You begin with a somewhat romanticized view of your new company and hopefully very excited you’re making more money than you were before you joined. In some ideal cases, you found your home and you’re perfectly happy and never want to leave. But more often than not, at some point the “honeymoon” period ends and you start getting annoyed by the little things. Your initial compensation handshake wears off and you start realizing you can make just as much money or more somewhere else. Or, inertia kicks in and you are not 100% happy but doing something about it is simply too much effort (prep for interviews and learning a new tech stack and a new culture are exhausting).
The second time you join a company is entirely different. You know exactly what you’re getting into. You know how the sausage is made. And you are aware it’s not always pretty. Things inside any big tech company are messy and far from perfect. I spent 11 years at Amazon before, so I know the company deeply. I have a laundry list of things that annoy me and wish I could change. But I rejoined fully knowing all these things. And also coming back with a newly found appreciation of things Amazon offers me I didn’t even know were important to my life until I left. The 3 things that I’m glad to have in my life again are (1) Leadership Principles, (2) an extremely high bar for writing and expressing ideas, (3) the contagious and uniquely amazonian intensity and sense of urgency to Work Hard, Have Fun and Make History around me.
a2g2a: New Employee Orientation
In 2024, onboarding at Amazon as a new employee feels like a well-oiled machine. My embarkation (pun here) has been smooth!
First time I onboarded at Amazon was in 2009. We were a smallish company of 3k engineers starting hypergrowth, so the process was pretty informal. Somebody spent 30 minutes going over benefits, then she played a 15 minute video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon, we were handed our laptops and badges, and an hour later I was writing my first piece of code (fun fact: that piece of code ended up in TPSGenerator many years later!). That was kinda it. You’re now an Amazonian, now go do some work!
I onboarded at Google in 2020 just as the pandemic shut down the world. I was hoping it’d be like The Internship (that dumb movie with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson). Instead, well-intentioned Googlers were trying really hard to make us feel welcome via hours of GVC, but we were all trying to figure out how this “remote” thing even worked. I got my noogler hat 2 or 3 months after my first day. All in all it felt pretty underwhelming. I imagine it’s probably better now.
Where today’s Amazon new employee orientation shines is in crisply explaining our culture and DNA to new amazonians. I am a returning amazon-veteran, so I knew all these things by heart, but I still watched with delight every single video, out of curiosity. The videos on Leadership Principles are pure gold.
When I joined Google, I tried very hard to grasp the DNA of the company. I asked five people: What does it mean to be ‘googley’? and I got five different answers. A few scattered axioms like “Don’t be Evil” and “Respect the { User | Opportunity | each other }” help, but fall short of articulating culture.
You can argue whether having a strongly defined culture is a good thing or a bad thing. Personally I think it’s a good thing, but others might feel it as cult-ish / indoctrination / fill-in-the-blanks. It is absolutely true that, as far as culture is concerned, Amazon’s is so strongly defined that some personality types thrive and some do not; whereas Google’s is so loosely defined that it’s a more inclusive place overall. What I learned at Google and I’d like to bring back a little bit is that awareness of how to bring other people to the table.
Again, personal opinion only here, but to me, Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast
a2g2a: Company meetings
Yesterday I attended the Amazon Company Meeting. My first one was 15 years ago.
I attended many Company Meetings before, while at Microsoft. Back in the nineties, they would bus tens of thousands of microsofties across Lake Washington and we would descend upon the Kingdome (a stadium long defunct) to lovingly hear Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Steve put on quite a show. He was sweaty, agitated, and passionately scream about how we needed to destroy the competition. “We gotta destroy Sun!”, he’d yell. Woooohoooo, we would respond. “We gotta destroy Netscape!”, he’d continue. Woooohoooo! I was young, dumb and full of testosterone, so his competitive nature resonated with me. Steve always ended with a standing ovation.
And so in 2009, I curiously joined my first Amazon Company Meeting, half-expecting Jeff Bezos to get up there all sweaty and scream at me. Instead, Jeff was down to earth, white shirt, jeans, sneakers, took questions from the audience candidly, and spoke about “the customer” a lot. I turned to the guy next to me. “When is he going to talk about who we need to destroy?” I asked impatiently. I learned that day Amazon Works Backwards from the Customer, not Competitors.
Throughout the years I never once missed an Amazon Company Meeting. The most memorable was 2013 when Jeff gave me a Just Do It Award in front of thousands of amazonians, and I got to hang out backstage with him. It was only a few minutes but the 1:1 with Jeff made a huge impact to my entire career. Still got that shoe.
And so in 2020, when I joined Google, I was equally curious about the Company Meetings, so I attended all of them as well. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison because Google today isn’t Google 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, and you can’t have the same level of candor when 120k engineers are listening to every word you say (and a few of those are leaking every single word you say which then affects your stock price…), but the entire thing felt rehearsed and inauthentic. I found Sundar to be a thoughtful and calm leader, but also not relatable, and lacking pizzazz, conviction and courage. He was cautious and reserved. I didn’t learn anything from him. I did not feel inspired by a vision. The VPs that got up on stage were very rehearsed, inauthentic and peppered their speeches with weasel words and platitudes. My low point was the All-Hands after the 12k-people layoffs. Sundar and Ruth (Porat) botched the entire thing. I’ve literally never seen two leaders more out of touch with the people they were supposed to be leading in my entire life. I loved the googlers I worked with, but not senior leaders.
Yesterday I was wondering: Would Amazon be what I remembered? The all-hands felt surprisingly familiar. Sure, it was a bit more polished, and if I was presenting to 100k people live I’d probably rehearse a few times. But it was quirky, peculiar, and still very amazonian at its core.
a2g2a: Reasons Not to Promote
When you endorse somebody for a promotion at Amazon, you MUST provide Reasons Not to Promote. This is in recognition that we all have gaps and places where we could use a little growth. Nobody is perfect. In fact, if an endorsement lacked Reasons Not to Promote, it was removed from the promotion package. Or if it had too many weasel words and platitudes, it too was often challenged (“X is a very nice person and a good developer” — did you spot the weasel words?).
Occasionally this was weaponized. It also led to some awkward situations, like when I was up for promotion to Senior Engineer and I got a frantic text from my manager saying “Director X is citing ABC as reasons not to promote you, do you have any data to show improvement? I need it in the next 3 minutes if you wanna get promoted!!!” But most of the times I think it worked as intended. The desire was to trigger the right objective, data-driven, and honest discussions during the promotion decision meeting.
A couple of months after I joined Google in 2020, I was asked to endorse an engineer I worked with. I wrote my endorsement in Amazon-style, ending with Reasons Not to Promote. About a day later I got a worried text from the manager, “Hummm… do you NOT want X to be promoted???” I was confused, “I’m a huge fan of X!” I clarified. The manager explained in no uncertain terms that I was to remove the Reasons Not to Promote.
“Also, why did you say ‘Endorse’ and not ‘Strong Endorse’?”, the manager probed. At Amazon, a Strong Endorse means I’m willing to debate anybody regardless of seniority, tooth-and-nail, that this person deserves the promotion (and I did that multiple times). An Endorse means I fully endorse the promotion, simple as that. I quickly learned Google “Strong Endorse” mapped to Amazon “Endorse,” which also meant a Google “Endorse” mapped to an Amazon “Weak Endorse” or really to a “I-kind-of-don’t-really-endorse-this-person-but-I-dont-want-to-be-rude.”
Ultimately, the way that both Amazon and Google operate in this regard maps to the DNA of the company. Amazonians have a healthy disregard for social cohesion, and a very direct and factual communication style which I admit can sometimes borderline being a jerk, whereas googlers fear being jerks, to the detriment of making hard and correct business decisions sometimes.
Ultimately, the challenge is to be both direct and polite. I think both companies could learn from each other, but as for me, I’m a lot more comfortable in a culture of directness and open discussion.
a2g2a: Invent and Simplify
If you worked at Google, you know Broccoli Man. This video was an absolute classic and even in 2024 when I left Google we were passing it around. Even though it is from 2010, the overall culture it highlights is still very much present at Google today. While I found a lot of the internal developer tooling at Google amazing and magical, I also found them to be byzantine, esoteric, and overly complicated in every way. Simple tasks took way too long.
Amazon has plenty of toil in their internal tools also, but one thing I really appreciate is that one of the Leadership Principles is “Invent and Simplify” which acts as a barrier to the byzantine levels of toil I observed at Google. The importance of “Simplify” is well-articulated in that it explains how we reward engineers for solving complex problems with simple solutions. When you don’t articulate the key difference between complexity in the “problem” vs. complexity in the “solution”, smart engineers come up with complex solutions to show other smart engineers how smart they are, which is the wrong behavior to reward.
a2g2a: RTO (Return to Office)
Interesting to see how RTO (Return-to-Office) outcomes are entirely different for the two companies.
In my post today, I don’t really want to go down the path of debating whether RTO is “good” or “bad”. There’s very emotional and valid opinions on both sides, and it affects people’s personal lives in real ways. Please be respectful.
Whether you agree with the policy or not, for it to actually work it does need *critical mass*. Both companies have essentially the same RTO policy (3 days/week expectation), but there’s significant differences is in how the message was delivered and enforced — and the outcome.
Google’s 3-days-per-week was mostly a “pretty-please, would-you, if-you-don’t-mind” with no actual enforcement (but some vague threats). So most people ignored it. They still do. Leadership got frustrated and the message got less polite over time, but nothing really changed. Even as of 3 weeks ago, when I was still a Google employee, the buildings were fairly empty. That made being physically in the office significantly less useful, other than enjoying the perks of free food and massages by myself (and occasionally with 1 or 2 coworkers).
Amazon’s 3-days-per-week came with actual enforcement. Amazon used badge reader data to track when people were actually coming to the office, with consequences. It does feel a bit draconian, but you can’t argue with the effectiveness of saying “we have a policy that we believe is business-critical and we’ll enforce it or else.” I appreciate that when I come to the office, I can find my coworkers there and we can have f2f meetings. There’s critical mass for RTO to actually be effective. Amazon has picked a lane.
Personally, I have not figured out how to truly be productive and happy working remotely in the last 4 years. I respect and appreciate the fact that some people have, but I haven’t. I do like the option to stay home a day or two, skipping my long commute, working from a lounge chair in my backyard on a sunny day. But there’s nothing like the energy in the room of a good group meeting, or the chemistry of a face-to-face 1:1, or the enthusiasm of two engineers standing in front of a physical whiteboard drawing boxes and arrows with markers brainstorming about the future. Or the bonding of sharing a meal or a walk between buildings with a coworker. I feel energized when I’m physically in the office. It literally charges my batteries. I’ve been coming to the office 4x/week and loving it.
