How I went from Amazon, to Google, back to Amazon, Part 3
Thoughts on boomeranging back to Amazon after working at Google. → Part 1 | Part 2 ←
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!
Hire and Develop the Best
Amazon has a Leadership Principle dedicated to this, which includes (but is not limited to) activities such as being a mentor, organizing or presenting at internal conferences, leading communities, being an active interviewer, and many more. Basically, anything where you made the company a little better and helped others around you grow.
I quickly noticed when I joined Amazon in 2009 that amazonians took this very seriously. I don’t think this is something that got encoded into the Amazon DNA out of the goodness of Jeff Bezos’ heart. I believe Jeff recognized that as the company was doubling in size every year, it was business critical for amazonians to grow the next generation of amazonians. Not once (in all the promo discussions that I participated in) did I see a single engineer at Amazon promoted into Senior+ roles without having shown some genuine commitment to this.
When I got to Google in 2020, I was surprised how little value this had within the culture. Yes Google had a thing called “Citizenship” or “Community Contributions” that got half-heartedly mentioned during performance reviews and promotions, but it was at best a routine checkbox. I did meet some googlers that cared genuinely (I had one amazing manager and a great mentor), but I would say overall looking at the bigger picture of my 4 years there, they were the exceptions, not the norm.
I was disappointed to see not once, but multiple times, Google engineers promoted to Senior roles without having demonstrated a serious desire to making others around them better. The promotion discussion centered around their strong technical contributions and impact, which is good. But towards the end of the discussion, I would annoyingly and predictably ask the same innocent question, every time: “What has X done to make others around them better?” The manager would pause, perplexed, then proudly announce, “Oh, X did 3 interviews this year!” or “Ah, X has one mentee!” That’s an extremely low bar for a Senior Engineer, regardless of how amazing their technical body of work was. When I challenged this, I was overruled, every time.
Again: there were googlers who were exemplary in their commitment to help others grow, but it was always just *specific* people. The culture itself (particularly during perf discussions) tended to be “what is the least amount of work that I must do to get the ‘citizenship’ checkmark?”
Frustrated, I wrote a whitepaper, got VP buyin and circulated it broadly to a couple of thousand googlers around me. It was well received, and I think it changed some minds. But it felt like swimming upstream and against the company DNA.
Growing others around you matters. But ultimately, human nature is to follow the financial incentives. Make sure you work in a company that values and rewards people for making others around them better — in earnest and not as a checkmark.
Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
This is a core Leadership Principle at Amazon and it is defined as “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
You may feel amazonians give you jarringly direct feedback at times. At the beginning, back in 2009, I found it borderline rude and off-putting, and downright terrifying when coming from a Principal or Director. But I came to appreciate this aspect of the culture — and miss it terribly once I left Amazon. Once I understood it was not personal, I always knew where I stood with people, and I knew I was always going to get honest feedback about my ideas — even the terrible ones.
I was reminded of that a couple of weeks ago. I had to write an endorsement for a promotion. I was happy to do it but I was in a rush, so my writeup was subpar. The manager sent it right back to me and asked me to rewrite it. He was absolutely right — I was thankful that he had the Backbone (incidentally that’s also Insist on the Highest Standards). My second version was much better.
On the other hand, Google places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on being “nice” to each other which is a lovely sentiment but it ends up incorrectly translating to “don’t say anything that might offend somebody or hurt somebody’s feelings, at all cost.” And so in the pursuit of “googlyness” the culture sacrifices directness, honesty and candid feedback. There were so many instances where I found myself wondering, “What is this person actually saying to me right now? Do they agree or not? Please, for the love of God, stop beating around the bush and just get to the point!”
My low point came when one of my managers at Google shared that a co-worker had provided pretty negative feedback about me. The feedback was fair, but I was frustrated because I had been meeting with that individual every other week for a year and they had not once said any of those things to my face. I wish they had — we could have had a much deeper, meaningful, relationship and I could have acted upon those things earlier.
Another example: My Google leadership hired an expensive outside speaker to conduct a full day workshop on Radical Candor — yet a month later everybody had reverted to their old behaviors. Again: what you bake into the DNA of the company really, really matters. Unless the culture enshrines it, it’s hard to go against the current. Amazon enshrined that this a critical part of its DNA.
I did learn from my time at Google though. I believe it’s possible to be both “direct” and “nice.” In the past, I was more worried with being direct than with being nice. I think Google made me a better human being, but without having lost my Amazon directness. I hope :)
Awards
This is one where I stand somewhere between Amazon and Google, actually.
Amazon is stingy in awards. Both in terms of the number of them and compensation. The award I’m most proud of is the Just Do It Award in 2013. This is a company-wide award that was granted twice a year by Jeff himself (now Andy). You did not get any cash. In fact it wasn’t much of an actual physical award, it was a size 18 Nike shoe. In terms of material value it was worthless, but in terms of bragging rights it was priceless. I got to go up on stage and shake hands with Bezos in front of tens of thousands of amazonians. And I know my thing competed with about 20 other submissions that year. So it genuinely felt like an accomplishment to be proud of, despite the fact I got nothing material out of it. To this date, it’s one of the highlights of my career (https://lnkd.in/gm7kZPhA).
Google is lavish in awards. During my 4 years there I got 15–20 different awards that added up to ~25k. That was lovely. There were Peer Bonuses, which anybody could just send to anybody for doing anything (vetted by the recipient’s manager but very rarely rejected). I think it was $300 and you could give up to 3 every quarter? There were Spot Bonuses, granted by managers generally in your direct chain, usually $1000-$2500. I got a few for things like being one of the organizers of an internal conference, publishing a paper externally, and being a judge in a competition. Then they were org-wide awards: I (along many others) received the Google Cloud Tech Impact Award in 2021 — that was $3k (used to be a trip to Hawaii but Google has gotten stingy hahahah). I could keep going.
Sounds awesome, no?
The dark side is: I started seeing just how much behavior was driven by these awards. To quote Broccoli Man, the single best video to understand Google culture (https://lnkd.in/gxGVs9iZ): “1 peer bonus? I don’t get out of bed for less than 3!!!”
The second thing I started disliking is that a lot of them came down to Participation Trophies. I was a judge for a prestigious org-wide competition, and I realized that 90% of submissions got the award. Let me be painfully blunt: when 9 out of 10 people get an award, it’s NOT an award. My job as a judge was to rubber stamp the winners for optics. Some had done truly amazing things, some not so much.
The tension is: if you thank Everybody for Everything, you thank Nobody. I do not need to constantly be congratulated for literally just doing my job.
Having said that, I think there’s a thing or two that Amazon could learn from Google. I liked that there was a company-wide culture and mechanism for consistently and publicly recognizing people who exhibited exemplary behavior. So here’s my challenge to us amazonians: Let’s all collectively take a step forward towards being more openly appreciative of each other. Right now, think about somebody that went above and beyond, and send them a Shout-Out!
Goomics
One thing I always found refreshing about Google is how openly and freely googlers criticize various aspects of their culture. I think it’s healthy. In other parts of corporate America, some of the comments I heard internally would have been… career limiting.
Google has a beloved thing called Memegen which googlers use to constantly create and share memes among themselves. I would venture the guess that it costs the company hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity lost (you don’t believe me? 120k engineers * $350k/yr comp * 1% of their time = $400MM/yr for example…). Comics/memes are a fascinating and surprisingly honest window into a culture — deep beliefs, sentiment, trends.
If you want an insight into Google’s culture, there’s always “Software Engineering at Google” (a really good book by my friend Titus Winters and others), and “Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems” (also another really good book).
…but also…
I absolutely love Manu Cornet’s amazing Goomics books (you can order them on Amazon or go to https://goomics.net). Manu spent more than 14 years at Google so I think he knows a thing or two about the culture. He has such insightful and clever ways of capturing the little subtle details of the culture that make Google… Google…
I read these books my first day at Google, and I re-read them my last day at Google, 4 years later. So much resonated — both good, bad and in-between.
Adding a couple of my favorite ones as teasers — more at https://goomics.net. Worth a look — there goes YOUR productivity for the next hour (sorry).
