The things I love about Google are the things I dislike about Google
How Google hires Dreamers and Amazon hires Builders
I spent 11 years at Amazon (as a Principal Engineer in Developer Tools), and have been at Google for the last 2.5 years (as a Senior Staff Engineer on Developer Infrastructure for Integration Testing). Both positions were company-wide engineering productivity roles that put me in touch with a vast array of teams and exposed me to both cultures deeply.
And I’ve come to the following epiphany and paradox:
The things I like about Google are the things I dislike about Google
The things I like about Amazon are the things I dislike about Amazon
If you came here hoping to find a juicy tell-all story about how Amazon is a bad place, or how Google is a bad place, or how one is better than the other, sorry to disappoint you. I genuinely loved my time at Amazon, and I’m genuinely having fun at Google today. I would recommend either of these companies as a great place to work. In both places you’ll work with extremely smart engineers and you’ll design, write, test, deploy and maintain top notch software for millions of people. But they are polar opposite ways of thinking about the world. And here I am, in the middle of two cultures. I’m a proud Googler with an undeniably heavy Amazon accent that just won’t go away. Some weird hybrid dude trying to figure out life.
But this isn’t my first time being a hybrid. I was born and raised in Argentina, came to the US when I was 15, and have lived here ever since. I’m Argentinian and American and I’m also neither Argentinian nor American. I’m a walking contradiction. No matter how many years I spend in the US, I’ll never truly be 100% American (but that’s alright, my wife says she likes my Latin flair). There’s traits, beliefs and behaviors that I carry deep inside, some even subconsciously, that clearly hint I’m South American (for example the amount of screaming and crying at the TV during any FIFA World Cup). But that cold rainy day in 1991 when my plane took off from Buenos Aires irrevocably changed my life. I’ll never be 100% Argentinian again. Seattle is Home. This is where I want to spend the rest of my life.
I’ve come to embrace the paradox and even welcome it. Having two cultures gives me a broader perspective of the world. I can pick and choose the things from each culture that matter to me. I can bring things from one of the cultures in my interactions with the other culture. I can view a situation from multiple perspectives. Please don’t consider this an authoritative guide on the differences between the companies: your experience may vary; here’s Google as viewed by this ex-Amazonian.
Google hires Dreamers, Amazon hires Builders
The first difference is at the intake. Who you chose to bring into your company influences your DNA. I did 813 interviews for Amazon, and have done 55 for Google so far. Both companies have challenging interview loops, and you’ll want to spend a few hundred hours on leetcode preparing for essentially very similar technical probing. But Google focuses heavily on intelligence and raw IQ, while Amazon focuses on delivery and pragmatism. Amazon is heavy on behavioral questions, not situational questions, which tends to bring in people who have demonstrated being pragmatic about delivery in their past.
What I like about Google
The amount of raw IQ and intelligence around me at Google is amazing and humbling. Everybody around me is smarter than me. People often solve hard or nearly impossible technical problems for the sheer intellectual achievement of having solved them. These are Dreamers. And the world needs them.
What I dislike about Google
Since the self-incentive to solve problems tends to be “because they’re intellectually challenging,” once they’re solved, people sometimes aren’t as motivated in what comes next. There’s a huge difference between launching something and landing something. Once you put a piece of code in production you must socialize it, educate your customers, nurture it and evolve it. Amazon was ruthlessly pragmatic and disciplined about this. The main motivation for solving a problem was not the intellectual challenge, but the impact that you could achieve once it was solved. These are Builders. And we need them too.
The verdict?
Would love a middle-ground here, and to be fair I’ve met plenty of well-balanced individuals at both companies. But ultimately I think it does come down to the interview process yielding two fairly different personality types into a company.
Google offers empathy, Amazon fires liberally
This might seem like a no brainer. Who wants to work for a company that fires people? Amazon is undeniably a harsh environment. It’s not for everyone. When I was there, we routinely fired the bottom ~5% of the engineering population. When I was a manager, I fired people. When I wasn’t a manager, I begged managers around me to fire their people. Because of this, Amazon runs extremely lean. Google on the other hand has a high bar for hiring, but once you’re a googler, you are provided with an immense psychological safety net.
What I like about Google
Not having to worry about whether you’re going to be fired tomorrow relieves a huge weight. I’m physically less tense at work. People naturally have times where they’re running on all cylinders, and times when they’re not, and Google’s approach is more holistic and long-term focused. Empathy is a good trait in a company. I believe Google cares about me as a human being.
Just a couple of days ago a buddy and I were debating this topic at lunch, and he asked me, “Have you been both at the top 5% and the bottom 5%?” Yes, yes I had. In my 25 year career at Microsoft, Amazon and Google I had been, at various times, and for various reasons, in the bottom 5%, and in the top 5%. He proceeded, “Well aren’t you glad you didn’t get fired when you hit rock bottom?”
What I dislike about Google
I think it’s just human nature to expand to whatever freedom a system offers. You can default to doing the least amount of work to not be fired. You may not even be doing this deliberately or maliciously, but subconsciously. This is exactly what I did when I was in the bottom 5%. I couldn’t see it then, but I can see it now clearly looking back. I was hurting my career, my team and my company.
This inertia is terribly contagious. It can spread through a team in any company, Google or elsewhere. One mediocre individual can normalize mediocrity and reset the bar for an entire team. Recalibrating it after that is extremely difficult. I’m not alone. Google’s CEO, Sundar, spoke very clearly about sharpening our focus recently: “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.”
The verdict?
This is just my personal theory, but I’m beginning to think that empathy towards low performers translates to lack of empathy towards high performers, and vice versa. I would love to see a middle ground here, where we aren’t afraid to put struggling individuals on performance improvement plans and fire appropriately, while at the same time we don’t insist on routinely just getting rid of the bottom x% of the population. A psychological safety net frees people to do better work, but checks and balances are healthy.
Google is polite, Amazon is blunt
The Amazon communication style is blunt, candid and raw, with very little regards to people’s feelings. It values facts and data over opinions and emotions. It’s succinct: very much to the point. My first year at Amazon, I found this off putting. Eventually it dawned on me that nobody was criticizing me as a person, and it was never really personal. I also began to like that I knew exactly where I stood with people: when they thought I was being an idiot, they said it to my face — and then, having gotten that out of the way, we’d proceed to go grab some lunch or beers together like we were old friends.
Google has fostered an environment where people are genuinely inclusive, a lot nicer and politer to each other. That was refreshing to me. People bring their full self to work without so much fear of being criticized, and it’s liberating. This provides a bigger psychological safety net in your work environment.
What I like about Google
My likelihood to run into a “jerk” at Google is extremely low. People like each other. I literally smile more at co-workers here — and they smile back. I ran into “jerks” at Amazon on a daily basis, and eventually I developed a thick skin and didn’t even notice.
Also, an environment where people are nicer to each other brings more diversity of perspectives and experiences to the table. The harshness of Amazon caused some personalities to either quit, or stay quiet out of fear of being chastised. I love working in a more inclusive environment.
What I dislike about Google
I have at times felt I couldn’t quite say something, because there was no polite way of saying it within the Google culture. I’ve been working hard on calibrating my inner-jerk to still say things that need to be said for the business and challenge my colleagues appropriately and respectfully. I sometimes jokingly start with the disclaimer, “Sorry if my ‘amazon’ shows here, but…” and people know that I’m going to slip back into amazon-bluntness style for a minute. I do think that people sometimes tiptoe around an issue just to be polite, and I wish there was a bit less worry about social cohesion and people’s feelings. This is a business.
The verdict?
Once again, I’d love to land somewhere in the middle here. I’m constantly recalibrating my communication style to be candid, while being respectful. I don’t have a silver bullet — sometimes it’s extremely difficult to be both. But I try, every day. And I encourage others around me to feel comfortable enough to be candid with me too.
Google offers freedom, Amazon has discipline
At Amazon, I spent months writing a whitepaper proposing a product and asking for funding. My doc had 345 revisions. I debated multiple Directors and VPs, but eventually, my little 6-pager made it to Jassy’s leadership and was approved. We hired engineers and built the thing. It was awesome, but exhausting. The amount of scrutiny my paper got was not for the faint of heart. I almost quit.
My first week at Google, my boss essentially told me here’s N engineers and go figure out what to do with them, I trust you. My Amazon reptilian brain almost exploded. I was not mentally prepared for that amount of freedom!
What I like about Google
Google’s culture is that if you hire really smart people and give them an immense amount of freedom, something good will come out. It has paid off handsomely well, with nine products with over a billion users each. I enjoyed this freedom myself. A year ago, we identified a little problem in engineering productivity that we thought we could apply machine learning to (more details here and here), and my Director gave us six months to figure things out. It was an ambiguous space and it was unclear exactly which way to go, so I appreciated the freedom to go chase it without leadership breathing down our necks every other day. It’s well on its way to become a critical piece of google-wide infrastructure today. I would have struggled to do something like that at Amazon.
What I dislike about Google
With freedom comes responsibility. Remember I told you earlier Amazon hires Builders and Google hires Dreamers? Just because you’re a super-smart engineer doesn’t mean you have a solid business acumen. Sometimes things get built without a deeper thought on the long-term. Or the ecosystem around them. Or whether they should be built to begin with.
In my last two and a half years at Google, I’ve played the role of the annoying guy who shows up at tech design reviews and like clockwork, asks just two questions, at the very beginning: “Why are you building this?” followed by “Who else has built this before you and why is yours different?”
The verdict?
I’d love to see us somewhere in the middle. Hire smart engineers, give them a huge amount of freedom, but provide some checks and balances, and some guardrails and discipline, to keep our company in sharp focus.
Google loves employees, Amazon loves customers
There are two things that impact a business the most: Customers, and Employees. You often hear that a picture is worth a thousand words. I can summarize my entire article with this from a 15-yr ex-googler (credit):
Like all memes, there’s satire there but also there’s some truth.
Amazon excels at Working Backwards from the customer. It’s not an accident that Customer Obsession is listed as the first Leadership Principle. But this often came at the expense of employees’ life/work balance.
From its start, Google set out to treat its employees amazingly. It’s not a coincidence that Google consistently showed up at the top of Fortune’s best companies to work for, time and time.
What I like about Google
As an employee, the perks are amazing. Great food, massages, gyms, play rooms, business travel, I could go on and on. Life/work balance is extremely healthy. I’m very much pampered and spoiled. What is there not to like?
What I dislike about Google
Amazon’s focus on business above employees has one positive: it can innovate very, veeeery quickly on behalf of customers. It can laser-focus on anything and deliver it 2x faster than any other company on Earth. Amazon is scary efficient in everything it does. Dates weren’t optional, they were commitments that were taken seriously. Everybody around you had a sense of urgency and an intensity to deliver. I miss some of that — but realize it comes with a culture that doesn’t always respect your life outside work.
What’s the verdict?
Once again — can we land somewhere in the middle here? Everybody that I interact with at Google does very deeply care about their customers, so I’ve been trying to bring in some of the Customer-Obsessed mechanisms from Amazon, like Working Backwards, to teams around me. People have been receptive and it’s been going well, so I am excited about an opportunity to combine my two cultures!
