The video explores the internal culture and strategic decisions at Amazon, particularly in the context of recent layoffs and organizational changes. The speaker, an ex-Amazon employee, shares his insights and concerns regarding Amazon's Layoff practices, the company's focus on customer satisfaction, and how team dynamics have been affected by these practices. He highlights the complexity and impact of decisions taken by Amazon's leadership on employees' Morale and workflow.

The discussion also touches upon Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's approach to strengthening the company's culture, emphasizing the company's focus on maintaining innovation and growth. The speaker reflects on the unique culture at Amazon, where starting and growing from a low-level position is possible but challenging. He shares personal observations on whether Amazon's strategies effectively balance innovation and maintaining a healthy work environment for employees.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Bureaucracy [bjʊˈrɑːkrəsi] - (n.) A system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives. In a work environment, it refers to excessive business procedures and rules.

When I joined the team, I was one of the two employees that the manager managed. By the time I was leaving that team, that manager was in charge of like 25 people.

2. Layoffs [ˈleɪˌɔfs] - (n.) Discharging surplus employees, often temporarily, from their jobs.

There's been a bunch of random chunks of layoffs throughout.

3. Morale [məˈræl] - (n.) The confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline of a person or group at a particular time.

...destroying the Morale of the team.

4. Ingenuity [ˌɪndʒəˈnjuːəti] - (n.) The quality of being clever, original, and inventive.

I appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.

5. Frugality [fruːˈgæləti] - (n.) The quality of being economical with money or resources.

...strong urgency for most big opportunities. It's a race. High ownership, fast decision making, Scrappiness and Frugality.

6. Obsession [əbˈsɛʃən] - (n.) An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on one's mind.

To this day, I don't think I've ever worked somewhere that was so willing to throw everyone and everything under the bus to try and do anything that makes the customer's life slightly better.

7. Hierarchical [haɪəˈrɑːrkɪkəl] - (adj.) A system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority.

L five is the role between like junior and senior.

8. Vertical [ˈvɜːrtɪkl] - (n.) A business term focusing on operating or developed by a specific segment of the company or market.

Amazon was one of the earlier companies to go all in on the vertical slices model.

9. Severance [ˈsɛvərəns] - (n.) The action of ending a connection or relationship.

...because the engineers who have been around the longest, who are going to be the most insistent on getting to stay at home, and they have a taste of it.

10. Conviction [kənˈvɪkʃən] - (n.) A firmly held belief or opinion.

Leaders have conviction and are Tenacious.

Inside Amazon's Culture Challenges and Transformations Unveiled

Message from CEO Andy Jassy strengthening our culture and teams. Oh, boy. If you didn't know, I actually did work at Amazon, and not just when I was at twitch. I was an Amazon intern all the way back in 2015. So I have a lot of thoughts on Amazon's culture, the way they run things, and how the experience is as a person working there.

Message from CEO Andy Jassy strengthening our culture and teams. This is very interesting, especially when you consider like Layoff culture and all the stuff that has been going on in the industry as a whole lately. When were the last Amazon layoffs? Come on, Amazon. Ah, yeah, theres been a bunch of random chunks of layoffs throughout. There were 2022, 2023. A whole bunch. But yeah, this confirms the weirdness of how Amazon is doing layoffs. And I do have thoughts on this because it sucks.

The one and done Layoff where its like, okay, were downsizing, were cutting this many people, youll have an email if youre still here by this time. Does that suck? Absolutely. At the very least, you get to like be done with it. It's the whole rip the band aid off thing. The thing that sucks here is that you never know when you're done ripping band aids. You don't know after the layoffs if you're just going to get hit in a few weeks or not, which just destroys the Morale of the team. And I've seen this, I've talked to a lot of people who are at twitch right now, and they got hit with two separate waves of layoffs. And then some teams got hit with a separate third one as well.

At the same time, we're growing and inventing. We're also continuing to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which isn't easy to do. Overall, I like the direction in which we're heading and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.

When I think about my time at Amazon, I never imagined I'd be at the company for 27 years. My plan, which my wife and I agreed to on a bar napkin in 1997, was to be here a few years and then move back to New York City. Part of why I stayed has been the unprecedented growth he started when they were at $15 million of annual revenue, and now they're going to be over 600 billion. The perpetual hunger to invent, the obsession with making customers lives easier and better every day, and the associated opportunities these priorities present.

So starting at l five, so starting literally just above where I was when I started. Literally where I was at Amazon about a year in and climbing all the way to CEO. That is a cool thing. Most CEO's don't climb there from a low level entry point. They might get hired in as like an exec and then become CEO. But the experience of starting at this low of a level and climbing up is very rare.

The speed at which they make decisions and move Amazon does not move fast anymore. They do not move fast at all. The Bureaucracy bits kind of real like they skip over a lot of the stuff that you see at a Google or a Microsoft.

Our culture is unique and has been one of the most critical parts of our success in our 1st 29 years. But keeping the culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the breadth of our business, their associated growth rates, the innovation required across each of them, and the number of people weve hired in the last six to eight years to pursue these endeavors is pretty unusual and it will stretch even the strongest of cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the S team and me.

And I think about it all the time. The and comma, I think about it all the time. Robot we want to operate like the world's largest startup. This means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency for most big opportunities. It's a race. High ownership, fast decision making, Scrappiness and Frugality. Deeply connected collaborations. You need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems and a shared commitment to each other.

This bit here about the world's largest startup, again, I would say this is one of the things I think Amazon does quite well. We're at a point now where tools are too good to have your teams separated based on points in your technical stack, having your back end team, your front end team, your mobile team, your support team, your sales team as these separate groups based on the role rather than the vertical you're solving.

Like why would somebody who's selling to vendors on Amazon be on the same team as somebody selling AWS infrastructure? They're both sales, but if you put them under the same manager, you're stupid. Amazon was one of the earlier companies to go all in on the vertical slices model, where instead of there being a sales team that covers everybody or a backend team that covers everybody, there were individual small vertical teams for each of the different things Amazon was doing.

Two areas the S team and I have been thinking about the last several months are the following. First, do we have the right structure to drive the level of ownership and speed that we desire? And two, are we set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business that we can. We think we can be better on both.

On the first topic, we've always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery focused and missionary teammates. Also mostly true. I mentioned before, customer obsession. Ownership is a big one too.

I'll write. A lot's a fun one. The goal with this one is that we hire people who, if they feel strongly about something, it's more likely than not true, but also learn and be curious right after, which means you're okay with being wrong and learning from it. This is the one I was looking for. Have backbone, disagree, and commit. This phrase has haunted me now for like almost a decade. I've went from loving it to hating it back and forth, constantly settling at an okay spot with it.

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.

I think this is both like one of the strengths and weaknesses of Amazon, where, like, when there's a disagreement on something, they don't recommend how you settle the disagreement. They just say, pick one. So if there's like one person who is the main owner of the project, somebody who's maybe even higher up but doesn't own the project, and they disagree on a way to do the thing, the person who owns it says, sorry, I own it.

As we've grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have in the last many years, we've understandably added a lot of managers in that process. We've also added more layers than we had before. It's created artifacts that we'd like to change. For example, the triple pre meeting for pre meeting for the decision. Meeting a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before moves forward.

At Twitch, most decisions we make are two way doors, and as such, we want more of our teammates feeling like they can move fast without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms, and layers that create overhead and waste valuable time. Look at that founder mode.

So we're asking each estimate organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of quarter. 120 25. This can have benefits and negatives. I was on a team once where when I joined the team, I was one of the two employees that the manager managed. By the time I was leaving that team, that manager was in charge of like 25 people.

Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers, decrease Bureaucracy, and strengthen our organization's ability to make customers lives better and easier every day. I hate these giant sentences with the like comma, comma, comma, with like, full sentence points. They're working to complete these goals over the next few months.

To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other. And culture. That's a fucking sentence. The second issue is getting better set up. I'm not going to even try to read this. It's a mess. Today we're going to return to being in the office the way that we were before the onset of COVID Here's the big news.

We look back over the last five years. We continue to believe the advantages of being together in the office are significant. I've previously explained the benefits, as he did in post in February of last year. But in summary, we've observed that it's easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture. Collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.

Teaching and learning from one another are more seamless, and teams tend to be better connected to one another. If anything, the last 15 months we've been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits. This is also an interesting point, and also where people are gonna start getting mad at me.

To be clear, I don't think working from home makes you individually less capable of contributing code to solve a specific problem. I do think it means that planning gets more difficult around those things, and you have to have more processes, more communication methods and styles, and more management in order to make sure people are moving in the right direction, because it's a lot harder to know if somebody's going the wrong way, if the friction for talking to them about it is as high as a slack message.

The in person casual conversations are a huge benefit to the individuals and to the company. And I can see why people, especially business leaders, want that. Because if you want to retain your employees, you want to have your employees get better every year, and you want to be able to justify promoting them, giving them raises, and seeing them make more impact in person makes seeing that easier. It makes feeding into that easier, and it makes growth significantly easier.

So I understand. That said, when growth isn't the focus on an individual level, instead, delivery is being able to lock in at home, just sit down with my laptop and code out a solution to a problem that's well defined, that is a lot better than being distracted in the office trying to do the same thing. And I can say 100%, certainly the best code I've written was not written in a goddamn office.

Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or parents, if you need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people would work remotely.

Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances like the ones mentioned above, or if you already have a remote work exception approved through your S team leader.

The problem with this is you're going to churn a lot of your best engineers. To be fair, that might be a specific goal, because the engineers who have been around the longest, who are going to be the most insistent on getting to stay at home, and they have a taste of it, they also would have the highest severance in separation. And they would also be the ones that look the worst if you lay them off.

But if you can get them to quit, you don't have to pay them the severance, and then you can replace them with people who are a lot cheaper. Cause the markets, like rates for hiring engineers are a lot lower at the moment. And then scale them up. Cause everybody's in office again. That's a financially good thing to do. It sucks.

I would never have, like at twitch, even pre Covid, I was working remote one to two days a week. I just would call in for my first meeting always. I never showed up for my first meetings. If they were before noon, I would call in from bed because I have a degenerate sleep schedule, show up for the free lunch, have my favorite thing, which is the lunch conversations with my fellow nerds, go to whatever meetings, try to get some work done on my desk, fail outright, have my free dinner, go skate for like four to 6 hours, get home between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, and then code till three in the morning, restart the next day.

In many ways, honestly, I kind of missed that. But this feels like a push away from that, and I have feelings. I'm scared that, like, the next theos might not be able to work at an Amazon like company. If it changes this way.

Before the pandemic, if you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or parents, if you need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people would work remotely. This was understood, and it will be moving forward as well. Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward.

Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances like the ones mentioned above, or if you already have a remote work exception approved through your S team leader. And here is where it crumbles.

To be clear, companies need process to run effectively and process does not equal Bureaucracy, but unnecessary. An excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I'll read these emails and action them accordingly. Apparently this is because he created a Bureaucracy mailbox for examples where there are things that are blocking people from making shit happen.

That's kind of cool to have a place people can send their complaints like, hey, I had three meetings for this thing that shouldn't have had a meeting. I would have abused that.

If you're going to be an engineering manager, you should know how to do engineering. Same as with most other managerial jobs, the accounting manager can still do accounting if needed. I absolutely agree with this point. Good managers deeply understand the work their employees are doing, not just what they're individually working on at that moment, but the field they're working in and the ways to deliver.

Good managers are people that the employees can look to for help and guidance in tough situations and feel understood by and if you haven't coded in eight years, you do not understand me as an engineer. And if I stop coding, I will be a terrible manager for my team. It's one of the many reasons I try to code as often as I possibly can.

Amazon, Leadership, Technology, Corporate Culture, Workplace Dynamics, Organizational Change