Many people in the tech world have by now heard about Tim Bray’s departure from Amazon, as well as read Brad Porter’s retort on the matter.
In this article, I’m sharing some thoughts about how I read into this.
Disclaimer: I am currently transitioning out of my Cisco leadership role, and am no longer leading Cisco’s Silicon One SDK team. All thoughts and opinions in this article are my own. With that, let’s get going.
One of the most underappreciated complexities we have in life is the ability to figure out what really is going on. We often have little to no visibility into actual data and details, and little relevant experience to analyze what the data we have actually means.
What is an Amazon Distinguished Engineer?
Distinguished Engineer is the highest-ranking Amazon technical position. Hierarchy-wise, it equates to a Google Fellow, Microsoft Technical Fellow or Intel Senior Fellow. OK, I guess that really doesn’t make things any clearer. Let’s try again.
An Amazon Distinguished Engineer (DE for short) is an engineering superstar. If you can imagine someone who can do most anything, tech-wise, that’s the type of person. To quote Brad, Amazon has ~20 DE-, out of almost a million employees. Putting that in perspective, Amazon has 175 fulfillment centers in the world — almost 10x more than it has DE-s. That’s how critical these folks are.
If you imagine a tech-maverick, sitting in a dark room and coding 24/7, think again. These are people who have intimate knowledge of Amazon’s business, anything from top-secret new business plans, strategic acquisitions being considered, intelligence on the competition, and anything else you can think of. They make super-tough technical and execution calls daily; think about the complexities of taking a mortgage — these folks make decisions of much higher complexity and uncertainty every day.
The upshot of this is that we should not think of these folks as people with rash judgement, or with a lack of understanding of what Amazon is. They may be wrong, but it is unlikely that they are uninformed, or that they do not possess the skills to analyze the situation.
That said, they are not any more or less moral than anyone else; only that they are calculated and typically have an excellent judgement.
Tim Bray says he “snapped”. How does that fit “calculated”?
“Snap!” makes it sound like Tim lost it. Going through the text, it becomes clear that this is just as calculated as one would expect from a senior leader: he went through the “proper channels” (more on that soon), had multiple discussions, and only after making sure he could not reconcile the situation with his moral code, chose to quit.
This definitely describes a person in deep moral conflict, but not one who lost it. It’s fair to discuss whether his choice is correct, but it is unlikely that it was made without consideration of a uniquely talented individual with a proven track-record of making tough calls.
As for the million dollars he mentioned — my guess would be that he may not be rich, but is definitely well-off and not in any financial risk. I would guess he felt quitting would give him more happiness overall, and went with that.
So yes, he “snapped” in the sense of having a moral burden too high to bear, but definitely not in the sense of losing it.
Isn’t Amazon worried of bad publicity?
Hard to say. A few points to remember though:
- There are little to no reasonable alternatives to Amazon, more so in a time where people are isolated at home.
- Amazon leaders know about the efforts they’re making to keep warehouses and customers safe, which can make them believe others will see the big picture as well. Many of these people are engineers that may conclude that what they’re doing is for the greater good, and so is acceptable — even if some people suffer due to that.
- Firing people quickly and early is a warning shot — you only need to do this once to make sure all your employees know it’s risky to protest publicly. You get some bad PR, but the workforce impact remains for a long time.
I do not know what Elon Musk thought when he tweeted “Funding secured” in 2018, but I would not be surprised if he contemplated and decided the potential penalties are worth it to make sure short-sellers know Tesla is risky business for them, and lay off Tesla stock.
I’ve seen other response from Amazon employees; it doesn’t seem like they’re afraid to go public.
Anton Okmyanskiy (and probably others) have commented on this publicly as well, expressing agreement with some of Tim’s comments.
I think this was spelled out correctly by Tim: Amazon engineers are highly paid (read: can stay home for a few months until they get their next gig), and can typically walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.
Many engineering companies know that an atmosphere of fear will hurt the bottom line, and no company vying for the best talent in the world wants to have the type of bad publicity associated with firing your engineering force for speaking up.
Warehouse employees do not have that type of power over Amazon, hence the effectiveness of control by fear.
What about Brad Porter’s response?
Brad’s response revolves around several key points:
- Amazon is moving crazy-fast in response to COVID-19, prioritizing employee health and critical customer needs above short-term profit.
- Associates are valued employees, and Amazon does everything it can to keep them safe (and happy) in a highly-competitive employment market.
- Tim Bray’s take that “Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential” is flat-out wrong.
Amazon probably is moving crazy-fast to tackle the challenges posed by COVID-19. It is one of the most flexible company at this scale in the world, and very probably #1.
To put that in perspective, Jeff Bezos knows this is good for business. You can read more on Amazon’s COVID-19 related expansion plans here. It is certain that Amazon will do all it can to capitalize on this huge opportunity, and ensuring its warehouses and associates are long-term safe is key to that.
However, one of Brad’s statements may actually give us more insight: “Amazon is more like an ant farm that can adapt extremely quickly”.
All workers in an ant farm are important, but are also expendable if that is in the interest of the queen or colony. During a crisis, they’re at increased risk. Moreover, colony leadership (a.k.a the queen) would not accept any of these workers “rebelling” while it executes the master plan.
Ask anyone whether he’d like to be a worker ant, and the answer is clear.
Furthermore, people like Brad (and many others in engineering) are working day-and-night to automate such tasks; do not think for a moment Amazon would continue paying an associate the moment it can be replaced by a machine.
Lastly, Brad ignores the huge disparity between engineers and associates. Many engineers — definitely Amazon Distinguished Engineers — can just stay at home during a crisis if they want, and quit if that’s not acceptable by their employer. Staying home for a few months, or even a year, is typically not an issue when you make that kind of money.
An associate who quits does not have that luxury, and may find him/her-self in debts in a few weeks — more so during these times.
Brad being a Distinguished Engineer (and you now know what that means), I’m sure he is fully aware of these points.
How do you reconcile Amazon’s internal urgency with these firings?
To the best of my judgement, I believe Tim’s analysis is correct. Dealing with criticism can be tough on anyone; and while I believe Amazon leadership is very good at dealing with it, it may very well be that top execs felt that “we are working hard to ensure employee safety, and the rebelling warehouse workers are causing huge damage by not seeing that”.
While these leaders are all very senior, and should not be excused from their responsibility to this situation, I do acknowledge that they are probably all working super-hard at this time, and may make bad calls — one that impact people’s lives — due to exhaustion, bad judgement, or just mistakes. Moreover, in a society where litigation and argumentation are the norm, any hint at an apology immediately becomes a business risk; that may lead leadership to commit to a wrong path just to avoid an apology.
If Amazon leadership believes firing these employees was wrong, it would be a leadership act to rectify that.
So, is Amazon evil?
Probably not — at least not more than most other large corporations.
As Anton stated, Amazon is simply a reflection of the society it’s a part of — a highly capitalistic one. It has become so good at what it does, so prevalent in our daily lives, that its actions are amplified.
Some of us may remember how Microsoft was once The Empire, and Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan. Both are no longer the case. Perhaps Amazon, like other organizations, needs to go through growing pains to evolve into being more accepting to criticism from within — being able to contain it without resorting to firings.
To quote Lord Acton, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. So long as Amazon does not encounter limits to its power (as happened to Microsoft during its anti-trust case in the early 2000-s), its growing power and potential of becoming “The Empire” will remain a concern.
To be clear though, I do believe that most people working at Amazon — including its top leadership, all the way up to Jeff Bezos — are good people, striving to make the world better to the best of their ability and understanding.
Final thoughts
At the time of this writing, Tim’s post has >600 comments, almost all supportive. Brad’s has ~150, with some support from Amazon employees and some back-and-forth discussions.
Top Amazon leadership — Distinguished Engineers, SVPs and of course Jeff Bezos — is made of hyper-intelligent people. Assuming they are anything but capable of grasping complex situations would be a gross underestimation of their capabilities.
It’s hard to believe that Tim is uninformed, and no other data contradicts his key point — that this firing was unjustifiable. In parallel, it is clear that Amazon is doing almost everything possible to safely scale its warehouse operations to tackle COVID-19 challenges and opportunities. It does so, first and foremost, since this is a huge business opportunity.
Amazon is an amazing company; to a large extent, it embodies what may be the best our variant of capitalism can get. We can all hope that Jeff Bezos will voluntarily focus on improving Amazon’s culture by providing paid sick leave, more paid vacation days, and being more receptive to whistle-blowers. To the pessimistic, I will say that following Jeff’s behavior, there are many signs that he is — like almost all people — a good man trying to do good, whether we agree with his actions or not.
At the end of the day, it is up to us as a society to choose the norm. If we want the absolute cheapest prices — or absolute highest profits — our employees, leaders and corporations will aim to deliver, whatever the cost. This does not absolve Amazon or its leadership from responsibility, but we’d be mistaken to expect any other result as long as these are the rules of the game.
Amazon — as big as it is — is just one company. To make everyone’s life better, we need to enable a level playing field by changing the game, not the players.