Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS
Thing is, cbell doesn't make it personal (in any of the calls I've seen). It's about raising the bar. He demands quality, and he gets it. His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point. They think ripping into people is the goal.
I've got a project this year that I'm told is on his radar. I'm not terrified. I'm excited, because it means I have to deliver the best I am capable of and I'll get help to do it.
> His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point
couldn't agree more. Almost every day of the week now with AWS, org, service, and team level ops meetings, and most of them miss the forest for the trees
Like you, I don't think those meetings were particularly brutal but merely kept plain and honest, and more importantly, were of great learning value besides being a fantastic demonstration of leadership by cbell.
It's funny how differently people respond to that type of stuff.
I grew up playing pretty competitive sports. Being ripped apart in front of my peers was a once a week occurrence for me for most of my life. I had no interest in doing it to anyone else, but it didn't seem like a big deal, and didn't bother me much.
My first job was at a company where it happened a lot. I didn't realize how toxic it was until I started talking with co-workers who were having panic attacks from it.
Yep. Not sports here, but military. I will take a dressing down, public or otherwise, over office politics and some of the corporate shenanigans that I have encountered in my private sector career. Give it to me straight, let me know how bad I fucked up, and what we can do to fix it, or walk me out the door.
That said, I also understand that this doesn't work for alot of people.
Same for me. My high school and college hockey coaches could really let you have it. They never pulled you aside and did it in private either. My college coach had episodes that would make even Bobby Knight look like a pussycat. He once had a roll-on-the-floor grappling fight with a teammate in the locker room between periods. (Coach had a big tactical advantage: he wasn't wearing skates) When I ended up working on a trading desk the impromptu performance review broadsides -- in front of everyone -- felt very familiar.
It's actually a rare opportunity that someone smart can "rip me apart" for the right reason. Candid truth does not hurt. It stimulates growth. In contrast, the worst place is where everyone is nice, but does not tell you what you have done wrong.
Candid truths can be shared in blameless postmortems and a hundred other ways. An executive shouting at someone in a large meeting is an ego trip, nothing more.
As someone who has been on these calls multiple times, I think "rip someone apart" was an attempt to portray the bluntness with which feedback was provided but (as other commenters have mentioned) not to import any ad hominem attack characteristics to the feedback. Although admittedly the language used was contrary to that. While Amazon certainly has its flaws and has plenty of room to grow in the hospitable work environment category, cbell's feedback on weekly calls is not one of those areas imo.
Blameless is often pointless because sometimes something about the person is the problem. If the project failed because Bob ran it and Bob is too risk averse, then you can't fix it without talking about Bob. Bob either needs to figure out how to be less risk averse (hard and time consuming journey) or Bob shouldn't run projects that require risk taking.
Doesn't mean Bob is bad or gets fired, but he is part of the picture.
The whole blameless thing is so weak - if there's something about you that caused the failure, don't you want to know?
The key mental shift (for me anyway) is that if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed. You need to design a better system when the flaw in the system is the people. What that often looks like is changing/instituting processes such that quantitative measure (metrics, checklists, etc) governs decisions (thereby removing much, but importantly not all, of the human element), or you design processes in such a way that one person is not in charge of making the decision (the "two person rule", CRs, leadership approval). There are of course other tools but these two are pretty common in my experience.
> if a system can be brought to its knees by a single person, then the system is very likely flawed.
That just means that the person who designed the system deserves the blame.
I'm only half-joking here. You can't just rely on the "system" – someone needs to be responsible, either for the decision or for creating the system that makes the decision.
Having a system/process is not about removing accountability, it's about reducing discretion/cognitive load where it's been identified as risky. In fact, having a system/process in place to point to and say "this individual did not follow the steps/process/rules" makes an unbiased conversation about their performance much more possible.
Yes and this works when you're doing something for the 10th time. It totally doesn't work when you're doing something innovative and risky, which I assume is the kinds of conversations we're talking about here (this subthread is contextual to a senior amazon exec, he's probably not PMing someone forgetting to change the backup tapes)
If your root cause analysis leads to a preventative fix that amounts to “humans should not make mistake X” you haven’t done anything to prevent recurrence.
I listen to the calls weekly. No one shouts. No one degraded others. Cbell's power is that he doesn't have an ego in these calls.
The blameless postmortems are reviewed in these meetings, and the findings challenged, to ensure they really got to the root cause and lessons are learned.
I once almost got to present my post mortem, but it wasn't high enough priority that week. I wish it had been. It would have been ripped apart, but I would have gotten the feedback from the smartest people in the company on how to make my system better.
