[angarg12]

Is it the case though? I mean, it's extremely convenient for leadership to say that of course it isn't the fault, it's the fault of new employees and WFH.

But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault? they are the ones who allowed or enabled bloating and empire building, and they are the ones who didn't intervene when culture started deteriorating.

Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly?

TL;DR it's very rich for execs to blame rank and file employees, as if they are powerless to change anything.

[alephnerd]

> But let's assume that it is true, and that the newer employees are eroding culture. Isn't it still ultimately leadership's fault

Pre-COVID Amazon was always an in-person culture company - there just wasn't the muscle needed to manage a fully remote organization.

People really underestimate how difficult it is to convert a company that was almost entirely in-person and synchronous to a fully async culture.

A company isn't just SDE1s and SDE2s writing code - it's also PMs communicating with Sales, Sales communicating with E-Staff, Support communicating with Eng, Eng Leadership communicating with other Eng Leadership, etc.

The brass tacks are that in-person meetings are absolutely more synchronized and efficient, because not all communication can successfully occur over Zoom - you'll often need to meet other members to build consensus or have spontaneous conversations with peers or managers, and scheduling or doing those over Zoom or Slack is difficult.

> Ultimately if execs don't have any power to steer the company at an strategic level, what is their role exactly?

Execs play a role, and clearly Amazon's execs have decided that being fully remote just didn't make sense with how they operated.

Also, this kind of an argument absolves line level employees if we're being honest. A culture is the sum of it's parts, and if line level employees aren't working on propagating the culture they want, then it's on them too.

If execs try to draconianly enforce culture, then the same people complaining about lack of culture will complain about the "corporate cult" (eg. HN complaining about Apple or Amazon pre-covid).

This doesn't mean that companies can't be fully remote - they absolutely can.

It just takes A LOT of effort and a massive cultural shift to become an async organization: a lot of documentation, touchpoints, and aggressive calendaring is required and you end up having to do on-sites every couple weeks anyhow to re-sync.

[angarg12]

Not buying it.

Sure, culture is everyone's responsibility. But the share is not the same. Doesn't it seem obvious that a VP has dramatically more impact on culture that a poor junior engineer?

The same execs who allowed overhiring employees with expensive comp packages, just to turn around and lay off thousands of them, has never apologized or admitted, at the very least, some level of incompetence. Instead they blame it on those very same people that they hired and then fired.

BTW if you hypothesis is correct, shouldn't the culture be improving instead of deteriorating? RTO has been in effect long enough that we should be seeing it's positive effects clearly. Instead the company seems to be rotting from the inside. But I guess you could always find a new scapegoat. Maybe 3 days a week in office is not enough, and we need full 5. Maybe those covid hires are the real problem and we need to get rid of them.

Signed: tenured Amazonian (pre-covid), who has recently quit fed up with the company.

[danaris]

Even if execs had much less power to steer the culture, they still bear the responsibility.

That's what it means to be in charge. The Buck Stops Here.

[hughesjj]

> in-person culture company - there just wasn't the muscle needed to manage a fully remote organization.

Eh. There was always a bunch of remote ("virtual") workers. I had teammates in Dublin, Japan, Seattle, and Denver simultaneously.

Yes some teams or even orgs could be limited to a single stretch of contiguous bullpens, but I swear James Hamilton hasn't set foot on land in a decade and he's svp

Amazon has long been one of the worlds largest tech employers. They have a heavy docs culture and were one of the least affected by the pandemic wfh switch (the corporate VPN was rock solid, chime still has some of the best video conferencing around, the meetings webapp was legit if a bit slow).

Honestly the transition was incredibly smooth. At least in my circles the push for async seemed to be built in, and I hated when we started going more sync style pre COVID.

I get that Amazon is huge, but corpinfra is a single department, and beyond most contemporary companies they really had their shit together.