Amazon Management Principles: Conceal and Coerce?
July 12, 2021
I read “Amazon Tells Bosses to Conceal When Employees Are on a Performance Management Plan.” Let’s assume the report is accurate and not the outputs from disgruntled individuals familiar with the online bookstore which sells a few other things to a couple of people on the Kitsap Peninsula.
The write up states:
Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks, according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for managers.
I assume the intranet page is company confidential. If it is, what does access to the page by a “real news” professional say about Amazon security? The question is important because Amazon has floated above the cyber breach storms which are burning some organizations.
Next, the write up explains:
The policy, a copy of which was viewed by The Seattle Times, helps explain why some Amazon employees have described the experience of being on the performance-management plan, called Focus, as baffling and demoralizing. Some managers, too, question why they are asked to conceal that their employees are on a pathway that often leads out of the company. The secrecy surrounding performance management is one more reason why some Amazon office employees say the company is not living up to its April pledge to become “Earth’s Best Employer.”
What this passage suggests is that there is a disconnect between the marketing spin of a technopoly and the reality of the business processes in use at the organization.
This is a surprise? The Bezos bulldozer is a delicate machine. Unlike other largely unregulated, corporate entities, the bulldozer does not run over flowers, small creatures, and competitors. It’s a sensitive beast.
The most interesting factoid in the allegedly accurate write up may be this passage:
Some managers flout the rules and reveal to their subordinates that they are on Focus, according to two managers and documentation of one employee’s Focus plan seen by The Seattle Times. “I always broke the rule,” said one senior Amazon manager. “If I cannot share that an employee is on a coaching plan, how can I give him a fair evaluation?”
A similar management policy appears to apply at Google, the mom and pop online ad agency. “Senior Google Executive Who Opposed Work-from-Home to Move to New Zealand to Work Remotely” asserts:
CNET reported that Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for technical infrastructure is moving to New Zealand to work remotely. Holzle told staff on June 29 that he will be moving to New Zealand. As per the report in CNET, Holzle had initially opposed WFH for staff who did not have a certain level of seniority in the organization.
Does this mean that those with seniority and maybe an elected office in the high school science club have a different rule book? Sure seems like it to me. But maybe Mr. Holzle is moving to Detroit or another Rust Belt location and New Zealand was a red herring.
If accurate, these two reports suggest that Amazon and Google may operate with three levels of high school management magic.
First, official procedures are not disclosed. Anyone remember the cockroach guy Kafka?
Second, employees are uncertain. Keeping people on edge is a clever way to exert control. There’s nothing like control, just ask a prison guard.
Third, the rules are differential; that is, those with power have a different set of guidelines.
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2021
Recursive Weirdness: How Technology Is Gnawing on Its Fingernails
July 8, 2021
I was scanning headlines this morning after a peculiar venture innovator meeting after work on July 7, 2021. Quick summary: I talked to 11 attendees at the Louisville, Kentucky, even and each person worked for a big firm and was prospecting for recruits, trying to sell accounting services, or offering their non venture expertise as a consultant. Wow. No wonder Louisville has been outpaced by Nashville, Tennessee, in the venture space.
Now to the childish habit of chewing on fingernails:
I assumed the adults of the technology industry were enjoying the good old summer time. As I zipped through the content in my Overflight system, I noticed a few sleeping policeman in the highway to the vacation resorts in Monopoly Land; for example:
- A trivial 36 states in America are now demonstrating their inability to be Googley.
- Top dogs at Facebook allegedly find the firm’s social kennel too confining, too small, and too uncomfortable.
- A former president is not happy with the Twitter thing.
- The government of China makes clear why old-fashioned capitalism may be a risky life choice in the Middle Kingdom.
But none of these stories is as intriguing as this one: “YouTube’s Recommender AI Still a Horror Show, Finds Major Crowdsourced Study.” The main idea is that YouTube recommends content which it then bans for violating its terms of service. The write up states:
New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube’s AI continues to puff up piles of “bottom-feeding”/low-grade/divisive/disinforming content — stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by triggering people’s sense of outrage, sewing division/polarization or spreading baseless/harmful disinformation — which in turn implies that YouTube’s problem with recommending terrible stuff is indeed systemic; a side effect of the platform’s rapacious appetite to harvest views to serve ads. That YouTube’s AI is still — per Mozilla’s study — behaving so badly also suggests Google has been pretty successful at fuzzing criticism with superficial claims of reform.
The write up and the study must be read in their entirety to appreciate the delicious business processes at work. Business processes, what are those? Here’s an example:
Mozilla’s report also underlines instances where YouTube’s algorithms are clearly driven by a logic that’s unrelated to the content itself — with a finding that in 43.6% of the cases where the researchers had data about the videos a participant had watched before a reported regret the recommendation was completely unrelated to the previous video.
This story is interesting to me because it illustrates how relatively simple methods can be used to generate revenue and keep users clicking. The notion of making informed decisions about content using artificial intelligence may be little more than magician tricks. It seems that audiences want to be mesmerized. Advertisers want to believe that online advertising works. Google wants to be the quantumly most supreme high-technology giant no matter what.
Sure seems like it. Each of the examples remind me of a confused sun bear chewing on its claws.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2021
Amusing Confusing Wizards
July 7, 2021
More from the Redmond wizards’ humor generating machines.
Microsoft has found a way to deflect attention from yet another security issue. Do you print over the Internet? “Microsoft Acknowledges PrintNightmare Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Affecting Windows Pint Spooler Service” says:
IT Admins are also invited to disable the Print Spooler service via Powershell commands, though this will disable the ability to print both locally and remotely. Another workaround is to disable inbound remote printing through Group Policy, which will block the remote attack vector while allowing local printing.
So what distracts one from a print nightmare? That’s easy. Just try to figure out if your PC can run Windows 11? TPM, you say? Intel what?
PrintNightmare aptly characterizes Microsoft’s organizational acumen perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2021
Institutional Knowledge: A Metric about the Google
July 6, 2021
I read an unusual “I left Google” essay called “Leaving Google.” I am not sure I understand how an apparently valued employee would find bureaucratic processes a reason for leaving what seems to be an okay job. You can read the write up by a Xoogler who worked at the mom-and-pop online ad company for 17 years.
I noted one factoid which struck me as quite interesting. Here it is:
At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.
That means that the institutional “knowledge” of Google, its thousands of technical components, its hundreds of thousands contracts, its millions of inter- and intra-process dependencies from the days of Backrub to the weirdness of solving death to the incredibly brilliant but Floc’ed solution to user tracking resides in exactly 0.1935 percent of the staff.
Perhaps some of Google’s more interesting behaviors, products, pronouncements, and personnel decisions have drifted from what the company was first engineered to deliver?
Questions:
- When a component buried deep in code created in 1999 goes wrong, who knows how to fix it?
- What if the issue cannot be fixed? What then?
- How much of modern Google is code wrappers slapped over something that mostly works?
- Are disconnects between engineering and marketing created by this loss of institutional knowledge?
I suppose one can use a Web search engine like Bing, Swisscows, or Yandex to seek answers. Google search is not particularly useful for this type of query.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2021
Google and Personnel: Progress or Regress?
July 5, 2021
I read a write up from Verdict, a UK information service. The story “Google: We’re Hiring Lots of Minorities! Sadly They Are Leaving Even Faster” provides some useful information about Google’s management practices. The story reports:
Big Tech has a diversity problem, a fact underlined by Google’s latest diversity report revealing how minorities are leaving Mountain View in droves.
And from whence does this factoid come? Heh, heh, the information comes from the Google, if the Verdict story is on the money. Google issued an annual diversity report. I think this was the first one since the diversity report for 2014. Hey, we are on Internet time, so those seven years are really many, many more. Logically, if Google operates on Internet time and that “time” is accelerated, the Google is not late. Google is on time and on target. Non Googlers need to process Google’s definition of annual and understand that the faster you go, stuff slows down to observers. Hence, 2021 is simply the next annual report in the quantum supremacy world. Google uses a variation of this logic when it misses European regulators’ requests for documents by invoking the “dog ate my homework” enhancement.
Onward. The article includes this interesting passage:
True to form, the latest report kicks off by highlighting all the efforts that it’s made to ensure diversity among its staff. Some highlights to that end include how 84% of Google’s people managers have completed unconscious bias training and that Mountain View has spent $55m since 2014 to boost economic empowerment for women. To put that last figure into perspective: that’s 0.4% of Google’s total revenue of $13.059bn from 2020…
And there’s more:
Hiring among black employees jumped from 5.5% to 8.8% between 2020 and 2021. Similarly, hiring of Latin employees jumped from 6.6% to 8.8%. However, hiring of Asian employees shrunk from 48.5% to 42.8% and Native American hiring slumped from 0.8% to 0.7%. The hiring of white employees rose from 43.1% to 44.5%.
The article includes a somewhat negative statement too:
However, the report also reveals that Google is bleeding staff from ethnic minorities.
And here are the data presented by Verdict:
The biggest change was seen among its black staff. The attrition index demonstrated a jump from 112 in 2020 to 121 in 2021 among black employees. It was particularly bad for black women, whose attrition rate grew from 110 to 146 over the last year. For black men, the number decreased from 114 to 106. A similar increase was seen among Latin employees, with the rate of attrition increasing from 97 to 105 over the period. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. The attrition of Native American Google employees grew from 131 to 136. The increase was led by by Native American women whose attrition rate increased from 123 in 2020 to 148 in 2021 while the men in the group saw attrition decrease from 143 to 127.
Hmmm. The next report will be due next year. Please, don’t forget to calculate what annual means in Google speak.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2021
Smart Software, Humans, and Personnel: The Ingredients for Management Success
July 2, 2021
I thought this paragraph was thought provoking:
A Deloitte survey found that while 71 percent of companies see people analytics as a high priority in their organizations (31 percent rate it very important), progress has been slow. After years of discussing this issue, only 8 percent report they have usable data; only 9 percent believe they have a good understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance in their organizations; and only 15 percent have broadly deployed HR and talent scorecards for line managers. One of the reasons for the low adoption of people analytics is that companies have a closed approach to analytics in HR, and readiness remains a serious issue.
This passage appears in “How People Analytics Can Create a Culture of Care and Success.” Let’s consider two organizations with smart software, oodles of data, and a pristine track record for making big bucks. The two outfits are Amazon and Google. Both of these exemplary institutions have done an outstanding job with their people management. As I recall, there were some distasteful blog posts about warehouse workers and plastic bottles, comments about smart cameras and GPS systems monitoring delivery truck drivers, and the phone booth in which an employee can lock away the world. Peace, calm, and care.
And the Google? Staff flips at DeepMind, the outfit which has some type of smart software supremacy. Then there is the trivial ethics thing and the textbook handling of the Timnit Gebru situation. And, lest I forget, the yacht death, the diploid cell assembly in the legal department, and the fumbled suicide attempt by a big wheel’s marketing associate. Protests? I could name a few. Petitions? Well, that Maven thing. Sigh.
It seems to me that the article, including the “hire us because we are HR experts” in the Deloitte PR set up are describing a future which sells consulting. It seems that employees are forcing change upon employers. Others are quitting. Another group is happy to collect government “pay for being alive” checks. Smart software to the rescue? Give me a break.
When two outfits equipped to create cultures of care and success cannot do basic personnel, reality is different from the silliness of surveys chock full of buzzwords. Don’t believe me? Ask an Amazon truck driver. Better yet, pose a question to Dr. Gebru.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021
Google and Its Engineering Residency: Problem Solved or Is It?
June 24, 2021
I read “Google Drops Engineering Residency after Protests over Inequities.” That means unfair, right? Maybe discriminatory? Nope, more of the good old Google management method in action. Remarkable, but the Google is consistent. Controversy and glitches every which way but loose.
The write up states:
The Google residency, often referred to as “Eng Res,” has since 2014 given graduates from hundreds of schools a chance to work on different teams, receive training and prove themselves for a permanent job over the course of a year. It offered a cohort of peers for bonding, three former residents said. Residents were Google’s “most diverse pool” of software engineers and came “primarily from underrepresented groups,” according to a June 2020 presentation and an accompanying letter to management that one source said over 500 current and former residents signed. Compared with other software engineers, residents received the lowest possible pay for their employment level, a smaller year-end bonus and no stock, creating a compensation deficit “in the mid tens of thousands of dollars,” the presentation said. Nearly all residents converted to regular employees, according to the presentation. Many alumni years later have continued to feel the “negative effect” of their starting pay on their current salary, it said. Google said it worked to eliminate long-term disparities when hiring residents permanently.
Interesting. The protest thing seems to be one way to catch the attention of the president of the digital science club working overtime to deliver quantum supremacy.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2021
Facebook Has a Supreme Court and Now Amazon Has a Legal System
June 24, 2021
Nothing makes me laugh quicker than the antics of big technology high school management methods. I get a hoot out of the Facebook content supreme court. My hunch is that nice lunches are provided. The Amazon jury thing is a knee slapper too. Navigate to “Amazon Organizes Internal Juries to Consider the Final Fate of Employees at Risk of Being Fired.” Note: You will have to pay to read this real news article.
The write up says:
Amazon employees who are close to being fired can plead their case to an internal jury that’s partly selected by the company, according to documents reviewed by Insider and interviews with people familiar with the process. These appeals are part of Pivot, an Amazon performance-improvement program that some employees say is stacked against them.
Well, sure. The write up says:
… Employees are not allowed external legal support, people who have been through the program said. “You go in by yourself not understanding what you’re up against,” one person told Insider. The people spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Amazon.
And what if one wins? No job guarantee.
Question: Who from the science club has a date for the prom? Answer: No one.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2021
Why Messrs Brin and Page Said Adios
June 22, 2021
Years ago I signed a document saying I could not reveal any information obtained, intuited, learned, or received by any means electrical or mechanical from an interesting company for which I did some trivial work. I have been a good person, and I will continue of that path in this short blog post based on open source info and my own cogitations.
Yes, the GOOG. I want to remind readers that in 2019, the dynamic duo, the creators of Backrub, and the beneficiaries of some possible inspiration from Yahoo, GoTo.com, and Overture stepped away from their mom and pop online advertising store. With lots of money and eternal fame in the pantheon of online superstars, this was a good decision. Based on my understanding of information in open sources, the two decades of unparalleled fun was drawing to a close. Thus, hasta la vista. From my point of view, these visionaries who understood the opportunities to sell ads rendered silly ideas like doing good toothless. Go for the gold because there was no meaningful regulation as long as their was blood lust for tchotchkes like blinking Google pins or mouse pads with the Google logo.
But there were in open source information hints of impending trouble; for example:
- Management issues, both personal and company centric. Who can forget drug overdoses, attempted suicides, and baby daddies in the legal department? Certainly not the online indexes which provide valid links here, here, and here. Keep in mind, gentle reader, that these items are from open sources.
- Grousing from Web site owners, partners, and developers. The Foundem persistence gave hope to many that others would speak up despite Google’s power, money, and flotillas of legal destroyers.
- Annoying bleats about competition were emitted with ever increasing stridency from those clueless EU officials. Example number one: Margrethe Vestager. Danes fouled up taking over England, other Scandinavia countries, and lost the lead in ham to the questionable Spanish who fed cinco jota pigs acorns.
Nope, bail out time.
I offer these prefatory sentences because those commenting, tweeting, and blogging about “Google Executives See Cracks in Their Company’s Success” seem to have forgotten the glorious past of the Google. I noted this statement which is eerily without historical context and presented as a novel idea:
But a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. They say Google’s work force is increasingly outspoken. Personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving and letting everyone know exactly why.
Okay. But Messrs Brin and Page left. This is a surprise? Why? The high school science club management method is no longer fun. The crazy technology is expensive and old. The Foosball table needs resurfacing. The bean bags smell. And — news flash — when Elvis left the building, the show was over.
Messrs Brin and Page left the building. Got the picture?
Stephen E Arnold, June 22, 2021
Google and Ethics: Shaken and Stirred Up
June 17, 2021
Despite recent controversies, Vox Recode reports, “Google Says it’s Committed to Ethical AI Research. Its Ethical AI Team Isn’t So Sure.” In fact, it sounds like there is a lot of uncertainty for the department whose immediate leaders have not been replaced since they were ousted and who reportedly receive little guidance or information from the higher-ups. Reporter Shirin Ghaffary writes:
“Some current members of Google’s tightly knit ethical AI group told Recode the reality is different from the one Google executives are publicly presenting. The 10-person group, which studies how artificial intelligence impacts society, is a subdivision of Google’s broader new responsible AI organization. They say the team has been in a state of limbo for months, and that they have serious doubts company leaders can rebuild credibility in the academic community — or that they will listen to the group’s ideas. Google has yet to hire replacements for the two former leaders of the team. Many members convene daily in a private messaging group to support each other and discuss leadership, manage themselves on an ad-hoc basis, and seek guidance from their former bosses. Some are considering leaving to work at other tech companies or to return to academia, and say their colleagues are thinking of doing the same.”
See the article for more of the frustrations facing Google’s remaining AI ethics researchers. The loss of these workers would not be good for the company, which relies on the department to lend a veneer of responsibility to its algorithmic initiatives. Right now, though, Google seems more interested in plowing ahead with its projects than in taking its own researchers, or their work, seriously. Its reputation in the academic community has tanked, we are told. A petition signed by thousands of computer science instructors and researchers called Gebru’s firing “unprecedented research censorship,” a prominent researcher and diversity activists are rejecting Google funding, a Google-run workshop was boycotted by prospective speakers, and the AI ethics research conference FAccT suspended the company’s membership. Meanwhile, Ghaffary reports, at least four employees have resigned and given Gebru’s treatment as the reason. Other concerned employees are taking the opposite approach, staying on in the hope they can make a difference. As one unnamed researcher states:
“Google is so powerful and has so much opportunity. It’s working on so much cutting-edge AI research. It feels irresponsible for no one who cares about ethics to be here.”
We agree, but there is only so much mid-level employees can do. When will Google executives begin to care about developing AI programs conscientiously? When regulators somehow make it more expensive to ignore ethics concerns than to embrace them, we suspect. We will not hold our breath.
Cynthia Murrell, June 17, 2021
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