
What it means to “disagree and commit” and how I do it (2016) - tush726
http://www.amazonianblog.com/2016/11/what-it-means-to-disagree-and-commit-and-how-i-do-it.html
======
ex_amazon_sde
Ex Amazon engineer here. The disagree and commit principle is a double edged
sword.

The good: it's taken relatively seriously, it's not just some empty PR line.
It allows you to prove to managers and colleagues that you know what you are
doing instead of following the heard. It encourages people to prove their
ideas with prototypes instead of talk and more talk. It discourage "design by
committee" and blame shifting. It's refreshing to be able to disagree openly
and challenge popular views.

The bad: It takes a lot of self confidence. Some people might feel insecure
due to impostor syndrome, upbringing or belonging to minorities and this
creates a disadvantage. Also, it's really exhausting in the long term.

Neutral: if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure. On
the bright side it teaches people not to disagree too lightheartedly.

~~~
AlexCoventry
> if you disagree, commit and fail it becomes a very public failure

Not quite sure what you mean, there. Can you give an example, please? How does
your disagreement make the failure more public?

~~~
khedoros1
I think that the idea is if you disagree, but what you disagreed with
succeeds, then it's difficult because you were proved wrong.

~~~
rmwaite
But that is not true. I can say idea X is bad and it can succeed due to any
number of reasons. That doesn’t disprove that it is a bad idea (relative to
some better idea, let’s say).

~~~
khedoros1
If you say "X is bad, it's going to fail", and it succeeds, it certainly
doesn't make you look _good_ , and I think that's what the previous comment
was getting at.

~~~
daurnimator
But it's rarely a "it's going to fail". Normally it's "it'll make more effort
for people down the line" or "we'll get more customers if we do X instead".

------
jph
Most important quote IMHO: “There are some risks related to this approach that
I am concerned about but I am confident that you have heard and considered
them."

Jeff Bezos makes the strong point that risk is important: "most decisions
should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish
you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow."

Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement: "Leaders
are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even
when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."

~~~
tetha
> Bezos also emphasizes that disagree-and-commit is a hard requirement:
> "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they
> disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."

I agree on both terms. If you plan and test everything to death, you are
wasting and in fact atrophying our ability to think on your feet. This is an
important skill, especially during incident and emergency handling. It's a
fine line to learn, and it changes with the team, and the company, and the
projects, but it's important.

Challenging decisions is the best way to keep unproductive work away from the
team, and unproductive work is one of the best ways to waste time and
motivation of a team. Even if it exhausts me at the end of a week, it's a good
thing to see 2-3 guys getting excited about a project they should do, because
it doesn't contradict our values and it furthers our infrastructure.

~~~
ex_amazon_sde
> you are wasting and in fact atrophying our ability to think on your feet

Most colleagues in Amazon agree that the company encourages quick thinking
versus deep/long-term way too much.

------
chronid
I wholeheartedly agree with this principle since my days at Amazon.

I also found that if you need to follow the principle too many times it's a
good indicator the team/company goals/vision/ and yours don't align and - if
circumstance permits doing so - leaving is better than keep up the fighting
forever (which is _extremely_ exhausting, from personal experience).

~~~
guitarbill
Don't know how it works at Amazon, but we have a similar rule to avoid teams
getting paralyzed on design decisions. I've also worked at companies that
didn't do this, and spent more time in design meetings than it would have
taken to code a simple prototype.

Following this principle too many times isn't necessarily an indication that
the team doesn't align with you, it can also be a sign your communication
skills are lacking, and you need to get better in how you convey your ideas
(unfortunately talking from my own experience).

A good tie-breaker is usually picking the simpler idea, to avoid perfectionism
or over-engineering that engineers sometimes fall into. It seems especially
common with people straight out of uni, and lessens with experience.

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mud_dauber
It's great to disagree & commit if the person on the other side of the table
can explain his/her position in a organized manner.

Unfortunately the proposal can be a fait accompli. I used to have demoralizing
arguments with my boss, a company VP, about his product directives that were
blatantly unsupported by logic or data. In every case his response would be to
shrug his shoulders and say "but it's a done deal". (Meaning his CEO wanted to
do it.) I can look back & say with confidence that each change was a financial
dud.

Go ahead & say that it's your option to leave the company in these situations.
It's true - and not always a viable option.

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purplezooey
It's funny how we all try to learn principles and how to be effective in the
abstract, but in reality most companies promote asshole nihilist freaks and
are dysfunctional, so none of it matters.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
> Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

That sounds quite similar to Lenin's principle of democratic centralism - once
upon a time communist parties allowed for a brief period of internal
discussion prior to accepting policy decisions (in theory), once the decision
was made every party member was committed to the 'collective' decision.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism)

Now that one did not quite work out, because you always depend on the whims of
who is heading the discussion; I wonder if the Bezos principle works any
better, as there are no third party regulators that might constrain the one
who is heading the discussions.

Once upon a time they had this theory of gradual convergence between a west
dominated by big corporations and the Soviet Union (for example ' 2001: A
Space Odyssey' made this assumption); this observation might have had a grain
of truth in it.

~~~
mjburgess
> they had this theory of gradual convergence between a west dominated by big
> corporations and the Soviet Union

That sounds like only something a resentful Westener could say, in feeling
entitled to a society exactly as they wish it, dismiss the one they have as
"practically similar to tyranny".

I think its fair to measure tyrannical states in units of genocide of their
own citizens. By this measure, the western democratic capitalism stands at 0%
tyranny.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
does genocide perpetrated in colonial possessions count?

~~~
mjburgess
What "colonial possessions" were held by western democratic capitalist
governments?

~~~
MichaelMoser123
Britain used to rule over half of the world, France had some in Africa - like
Algeria; Belgium had Congo, the Netherlands had a few colonies some time ago.
Not to mention the colonies of Spain, Germany when these countries were not
quite as democratic as they are now, but democracy is a continuum, isn't it?

~~~
mjburgess
They were not democratic _at all_. Clearly you know nothing about the history
of these countries.

Universal enfranchisement in the UK happened only after WW1, with more than
90% of the population unable to vote for the whole history of "voting". And
germany was just simply a dictatorship.

In 1800 90% of all of europe were farmers. The political class to even create
a political system was tiny.

Democracy is _rule by the people_. Votes among feudal lords for which is the
most powerful is _not_ democracy.

You made a claim about two political systems: USSR's communism and western
democratic capitalism.

If you're going to equivocate any old political system with any other then the
claim to "convergence" is incoherent. I'm not even sure what "covergence"
means when we're equivocating 19th Germany dictatorship, democratic
capitalism, and USSR communism.

"Convergence" is severely under-evidenced. And my original claim is only ever-
more evidenced: it is only possible to imagine our present system of
government "converging" to mass murder upon some resentful delusion.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
Well the Soviet Union of the seventies was a quite different place from that
of the thirties, if you mind. Systems change over time.

------
baxtr
I think, Amazon’s leadership principles are quite interesting since they
represent the essence of the company’s culture. Compared to other companies
these values or principles are not just empty phrases; they’re applied daily
and people inside take these very serious.

I personally like the principles although I’m missing a statement about
developing employees. Also, the combination of two values can have dire
effects, e.g. “Insist on the Highest Standards” and “Deliver Results” was
probably the reason why some amazon warehouse workers have peed in bottles,
see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520).

~~~
donavanm
As mentioned, Hire & Develop. Its required for leadership positions (sr IC or
people managers). May not be obvious, but also applies to yourself; continual
improvement and whatnot.

------
saosebastiao
Some may have found this to be true at Amazon, but I found it to be one of the
biggest deceptions of working there. It was more like Never Disagree Ever. You
take major political risks with every time you exercise the idea. I've seen
plenty of people's careers stagnate and effectively end because they chose to
publicly question some egotistical asshole's authority.

~~~
emmelaich
Did you disagree on some vague feeling or some past history (one bitten twice
shy) or have some substantive points?

~~~
saosebastiao
Few people at amazon will disagree with a superior based on a vague feeling.
I, as a business intelligence engineer, had no excuse to disagree without
substantial proof or evidence backing my disagreement. That never mattered. If
you disagree with someone a level higher than you, you need to not only have
perfect evidence, but also the backing of several people at that same higher
level or higher.

For example, one time I disagreed with my director, who spent his entire
career navigating by the seat of his pants. I was generally considered an
expert in the subject, after having written several whitepapers that had
become canonical reference amongst higher level leaders. That didn't matter,
he never conceded the point and he treated me like shit until his boss told
him he was wrong (which was after I transfered to a different org). This
demonstrates this problem on two levels: he wouldn't tolerate any disagreement
from me right up until the point where he realized that he was the one with
the unapproved opinion.

------
pvg
It's strange to see this repeatedly presented as some recent Amazon or Bezos
thing. It's been floating about since at least the 90s, often attributed to
Intel/Grove.

~~~
aoki
agreed. in the valley you do hear it attributed to intel.

the other long-time intel—ism that has now been appropriated everywhere is the
OKR system. it was really weird moving from intel to google and hearing
someone from peopleops talk about “this part of google culture called OKRs.”

------
Cofike
I've had this same though lately, that I was being seen as inattentive or
disengaged by not disagreeing more with decisions I don't fully support. Maybe
I'll try this out to see how that works.

The issue though is when you do bring it up and none of the leadership care
and they plow ahead anyways. Headlong into another poor decision.

------
coldtea
Sounds like a nightmarish environment, making a "process" of engineers
discussing a solution.

------
Digital-Citizen
First, I don't think this blog should require Javascript to fulfill its
function -- convey text to a user. I've tried to read the source markup to get
to the essay.

On to addressing points raised in the essay:

"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds
like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have
mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of
qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of
organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."

No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by
which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see
[https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting](https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting)
for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not
everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured.
Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable
conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them
ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as
Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a
full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will
leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while
delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint
as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if
Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the
"pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job
hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.

"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment
to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections
for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a
concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least
have it heard."

I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the
manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker
class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling
one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This
applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this
when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their
subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-
empowered class.

Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people
work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give
the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people
to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a
right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a
few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos,
who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he
could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his
children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between
rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.

It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-
point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous
users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the
post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems
that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They
work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are
a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run
directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".

~~~
valar_m
So what's your point?

I read your entire post. Is there a point besides: Amazon = capitalism,
capitalism = bad, Amazon = bad?

~~~
Digital-Citizen
I think it's more likely you're trying to minimize setting a critical response
which clearly focuses on exploiting workers in a context suggesting that
caring about worker exploitation is irrelevant or shouldn't be allowed to be
raised in the context of some manager going on about abstract management
technique (as apparently are those who downscored the post).

