
Jeff Bezos Taught Me When to Quit - lionhearted
http://www.chrisfharvey.com/2012/02/jeff-bezos-taught-me-when-to-quit/
======
RyanMcGreal
> I followed my heart. The universe took care of me.

Survivorship bias. Other people have followed their hearts and the universe
didn't take care of them, but their posts aren't likely to be posted on HN and
upvoted to the front page.

~~~
throwaway1979
Usually, I too think survivor bias. However, in this case, his action seemed
to be a no-brainer. This was 1999 - not 2008 to 2012. I had just graduated
from undergrad with a CS degree and was very naive. Yet, I had companies and
groups within companies fighting over me.

So ... he was in a hot job market, had a bad boss, a job where he didn't seem
to be learning anything and a low salary. The course of action seems pretty
clear to me. I don't think he needed "Jeff Bezos'" call to action to help him
on this one. Quitting less than 2 months into a job does seem harsh (not sure
if I'd do it) - if he waited a year or so, the tech boom would be over and
then things would be different. So, perhaps he did get lucky with the timing.

~~~
wpietri
I think it's much better to quit 6 weeks in than 6 months in. When I'm looking
at resumes, a very short stay tells me it just didn't work out. It happens.

I think it's also ok to just leave something like that off the resume.
Especially after you've had some other job.

But if you're there for a substantial amount of time (say, 3 months or more)
that's harder to explain, and I think you need to keep it on your resume for a
lot longer.

------
potatolicious
> _"Another new MBA was hired in my group. I found out her salary was higher
> than mine, although I had been told that my salary was “standard for new
> MBAs.”"_

Heh, replace "MBA" with "engineer" and this was my Amazon experience circa
2011. I was 2 years into the company, getting rave reviews and kudos from
management, with pitifiul 1% "raises" a year... and then I found out they're
paying a fresh undergrad more than I was making.

Oh, and verbal promises of an upcoming promotion... and then nothing come
review-time.

[cue sad trombone]

I did the same thing as author, except I found a 30% raise at another company
before leaving ;) Damn it felt good when I gave notice.

For those not in the know: Amazon's attrition rate is sky-high, and while
management acknowledges this and has some token measures to try and mitigate
it, nothing major is being done (i.e., none of the big, big reasons people
quit are ever addressed - pay, advancement, on-call stress, etc).

Now that I've got some distance between myself and Amazon, I consider the
whole thing a learning experience. 'Twas my first job out of college, and I
suppose learning to read poor advancement, bad pay, and bad management at that
stage of my career was better than doing it later.

~~~
timfrietas
Amazon is a giant company, so this statement is kind of broad, even in the
context of engineering groups. I know plenty of engineering groups with people
who have worked there 5-10 years, while others are a sausage factory of oncall
hell, it really depends on your team--just like with any other giant company
(insert Yahoo, Oracle, etc. here).

Also, in their defense, they do in fact try to address this: for example, a
couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce oncall
pages company-wide.

(Yes, I work at Amazon)

~~~
potatolicious
I apologize for sounding brusque, but yours is a defense of Amazon that I've
heard many times - multiple times from people who ended up quitting in
frustration/anger. It's a view I held _myself_ until things got bad enough to
make me leave. Things are always fine, until they aren't, and then they have a
tendency to compound very quickly.

> _"Amazon is a giant company, so this statement is kind of broad"_

It really isn't. Amazon's attrition problems are company-wide, and not limited
to a few bad orgs. Amazon's on-call problems are also company-wide, with only
a minority of teams spared from it (actually, I was on one of those teams,
thank God). Amazon's policy of not readjusting employee compensation to fit a
rising market is _also_ company-wide. So yes, they are a huge company, but
that is not a defense.

I was a returning intern, so I knew a lot of fellow ex-interns returning full-
time. My opinion of Amazon is formed by both my own experience and also a
whole lot of commiseration with others from across the company stretching over
every org.

In fact, of all the interns I returned with, only 3 remain, 3 years in. In
fact, _several_ quit without even fulfilling their first year. They willingly
handed back their signing bonus clawbacks (+tax!) just to GTFO.

My impression is that senior-level engineers see a whole different world.
SDE1/2 employees are just cogs, but SDE3 and up are treated like Faberge eggs.
Unfortunately, I was only a lowly SDE1.

> _"just like with any other giant company (insert Yahoo, Oracle, etc.
> here)."_

Amazon is trying to hire at the level of Facebook and Google. Comparing
oneself to Yahoo and Oracle (both known for being particularly poorly managed,
and the latter having a reputation for being a bit of a code sweatshop) is not
praise.

Hell, Amazon's hiring process may be _harder_ than Google's. A full-day of 5-6
interviews, including lunch interviews, with a single member of the group
having full veto rights over all other interviewers. It's a wonder they have
anyone passing said gauntlet. With that high of a hiring bar, new hires
trickle in, and the attrition rate pretty much negates any hiring anybody
does.

> _"a couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce
> oncall pages company-wide."_

Platitudes. I was there. Nothing _actually_ changed. I know a few sub-orgs had
_actual_ drives to decrease technical debt and drive down operational pain,
but for everyone else it didn't do squat.

Amazon's on-call misery stems _from_ the high attrition rate. It's a vicious
cycle. Most teams accumulate technical debt since they are constantly under-
resourced, what with people leaving all the damned time. Most teams I've seen
have perpetual open headcount, and never enough hands to really root-cause and
fix the chronic problems that are waking up their on-calls at 5am on a
Saturday.

Combined with upper management that keeps trying to drive features and this is
a recipe for disaster. The pace at Amazon is relentless (which is often good),
but it affords almost no opportunities to refactor, redesign, rearchitect for
better operational performance. Hell, if you want a prime example of this,
look at how the Catalog systems are set up. It's like a brick wall extended by
wooden beams extended by rebar extended by I-beams.

~~~
Shorel
What's SDE ?

~~~
potatolicious
Software Development Engineer - the standard title for coders at Amazon (and
Microsoft). You have SDE1, 2, and 3's, increasing in seniority. Beyond SDE3
you have various titles where you're no longer considered strictly an engineer
(Architect, Principal, etc).

------
einhverfr
I think the advice is actually good, all around. I also think it takes a
certain degree of courage for a CEO to advise workers to quit on this sort of
basis. Bezos's stature just grew a bit in my eyes.

Additionally it's a bit of an inspiring story.

There's another time and place to quit too which seems to me to be touched on
in the article. If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very
often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity. It's usually
better to quit and later re-apply than to try to work your way up within a
company. I saw this at Microsoft and have reason to believe it happens
everwhere else.

~~~
larsberg
> I saw this at Microsoft

As a bit of MSFT-specific advice, if you're in the dev/test/pm org and an IC
and feel this way, you should make sure that you're having a regular (e.g.
every six months) 1:1 with your manager's manager. During that, you should try
to get a deeper understanding of what the next level means. There are certain
levels (63, 65, 68) whose promotions are significantly different than the
other levels and can be intimidating, particularly to first-time leads. For
example, at 63, your lead might have to justify the promo to your PUM, and at
65, your lead has to convince your discipline manager to justify it not only
to your PUM but has to provide enough info about your comparable work to have
it justified with all the discipline managers across your division at the
calibration meeting.

Unless you are in an extraordinarily technically deep area (e.g. compiler
frontend, database internals), you should not expect your lead to be an
amazing manager. If they were, they'd have left you behind and be a manager of
managers within ~3 years because there aren't nearly enough of those to go
around.

~~~
philiphodgen
@larsberg's comment tells me (as an outsider) why Microsoft will die. It has
the corporate equivalent of arteriosclerosis. Whether theirs products are good
or not is beside the point.

All companies are both predator and prey. With inscrutable insider rules like
this Microsoft cannot move fast enough to survive as either.

~~~
einhverfr
I was recently reading what I had written about Microsoft, Sun Microsystems,
and Oracle in 2004 as part of a business plan. My outlook for Microsoft was
simple: Painful days are ahead but Microsoft has what it takes to succeed.
Sun, not so much. Oracle could go either way.

Seems I was right about Sun, not sure yet about Microsoft. I now think Oracle
is in a better position than they used to be.

One of the major things I noted was that Microsoft, despite a major
institutional aversion, has been slowly developing and expanding services
businesses. They have continued to do this, for example now offering to host
Linux VPS's via Azure. Their services offerings in 2003 were more anemic than
they are today. They are on the right track to deal both with open source
competition and long-extended upgrade cycles.

I don't think Microsoft is about to die. They may be cut down to size but I
think their offerings are large and diverse enough that they are more likely
to be pressured to evolve than disappear. Many businesses in fact do this, see
IBM's transformation into one of the world's largest IT services firms in the
world.

~~~
einhverfr
Just as a note on the factors I looked at:

1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves

2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These are important
because they are a hedge against open source software and upgrade cycles that
extend as hardware matures.

3) Lack of vertical integration/insularity

4) Organizational awareness of issues.

Sun scored relatively low on these, Oracle depended on how heavily you rated
customer satisfaction and customer perceptions, and Microsoft scored high on
everything but healthy services businesses, but there they were growing and
trying lots of things.

------
jorleif
Nice organizational insight: Yes, in theory the higher up managers should do
something about the bad boss, but they don't know there is a problem, and a
conflict is hard to solve, since you don't know who is to blame (and tend to
side with the boss, because he is more like yourself, and you probably know
him better)

High turnover, on the other hand, is a good signal of failed management, and
if you can find another job, then you'll probably do better that way.

~~~
mgkimsal
When the higher-up managers _are_ the problem, there's generally little hope
except to leave. I worked someplace that had about 50% of the dept leave in a
9 month period (I was part of the 50%) - towards the end of that period it was
harder for people to not get the signal that there was a leadership/management
problem, and the owner eventually stepped in, but not until a lot of damage
was done.

------
fmitchell0
I think the point of the article is connecting to the emotional (and sometimes
spiritual) experience of quitting.

I think everyone should quit or get fired from a job at least once in their
life. People talk about starting this or wishing things were better, but until
you've gone through the utter terror of quitting/being fired, you never know
how resilient you can be moving on to the next challenge.

It's kind of like starting a business. You can talk all you want, but until
you do it (or it happens to you), you don't get it.

The universe might have taken care of him, but that is because he realized
it's not about how you fall down (even if you jump down), it's how you get up.
If you keep getting up, the universe WILL help you out.

~~~
hef19898
Yeah, quiting can be enlightening! Since I wasn't fired, I can tell about
that. I know peole who wanted to quit for some time but never got to it. Now,
they still want to but are no longer able to. I never want to reach that
point, I value my own freedom and independance to much for that.

------
kristovaher
I agree that you should quit when your 'boss is bad', but in a way I also
think that what you did was also stupid.

Amazon is a great company and with effort you would have climbed the ladders
there if you were good enough. Jeff Bezos -is- a smart guy and he is taking
the company in the right direction as opposed to Yahoo!, which is a giant of
yesterday.

You had been there for six weeks and had a problem with someone else being
hired who got paid more? Why did she get paid more? I've been in the industry
long enough to know that salaries are never equal. They are part of the
negotiations and are often affected by the situation the new employee is in. A
lot of companies pay more for certain employees because of their background
situation. If an employee is qualified and shows promise, then companies often
offer a supporting hand, because otherwise the employee simply could not
afford to work there. A lot of companies pay more to an employee if the
employee asks for it when it is about 'their value' and not about value of
someone else.

It was incredibly stupid to complain that someone else is getting paid more,
when you had been there for six weeks. You didn't sound much smarter than your
boss there.

I would never allow a new employee march in after six weeks and ask for a
raise, unless they invented the next iPhone or iPad. You did spreadsheets. You
would have gotten a 'no' from any and every executive I know of.

------
snorkel
Don't count on the universe. First find a new job, and then quit.

------
mmcnickle
I was feeling sympathetic with the author regarding the raise until I realised
he was asking for it a few weeks after joining. I think his boss was right, he
accepted the salary when he joined; if he didn't like it he should have
negotiated at the time. I'm sure a raise would have be considered after a
suitable period.

~~~
eroded
Right, so he made a bad decision by taking the job. It's still much better to
realise you made a bad decision and cut your losses (by quitting), than
blindly sticking with it.

Given he was about to quit anyway if he wasn't offered a raise, there was no
harm to asking.

~~~
reidrac
But then it looks like Jeff Bezos didn't teach him when to quit.

There's a difference between a bad boss and making a bad salary negotiation
when you take a new job.

Nice post anyway, but it's a little bit like "I've seen it in the tea leaves".

Edit: typo

------
carsongross
Quitting a job and following your heart during the largest tech boom in human
history, when jobs were jumping out of windows onto unsuspecting passer-bys,
might make for a great story, but I'm not sure it's great advice for young
kids today, with under-25 unemployment in the 20's in the U.S. and much higher
elsewhere.

Unless you've got something lined up, or a lot of cash set aside, I'd advise
being very conservative in this environment.

------
debacle
This is really hard advice for a lot of people to stomach. That free-falling
feeling you get the morning after you quit, and the bittersweet terror of
being unemployed are brutal realities, but you're usually better off quitting
in the long run.

~~~
mgkimsal
having a cushion in the bank helps immensely. i realize everyone has different
risk tolerance levels, but... having a year of expenses in the bank gives you
a much different perspective on things than living check to check, or even
having 1-2 months of savings.

~~~
debacle
Very true, but it takes a long time to get there when you've got a family to
support.

~~~
mgkimsal
or have been deep in debt. :)

No doubt it often takes a lot of hard work and discipline. Sometimes just
thinking about that being a possibility is too much for some people.

------
renegadedev
It would be interesting if the author ever went back and figured out whatever
happened to Bill, the horrible boss. People like Bill often don't last long in
a swim or sink environment like Amazon.

If you're not a superstar, and I'm as un-superstar (sic?) as you can get, and
you've been around long enough, chances are you've held a job with shitty pay
and shittier boss.

Whether you depart for greener pastures or try to stay put make the best out
of your situation and work on improving yourself and the company, says a lot
about you also.

------
moocow01
If there is anything I'd tell a new college grad it would be build a financial
cushion as fast as humanly possible. I don't care if you are in debt from your
loans... build one - immediately. And yes it is hard when you start out.

Why? You will hate your job one day and probably sooner than later. It just
happens, its part of the learning curve. I don't mean that you are always
going to hate your job but you inevitably will end up in a situation with a
crappy boss doing something you didn't realize you signed up for.

Your cushion will give you perspective. Instead of looking at your crappy job
as your life raft and clinging on for dear life, you will be better equipped
to realize you have options. If you really don't want to go to that job
anymore, you can reasonably wake up and stop the next morning.

Another thing that nobody talks about is that having a cushion can
inadvertently gain you more respect in your workplace. I used to work for a
group where one of my work buddies was pretty financially independent (this
doesn't mean fabulously rich) and unlike everyone else who was desperate to
keep their job my work buddy would speak his mind to management. When projects
were unreasonable he would tell them to take a hike. Well guess who got all
the interesting work and respect.

Seriously build a cushion if you are new to the work world - it only makes
your life better.

------
mynameishere
Who would say that they have a bad boss at an "all hands" meeting? Wouldn't
have to quit after doing that...

~~~
spinchange
I bet it was a "planted" question to reinforce the hierarchical culture and
approach to management they seem to have. Otherwise, that would be a very
silly thing to ask the CEO, indeed. I think his answer was completely logical
in that setting.

------
bryze
More people need to do this. It seems that among adults, the most effective
message you can send is "goodbye". Sad, but, in my experience, true. Even
then, some people will never learn.

