Amazon's Leadership Principles: A Critical Examination

2025-09-01

This article offers a critical look at Amazon's leadership principles, particularly "Customer Obsession," "Ownership," and "Bias for Action." The author argues that Amazon overemphasizes speed and meeting superficial customer demands, neglecting true customer needs and long-term value. Regarding "Customer Obsession," the author criticizes Amazon's over-reliance on customer feedback rather than proactively developing potentially impactful technologies. On "Ownership," the author points to a lack of communication and collaboration within Amazon, with significant information silos between teams. Concerning "Bias for Action," the author believes Amazon overemphasizes speed at the expense of product quality and customer trust, advocating for a "bias for inaction" mechanism at senior engineering levels to ensure high standards before product launches.

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Startup

A Year of Amazon-Funded FreeBSD: Accomplishments and Challenges

2025-06-06

This post recounts the author's experience with a year of Amazon sponsorship via GitHub Sponsors for FreeBSD release engineering and FreeBSD/EC2 development. Over the year, four FreeBSD releases were managed, and several key issues on the FreeBSD/EC2 platform were resolved, including power drivers for Graviton instances and device hotplug support. Boot times for FreeBSD/EC2 instances were significantly improved, and new AMI flavors were added. However, with the sponsorship ending, several planned feature improvements will be delayed.

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Development