I put together a set of questions on corporate politics that get increasingly darker. I was aiming for the questions to test Ethan’s unusual level of transparency since he retired from being a VP at Amazon.
For instance, I asked him if he had burned people to get ahead or if he was empire building at Amazon. He shared a story of how he did and Jeff Bezos caught him. It didn’t go well for him.
He also had some interesting stories about unusual HR situations. One guy got fired for pooping underneath a girl’s desk to show interest in her.
As you can see, these conversations with Ethan are unusually candid and since he’s a great story teller I hardly realize I’ve been sitting in a chair for hours while I’m interviewing him.
Very few people enjoy corporate politics, but in many cases it is a necessary evil. Hopefully this episode can be educational on what can happen so you can protect yourself.
Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps
00:42 - How to receive credit for your work
19:18 - Ways for quiet people to get visibility
21:32 - How to be trusted for top projects
29:52 - How to defend from others taking your project
36:13 - How to reject bad projects
44:10 - How to be first for promo
55:35 - How to handle managers that dislike career growth talk
01:06:30 - What if your manager is in the way
01:15:43 - Did he ever have overly political reports
01:28:06 - How to fire a bad manager
01:35:16 - What gives you leverage
01:43:41 - How to defend against peers undermining you
01:50:24 - What if everyone is good at politics
01:55:11 - How Jeff Bezos burned him for empire building
02:03:27 - How to retain your headcount
02:07:31 - Career recommendations for the current landscape
02:15:11 - How to avoid negative layoff optics
02:18:39 - How to develop executive presence
02:29:25 - How to network in a natural way
02:33:30 - How to network with powerful people
02:41:01 - How to learn hidden incentives
02:44:43 - What happens behind the scenes with HR
02:50:13 - Did he burn people to get ahead
02:53:24 - What he says to people who hate politics
02:59:03 - Top book recommendations on power dynamics
03:00:45 - How he would speedrun career growth today
Transcript
00:42 — How to receive credit for your work
Ryan:
[00:42] I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but with all the latest advancements, it seems like these models are able to do the technical work of tech workers. And in that case, it feels like the non-technical work may become more important in the future. And at the same time, this is a theory that a lot of people have, which I hope isn’t true, but it’s reasonable, which is if these models can do the work of tech workers, maybe there will be fewer roles in tech.
[01:19] And in that case, I could also see politics becoming more important because there’s the same number of people competing for fewer roles. So what I want to do in conversation today is ask you everything in terms of soft skills, corporate politics, to try to help people in these potential future scenarios. And to start us off, I put together a set of questions about corporate politics, which are dark and get darker as they go on, but they’re also common scenarios that people experience.
[01:55] And I’m hoping you can answer transparently about how people should handle these and your experiences in these scenarios.
Ethan:
[02:03] Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know what you have in mind, but I’m always game for hard questions. I like questions that push my thinking. And if they’re dark, well, sometimes life is dark, so let’s go for it.
Ryan:
[02:16] First question, how do you make sure that you get credit for your work when there’s a collaboration and people are competing for visibility?
Ethan:
[02:25] Yeah, so I think recognition, particularly in a collaborative sense, is tricky. One of the good things is it’s easier to claim more recognition a little later. At the moment, people are very sensitive to it. I say, I helped start Prime Video, or I was the first engineer on Prime Video. Well, now that’s long ago. There are some other people who would be like, well, I was part of that team too on that day, but they’re not here right now.
[02:53] So, and they probably, even if they see this, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna be like, hey, I was there too. Maybe there’s a comment. If you scroll down in this video years later, maybe there’s a comment that says, hey, I was there too. It’s not really a problem. So to get your credit, number one, realize credit is easier to take a little bit after. You wanna get credit in the moment, but there’s also later, and it’s easier.
[03:15] Second, the way to get credit is to be the first to speak if you can. It doesn’t mean you have to say things that aren’t true, but those who speak first or those who speak up first, if you say, hey, we shipped this, I want to, I’m excited to share, we just released this feature. Whether you’re sending that internally or externally to a boss, to a product manager, you can include the we and say, oh, I did it with Ryan and Fred and Sarah and Rajeev.
[03:45] But if you’re the one saying it, you’re the one who gets the lion’s share of the credit, even if it looks like, and you are sharing that credit because the speaker gets it. Now, if someone else speaks first, what you need to do at that point is figure out a way to add on about what you did. So if you speak first and Ryan sends out this message that says, well, we did this project, whatever, I can at least chime in and say, yeah, this was a great project.
[04:15] I really had fun solving blah, blah, blah, or claiming your piece. I really had fun coming up with the algorithm that doubled our sales. And you find a way at least to say your part. What doesn’t work is be silent and hope your part will be noticed. That’s what never works.
Ryan:
[04:39] Yeah. And I think a very common pattern of this, and this is just the way the teams are laid out, is your group of engineers and then there’s a product manager, and the product manager is often doing the upward reporting, or maybe it’s an engineering manager that’s doing the upward reporting. And so the people who actually do the work may not be as visible. What would you say in that case?
Ethan:
[05:04] Yeah, so one thing you can do is you can talk to your manager, product manager, about remember to share the credit with the team, remember to highlight some people. I’ll give you an example. When my team finally launched that first version of Prime Video, I was a senior manager. I had a vice president, and I went to that vice president and I said, today’s the day now you write the congratulations message to everyone.
[05:31] So I prompted him. He wasn’t the sort to give out a lot of praise, so I said, “Today’s the day. You should write the message saying good job, team.” And once I sent that to him, I don’t think he’d have done it, but about 10 minutes later out comes this great job team, blah, blah, blah message. So you can actually somewhat direct people because a lot of people intend to give credit, but they’re not thinking about it.
[05:57] So that product manager, they’re thinking about, I need to report the news. They’re not thinking it’s important to note what Ryan did. So just giving them that prompt of, hey, this is a big accomplishment for the team. It’s a big moment for me. Can you make sure when you report this up to mention what we did or mention us, not just what happened? And usually they’re willing to do it. If they don’t or they won’t and you’ve tried that, find a way to share the news yourself.
[06:31] It may not be in the announcement to leadership, but share a technical note and say, follow on to the product manager’s note and say, I don’t know if all of you in leadership are curious, but I thought you might want to know some of the technical underpinnings of how we did this. And then you can talk about whatever you want. No one is going to come back to you and say, we don’t care about how any of it works, because that makes them look bad.
[06:57] So you’re finding a way to talk about things in a way that’s hard for people to not like or to at least shut down. And so let the product manager share the fact it happened, but then you share the color. Think of it if you watch any sports of any type, they always have 2 people in the booth. They have the play-by-play announcer who’s like, so-and-so hit the ball or kicked the ball or caught the ball.
[07:26] But then they have the color guy, and the color guy is there saying, yeah, and he’s the great receiver out of this university in his fourth year. And that’s a really tough play. When I was a player, it was really tough to run that pattern or whatever. You can be your own color guy. If the PM is the announcer, you give the color. And those are two jobs, and everyone welcomes the color guy. Do that.
Ryan:
[07:58] There’s often these forums for leadership reviews where you put yourself down and you say, “Oh, I’m trying to get steering on this. So I’m trying to get some headcount or something.” And I noticed that actually the real outcome they wanted was to put the project in front of leadership. So when that person’s promo’s coming along, then it’s visible and that person’s aware of their work. And so if everyone takes this advice, everyone’s competing to speak but not have impact.
[08:30] It feels like that’s not healthy for an org if everyone’s clamoring for visibility with no value. What would you say to that?
Ethan:
[08:41] So first I’d say you’re right. If everyone’s clamoring for visibility with no value, you’ve got a very political organization. But here’s some truths that will set you free. Number one, most people never say anything. Most people take no action, including, by the way, half the people I’m speaking to right now who are watching me. They’re like, I’m gonna do something different. And the fact is tomorrow they’re going to do nothing different.
[09:07] So I’m challenging you, be in the half that does something. Second, you can choose to add value. I was describing how to share news or share detail, but when I said share some of the technical detail, you can do that with a purpose. You can be like, what should I tell leadership about what happened or about how this was built so that they know? I can tell them it either is built for scaling and it’s ready to go, and you can trust it.
[09:37] Or I can tell them it’s important for you to know this is launch ready. But if we have a lot of success, we’re going to need to invest in scaling. You can make it somewhat useful. I understand the worry. And there are some orgs where too many people are talking just to get visibility. You don’t want that. But I would say if you have to have a problem, first be one of the people who’s talking, then figure out how to add value.
[10:08] Because so many people listening to this are like, I don’t care what Ethan says. I can’t stand the idea of I’m talking for no reason, so I’m not going to do that. And that’s the person who’s sitting in their cube contemplating either quiet quitting or rage quitting because they can’t get ahead. Because they’ve decided to opt out of the system. And I get it. I get what you’re feeling.
[10:32] But you’re telling yourself you’re this bold martyr for honesty, and all you are is a martyr. And so don’t do that. Instead, take it as a challenge and say, okay, I’m going to talk, but what I say is going to be worth hearing. I’m just going to raise the bar on myself, as opposed to I’m going to get mad at all these other people I see just flapping their faces, and I’m not going to say anything because to talk puts me in the same bucket as them.
[11:03] Don’t do that. Don’t get in the bucket with them. Make yourself a new bucket that’s better. And if you’re as good as you think, if you’re sitting there about how hot shit you are, then you’ve got to be able to find something useful to say. And if you can’t construct something worth hearing, then go back and revisit that. But I’m so hot shit, right? That’s the challenge I have to you.
Ryan:
[11:25] Is the best thing to do generally be as loud and outspoken as you can?
Ethan:
[11:33] First, I don’t think there’s ever a perfect best thing. And second, I would answer that no, because the way you phrased it, you’re gonna be seen as a blowhard, right? You’re gonna be seen as claiming falsely. If you rephrase what you said slightly to make sure you claim everything you legitimately can and stretch legitimate a little bit against the limits, then yes. Example, I always say I was the first engineer on Prime Video.
[12:01] Now, the truth is, and I’ve had one guy come back and challenge me on this, when I worked on that product, it was Amazon‘s first video product, but we hadn’t named it Prime yet. So when I worked on it, it was never called Prime. It became that. So I could explain, well, I was the first engineer to work on what became Prime Video. That’s just a lot of extra confusing words. So I’m ballooning up my claim.
[12:29] It’s not false, but it is how you look at it. And I’m simplifying my messaging as I’m the first person who worked on that. The guy who’s the first guy who worked on it when it was called Prime thinks I’m claiming too much. Well, fine. You push those boundaries a little bit because people’s brains can’t hold that much. You’ve got to make your message simple. So claim as much as you reasonably can.
[12:54] Don’t get caught out. Luckily, that guy isn’t like, you never worked on Prime Video. He knows what I did. He just doesn’t like how I label it. I can live with that. If he was like, hey, that’s bullshit. You were never on the team. Show me the proof you’re ever on the team or you ever did anything, then I’d be in trouble. So you want to push those limits, but not to being false, more to just being really simple, because it’s a lot easier to believe, to remember Ethan started Prime Video, than this more complex story.
[13:24] And it’s close enough to write. Now some people are like, well, that’s not really close enough to write, you’re embellishing. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s simpler and simple works. Simple messages work. It’s like all marketing messages are very short.
Ryan:
[13:42] And I hear what you’re saying, but it seems like there’s a gray area there. How do you find the right place in the gray area?
Ethan:
[13:50] Yeah, well, okay, so you want to talk about soft skills today. One thing you’re going to have to accept on all soft skills is they’re gray. Right? You’ve asked me a couple times stated like the best is this, the best is that. That’s a good challenge for me, but best is almost always context dependent. Who are you talking to? What do they care about? So you have to move in that gray area.
[14:14] And what I would say is get comfortable in the gray as opposed to we as engineers, we’re trained in binary. It’s 0 or it’s 1. We love black and white. Soft skills and these kinds of things are gray. Never verge into the black where you’re lying, but also don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to the pure white of facts not a single person would argue with. Because on a team project, who had the contribution and who had the idea?
[14:48] Let’s take another example. I hold many patents. A lot of those patents have other inventors on them. Sometimes I feel that I’m the inventor and some other people’s names got added because of social circumstances. And sometimes, to be honest, someone else was the inventor and my name kind of got added. In those situations, I just say I have 70 patents. I could try and divide it into, like, I have 70 patents, 25 of which I feel like I was the inventor.
[15:20] Or I could just say 75 patents. So answering your question about gray areas, my advice is read the room. And what does read the room mean? It means understand your audience and figure out how to explain what you did in a way that the audience is like, okay, you did that and it was good. You have to adjust. I can tell most of my resume accomplishment stories many different ways, right? I say I was the first person working on Prime Video.
[15:53] I can also say I was the first person working on Amazon Video. I can also say I was the first manager and I hired a team, and they built it. They’re all true. And that’s the gray area: every one of those is true, but they’re a different way of looking at it. Push me. I see you want to push me.
Ryan:
[16:10] Yeah, look, because I’m thinking, so there’s a spectrum here: complete, no one will push back on it, 100% truth. And then there’s outright lie. If you had to say where on the spectrum you should place yourself on average for the fastest career growth, where would you be?
Ethan:
[16:33] More is better. More is better until it starts to damage your reputation. You can’t back it up. More. Why do I say more is better? Because most people say too little and claim too little, and they have this faith which is misplaced. The key is what I’m fighting against is not on the table in your equation. What I’m fighting against is all the people who are hoping to be noticed. They’re waiting for someone to go look at the check-ins and count check-ins or go look at all the code and decide who had the real—and that’s never going to happen.
[17:12] They’re looking for this deep evaluation that will create this cosmic fairness. That’s natural because we came through university where you took a test and it got graded and every question got a score. And we’re trained to think that’s going to happen in life, and it’s not. So what I’m pushing back is imagine you took an exam and you were back in college, but the score that was going to be written down was what you could convince the professor your effort was worth, because that’s how your work is actually scored at a job.
[17:45] You fill out the same exam. Theoretically, it could be graded and give you a point score, but it’s really going to be 6 months later. The manager, the professor is going to sit down in a room with all these exams and think, what do I think about Ryan? I feel like he probably got about a 75 on this exam. They’re not going to reread it or grade the questions. They’re going to be like, I know Ryan, he’s about a 75.
[18:10] You want to have told a story where it’s like, I know Ryan, he’s definitely a 97. I get why some people’s skin is literally crawling right now. They’re like, it’s so wrong. This guy, I hate him because he’s telling me these things that just shouldn’t be. And I’m with you, but I’m telling you the real world. And it’s how well you manage that relationship and describe your work and surface it. They’re like, man, Ryan is my 97.
[18:41] And that does mean, by the way, the dark side is that someone else who was a 75 is like, oh yeah, Alfred. I don’t remember much about him. That’s an F. Alfred’s the guy who’s sitting and hoping for the fair grading. And now he’s in his cube contemplating rage quitting because he got an F. This is the world. The world is a social world with short memory, and you’ve got to claim what you really did.
[19:11] And why I tell people to claim more is so many people are Alfred sitting quietly expecting a fair grade.
19:18 — Ways for quiet people to get visibility
Ryan:
[19:18] These behaviors come more naturally to some people who are louder. But what about some people who are more quiet by nature? Do you have any ideas on how they can get this visibility?
Ethan:
[19:30] Yeah, absolutely. There’s a few ways. Look, the world favors extroverts. It’s done that for at least 100 years. There’s some evidence it was different in the past. But getting your point, what someone who’s quieter should do is, number one, can you write about it? If you’re not the sort of person who wants to talk about it or speak in a meeting, can you write about what you’re doing somewhere? Can you email it?
[19:55] Can you put it in Slack? Can you publicize it somehow? Second, if you can’t do that, can you get someone else to publicize it? So can you put it somewhere where it’s going to get reviews? Can you let your work speak, but not in a vacuum? Can you share it out? If you only want to talk to other engineers, can you turn something you did into a shareable component? Can you turn it into a talk for whatever, a white paper, a brown bag?
[20:26] What are the ways you can let your work truly speak for itself, but not in isolation? The way to succeed totally quietly is build something everyone else uses. If that happens, they will eventually, they will truly come looking for you. Who built this? A story here that’s fun is there’s a long-gone Amazon engineer. His name was Matt Round. I never met him, but he built something called the Matt Round Tool, or MRT, which was our interview tracking system for over a decade.
[21:06] Everyone used MRT. Well, it was the Matt Round Tool. So I never met this guy, but I can tell you a little bit about him because his tool became used by everybody and it was named after him. That’s a way to be famous without ever saying a word. Or I guess you had to say three letters, right? He had to call it MRT. So that’s the silent engineer’s publicity method.
21:32 — How to be trusted for top projects
Ryan:
[21:32] One situation that I’ve heard people talk about, or my friends have encountered, is competitions over scope. So let’s say you find an incredible opportunity and you know it’s going to be impactful, it’s going to be great for your career. This is before you tell anyone about it. How do you make sure that you get that scope?
Ethan:
[21:57] There’s a few things. Number one, for me to give you a project as a manager, I have to believe a couple of things about you. First, I have to believe your work’s good enough. If you have a good idea, I have to believe, okay, you’ve had a good idea, but are you the one who can carry it out? And you don’t have to be the best person, but I at least have to believe you’re not the worst person or someone who’s a risk.
[22:19] So it’s a trust in your ability. You have to establish that. The second thing is I have to believe you can make the free time, or that you have the time, or I can free your time. I’m going to be able to let you do it. And that means if you have other work, being able to hand it off, having it well documented, automating it, whatever it is you need to do in order to get that work to a point where you have the time to do this project.
[22:49] So what you want to do is think through how am I going to make the case to my manager that this is, or to whoever, that this is a valuable addition and that I’m the right person, both ability and time, to take it on. The key is you do start with an advantage. If it was your idea, then you’re the one who understands it best. You’re the one who’s thought about it most. So you should be in a leading position for that role, as long as you don’t screw it up, as long as you don’t have a bad track record or have a bad relationship or have something else going on that’s super critical.
[23:28] The other thing is be clear to ask for it. Say, I have this great new idea. You don’t have to say, and I want to make sure you put me on it. You phrase it as, I have this really valuable idea I think is going to change our business or change our team. And I am excited to bring it, to build it. I’m excited to make it happen. That messaging sets in people’s minds that you’re the person and that they have to choose to disappoint you if they’re going to give it to somebody else.
[23:59] Which most people will shy away from. If you don’t say anything, it’s like, “Oh, it’s a good idea. I’ll give it to Fred.” But if you’ve said, “And I want to do it,” then they have to decide, “Oh, well, if I give it to Fred, I’m going to tell Ryan that,” and get them just to think, like, is that worth it?
This is another rule I tell people. You do need to be a little thorny. One of the traits I think great leaders have, and this includes great engineers, is disappointing them comes with pain.
[24:31] Not that they’re jerks, but they’re not just gonna be, oh, that’s fine. Oh yeah, no, don’t worry about it. You gotta be like, what? What did you do? No, my idea. If this is how it’s gonna be, I just won’t bring any more ideas. What the hell? And then you gotta put that little pushback in there of like, this is not okay. Again, if you’re good, the threat is I will take my good ideas somewhere else.
[25:01] And this is important. Again, remember poor Alfred? He’s sitting there with his F and he’s mad. He has a good idea. If I can take away his idea and he’s just going to sit there in his cube and be mad again, Alfred gets abused. Why he gets abused? Because it’s free to me as a manager. I have to make a trade-off between Ryan, who’s pushing me for stuff, and Alfred, who’s always just willing to suck it up.
[25:29] Well, maybe I actually think you’re a little bit too pushy, and I’d like to help Alfred out. But I do have an ugly triage to do, which is, well, if I don’t cater to Ryan, he’s outta here. Whereas if I don’t cater to Alfred, that guy is solid as a rock. He’ll be here two years from now. I’ll give him some free lunch coupons and movie passes, and he’ll be so grateful. Don’t be Alfred. You’ve got to be a little thorny.
[25:59] And again, those same people are like, why do I have to do that? Why should I? Why? They love the word should. Why should I have to do that? Well, okay. In cosmic justice land where the god of your choice is making everything just, you shouldn’t. But we don’t live in that land. We live in reality land where managers have a choice. They have some pushy people that are still good, and they want to keep on their team, and they have some pretty easygoing people that are kind of going to go with the flow.
[26:30] The fact is, the right decision for me as a manager, not the just decision, but the practical one, is take a little from the people who are going to be all right about it and give it to the ones that aren’t, because that’s how I keep my whole team. And yes, for all of you who don’t like it, I have just said a little bit screw the nice people for the bad people, but I have a job to do. And so of course I also never tell myself how I just said it to you.
[27:01] As a manager, I never say, oh, I’m gonna screw all my nice people to help these 2 jerks. But subconsciously, I’m making this trade-off. And what I’m telling myself is I will get back to them and take care of them. The problem is you’re back around asking me for more stuff, and I never quite get back to them. And I meant to, and I had a good heart about it. And it just didn’t happen. And nonetheless, you got everything you wanted, and they lived with what was left over.
[27:29] And if you’re in this leftover bucket, it’s not that I meant bad things for you. It’s I had, there was this person always talking to me and I needed to get them outta my office. So I gave them what they wanted ‘cause I’m human.
Ryan:
[27:42] When I was a manager, I used to think about what’s the optimal team composition in terms of the personalities of the people? And I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Would you rather have a team that’s full of these super ambitious, pushy superstars, or would you rather have pure role players?
Ethan:
[28:04] Yeah, so I’d love to tell you I’d like all pushy superstars, but you can’t keep that many people happy unless your business circumstance is just dropping choice projects in your lap. That can happen in a high-growth scenario where everyone is against their growth limits. But absent that, and particularly now when there’s a lot more flat headcount scenarios, those people just eat each other.
[28:31] They turn cannibal and they turn cannibal toward you and each other. And it’s very ugly. So a few of them, though, the reason you don’t want all role players or all people who are very easygoing is you need those sparks of change, of ambition. You need people who are agitating for changes and ideas, I think, because in this world of very easygoing people, the team may be calm, but no one is pushing.
[29:12] And so it’s peaceful, but it’s not high impact. There’s a quote I love, or a saying I love, which is, reasonable people conform to their environment. Therefore, all progress is due to unreasonable people. People who are like, but why? But why? Why does it have to be that way? Why does it take 3 clicks? Why won’t the customer pay $1 million? Why can’t we all have hovercraft? Those are the people who push things.
[29:43] You need some of them. Too many though, and you just have chaos because everybody’s pushing in different directions.
29:52 — How to defend from others taking your project
Ryan:
[29:52] In the situation where you have a project and you haven’t unveiled it yet and you really want to work on it, I actually think a lot of engineers, they don’t worry about the manager giving it away. They worry about other engineers getting excited about their thing, the thing that they’re excited about. So in that case, how would you defend against other engineers coming in saying, oh, I want a piece of that, oh, that looks fun, oh, that looks impactful?
Ethan:
[30:20] Well, number one, that might be a good thing. The first question I would ask myself is, if my fellow engineers are excited about what I’m doing, how do I make it big enough or tricky enough or hand pieces out so I’m kind of the kingmaker? Right? So I’m like the person holding the cookie jar, handing out cookies. That’s a great role to be in, or could be.
[30:42] Now, if you’re really worried about defending, one thing, of course, is don’t tell them until it’s too late, right? Work on it, keep it to yourself, or until it’s assigned to you. The other thing is, if you had one good idea, you’re probably smart enough to come up with multiple good ideas. So can you go to your manager and be like, I have this great idea. I’m gonna work on this thing. But by the way, there’s these 2 other ideas.
[31:07] And I think people on the team would be excited about it. Whether they are or not, you’ve given some, I don’t know, other bait trail, right? And it doesn’t mean that’s illegitimate. Just you’ve given people other interesting things to work on. But from a pure defensiveness, I guess if you’re thinking about how do I keep my good work to myself, I would say outrun the competition, be a little ahead of them, be further down the prototype avenue or further down talking about it, or to where they’re not up to speed.
[31:49] They can’t keep up. The other thing, it’s a little bit darker. You probably have work to get off your plate. Think about what you have on your plate. You could get stuck on their plates. They have something to do. “I want to get rid of this.” You talk to your boss and you’re like, I have this great new idea. It’s going to make us a bunch of money or get us a bunch of customers, but I have to get rid of Project Foo.
[32:09] But you know what? Both Ethan and Sarah would be great to take over Project Foo. They’re up to speed on it. Now they may hate you. You gotta be careful. You’ll make enemies. You gotta figure out a way to say we’d have to figure out how to manage Project Foo. There’s a couple other people working on it. Maybe we can move it around and then get the boss to say, oh yeah, Fred and Sarah, I got it.
[32:35] Or Ethan and Sarah, right? That’s, I like to do things above board. I think one of the things I want to challenge about some of your mentality in these questions, there’s scarcity mentality. There’s only so much good work.
Ryan:
[32:52] It is true.
Ethan:
[32:53] There’s only so much promotion, so much visibility. But when it comes to good work, there’s a lot of it. Even with promotions and visibility, if a company wants to bad enough, they can promote whoever they want. So I try first to solve these not as a zero-sum game or a prisoner’s dilemma. I try to figure out how can I actually make them win-win. It isn’t always possible, but I at least start there of how can I find a way to make this project bigger?
[33:22] How can I find a way to, if somebody else wants in on it, say to them, great, how can we make it better and do it in half the time? Right. Or I even give them a hard time. I’ll say something like, well, okay, but this is a cool project and it’s better than what you’re working on. So show me you’re serious. What are you going to build this weekend to move it forward? And they’re like, oh, this weekend I have plans.
[33:45] Well, then sorry. This is a weekend’s project, right? I mean, you can do it. You can say it with a smile. I thought you were committed. You can get away with a lot if you can play it off as, hey, step up. Come on, I’m doing it. And there’s just a game to that because humans push each other, right? How do all those stories that end with, like, watch this, hold my beer, and then some guy doing something crazy.
[34:16] It’s usually he got pushed into it, like, “Oh, you should jump off the bridge.” Maybe you should jump off the bridge.
Ryan:
[34:20] Wow.
Ethan:
[34:21] If I did it, I’d do a backflip.
Ryan:
[34:23] Oh, I think it’s this.
Ethan:
[34:25] That’s how humans are. Another tough message about soft skills. Human skills are about dealing with humans’ weird, broken minds that are not rational. They are emotional. And that can be good. Emotions give us energy. They give us excitement. But you have to understand human psychology. And I would say to anyone listening, many of you, a lot of engineers understand poker and that story about if you can’t tell who the mark is at the poker table, it’s you.
[35:01] Well, in the game of understanding each other’s minds and understanding each other’s motivations and soft skills, if you’re not in charge, then you’re the mark, right? Because that game is happening in every meeting consciously and unconsciously. And if you’re not thinking about people’s motivations and their satisfaction and their fears, not to manipulate them, but just to understand and be able to play your cards right, you’re not in the game.
[35:31] And remember, poker isn’t a game where you manipulate each other. I can’t make you play cards a certain way, but it is still a mind game and a competition I’m allowed to win. And so that’s where I feel like you can be ethical and be a card shark and be really good at playing your hand. I’m not putting you down by beating you. I’m just beating you. You had a fair chance. You held your cards. I was better, and I won, and I get the money.
[35:58] That’s what I’m telling people to do. The other way to do it is, oh, I have someone standing over your shoulder or a planted camera. That’s cheating. That’s manipulation. Just be really good at understanding people’s minds.
36:13 — How to reject bad projects
Ryan:
[36:13] When you want to take on that project, maybe you offboard some of the stuff that you don’t want to do to other people. And I think a lot of people have experienced receiving that. So someone’s trying to give them scope that they don’t want. What’s the typical ways to protect against that and say, oh, I don’t want to take on this work. Thank you, though.
Ethan:
[36:33] If you’re in the situation where it’s been pointed to you and you have to refuse it, you’re already — you’ve already lost round one. There may be recovery, but the way to avoid that is to be the one proposing something to the team, the boss, the company, whatever. Be playing offense. Once you’re playing defense, you’re already losing. So I will answer how to defend. But the first defense, right?
[36:56] The best defense, a good offense, is to be the one putting forward ideas and talking about what could happen so that everyone’s like, Ryan’s full of ideas and he’s doing all this stuff. We couldn’t possibly give him anything. And then if I come to you, you’re like, man, I’d love to, but I’m on projects A, B, and C, or I have these new initiatives to do this stuff, and I can’t possibly do that.
[37:25] Now, if you’ve screwed up and you looked idle and you didn’t have some ideas cooking and somebody’s trying to shove stuff on you, there are a couple defenses. Number one is, hey, if this is so easy, I can’t take this on. It’s too big. It’s too much. And they’re like, oh, it’s easier. It’s just this. It’s just that. Great. You automate it. Go ahead. So pushback like, why aren’t you solving your own problem?
[37:53] Remember I said be a little thorny. The next defense is you’re not the only person on the team. So I guarantee you there’s somebody on the team who’s not going to resist. And so just be thorny enough that they go to that other person instead of you. Be the person when they come, you’re like, I’m not taking on your shit work. Who do you think you are? And then they’ll go to the person who’s like, oh yeah, I can help with that.
[38:21] That person is out there. So it’s the way you defend yourself is to be not worth it, right? It’s like a hedgehog defense or porcupine. Yes, can the tiger or the dog eat the porcupine? They can, but it’s not worth it. I’ll go find a nice mushy squirrel. And so when they come to you, you get those porcupine thorns out. And they’re like, ouch, I’ll go find the squirrel. And then there’s bunny guts all over the lawn somewhere else, and that’s your peer, but it’s not you.
Ryan:
[38:52] To say no, to give porcupine quills to your manager, they control if you get fired or not. They control your performance and all that.
Ethan:
[39:03] So if you’re constantly saying no, then you’re just not helpful. Goodbye. But that’s my point about play offense, right? You’ve got to be doing something that brings enough value so the manager isn’t always bringing you things. The other thing I would say is if that doesn’t work, try making a deal. Just look the manager in the eye and say, look, we both know this is not very appetizing work.
[39:32] Can we just agree that’s true? The manager will either be like, yeah, but it needs to be done. Or they’ll be like, no, it’s great. And you can just roll your eyes in a way that’s like, come on. So then you just move on either way, and you’re like, I’m gonna do this, but I wanna do this other thing. So I’m gonna crank through this, but the deal is I get this next thing. And again, most managers, they don’t wanna fight.
[40:00] They got other things to do. They need their team pulling with them, and they know they’re asking you to do some unappetizing work. And so they will make a deal. So there is a role to be a team player and to take on some of the stuff that needs to be done. There’s also a way actually to get credit. Let’s say your peer wants to hand stuff off, or your manager wants to hand stuff off. Go to them and say, hey, it’s been—I’ve really enjoyed getting to work on X, Y, and Z.
[40:33] You’ve given me some good projects. I know our team has some maintenance work, and I know you’re always hunting for people to do it. I’m going to spend the next 2 weeks doing whatever maintenance you want because I want you to know I’m on your side. And give me anything you want. I’m going to crank through it. And then I want to do this, or then I want to do that. But you just, if you’re gonna have to take the hit anyway, turn it into a virtue.
[41:00] If you think the hit is coming or you’ve seen a pattern, go volunteer for it and bargain up front. Hey, I know we’re buried in backlog or buried in bugs. I want to get us through that. I’m gonna do my own bug bash this weekend, tomorrow night, next week, fill in whatever, my next on-call. Tell me what is most important to you because I want to get to where then I’m free to — we’re both free — for me to work on this thing that you need, this better thing.
[41:28] And so it’s about all of these are strategies, though, to play offense. What doesn’t work is to sit in your cube or sit in your home office or wherever it is you’re sitting and hope you, like, this is the one case where hoping you don’t get noticed doesn’t work. Normally it’s— normally you won’t get noticed if you do nothing. But when I’m handing out shit work, I go look around my team like, who haven’t I seen in a while?
[41:49] Oh, it’s Alfred, the grumpy guy. All right, here we go. He’s already grumpy. Why not give him this? Well, why is he grumpy? Because he got an F on the test because his work didn’t get noticed. I actually made him grumpy, but I don’t know that. I just know he’s kind of grumpy, but he still goes along with stuff. So I’ll give it to him. As a manager, I go looking for who can I give this to? Human skills are an art.
[42:11] They’re not a pure science. There’s an art to being the thorny person without being seen as a jerk. You can be the porcupine without being a jerk. It’s like, hey man, I didn’t stab you. These are just my quills. So how do you do that? What does that mean? It means the little signs that you’re not quite happy without actually opposing stuff. Let’s say the boss brings you some extra crap work.
[42:42] You could be like, hmm, all right, this is—I will get this done, but we got to do better. I’m looking for better next time. And just that little challenge, you’re just setting that little hook of, I’m looking for a better challenge tomorrow, or as soon as this is done, I want something juicier. And you’re just setting that little hook because if they come back like, here’s another thing you need to do, and I’m like, hmm, I told you juicy, we both know this isn’t that.
[43:08] I’m going to give you one more pass. Most managers can’t take that because most humans can’t. Even though they never agreed, they can’t take going up against that expectation over and over of like, I’m gonna take him something else and he’s gonna give me shit again. It just isn’t worth it because there, again, there’s somebody else who’s gonna turn into bunny guts when I eat ‘em. And I also know there’s people listening are like, this is so unfair and I’m so sick of being bunny guts spread on the lawn when the wolf got me.
[43:44] Yeah, change. Become the porcupine, then become the bear. And it’s okay. It’s a learning process. Everybody was bunny guts at some point in their career because they didn’t know better.
Ryan:
[43:57] I want to—
Ethan:
[43:58] He’s losing it. He’s got this vision of a slaughtered field of rabbits.
Ryan:
[44:05] Oh God.
Ethan:
[44:05] Okay, we’re gonna come back. I’ll get a new analogy. I’ll save you from my analogy.
44:10 — How to be first for promo
Ryan:
[44:10] Okay, the next situation, a little bit darker as I mentioned, but also realistic, is imagine you want to get promoted but there’s only one available slot. Maybe there’s a promo quota, or maybe it’s one of those roles where there’s only one manager role and you kind of want it. How do you make sure that you’re the first in line to get that?
Ethan:
[44:35] So first, honesty sometimes is not possible. Sometimes, I’m not gonna promise people things that are impossible. If you have several more senior people in your team who are qualified and have done a good job expressing their interest, the right thing to do is get out of line, go somewhere else, go somewhere where there’s more opportunity. And I mention that only because some people—I always make fun of the post office because I can’t imagine how you move up in the post office.
[45:01] Like, either you deliver the mail or you don’t, and then there’s postmaster and there’s one of those, and they stay there until they retire. I don’t know what the hell you do at the post office. So if you’re at the post office metaphorically, get out, go somewhere that’s growing. Now, if it is growing and there’s gonna be spots, you have to be sure managers aren’t mind readers. They don’t know what you want.
[45:24] So you’ve got to make sure they know you want the role. The second thing is you can ask them, “How can I be your first choice for this role?” Or, “What would it take?” A great way to phrase that is, “Under what circumstances?” Like, “What would lead you to choose me?” Even if you have to be kind of absurd, like, “Hey, Ryan, against all odds, what would cause you to bump me to the front of the line and put me first?”
[45:46] What would that have to look like? Why do you ask it that way? Everyone can answer that. Everyone can say, well, this is what it would take. And then at least you know, and you can negotiate those criteria and say, what about this? What about that? The second thing, though, is who gets promoted is who’s indispensable, who I can count on, who I know is going to ride to my rescue when there’s a problem.
[46:10] So what I would do is I’d say, if I want to jump the line, if I want to make sure I get there, I have to jump on crises.
Ryan:
[46:15] These.
Ethan:
[46:16] When there’s a fire, I have to jump on it. Why? Doing your regular job well, there’s a lot of people doing that. In a crisis, when a system is down, when a customer is angry because they have an outage, who steps up to handle that? And who is technically brilliant and maybe a leader, they get noticed. And the question I’m asking myself at promo time is this person I’m about to put on my team, are they going to be the person I can count on no matter what?
[46:54] Are they going to keep me out of trouble? So you have to show that trait. Now, what that usually means— crises unfortunately rarely happen conveniently between 9 and 5. They’re always on a weekend or holiday. So you’re going to have to make some sacrifices to do that. But to show you want to have a discussion with your leader, what’s keeping you up at night? What do you need most? I’m going to work on those.
[47:21] I just spoke to someone. They had a great rule. They went to their manager and would have a chat with their manager and say, “What are your 3 biggest problems?” And their manager would always— managers always have problems. They can always say, “I have these 3 problems.” They would say, “Great, which one’s worst?” And they say, “Oh, this one.” Say, “Great, I want to work on your worst problem.”
[47:40] How do I want to go solve your worst problem. How do we make that happen? Well, of course, somebody who’s shown me repeatedly they want to solve my worst problem, who else do I want on my team? That’s how you get there. It is hard. Okay, you’ve asked a question. I want to be clear. I’ve answered how do you get the spot. What a bunch of people actually wanted to know is, how do I get that spot without putting myself out too much?
[48:09] That I can’t answer for you. There isn’t, I don’t know, bribery. There isn’t an answer for that one.
Ryan:
[48:17] In that last bit there, you mentioned someone, he asked, what are your worst problems? I wonder if there might be some unexpected opposite effect, or what I mean is if I was a leader and someone was coming up to me and overly, obviously eager to try to get promoted, almost kissing up to me and saying, hey, what’s your worst problem? Okay, I’m going to go solve that. It might make that leader feel weird.
Ethan:
[48:46] It could. I mean, again, this is about all personalities are different, and you have to figure out how to approach each personality. The question is the same, which is: what are they going to value enough to invest in me and enough to really get out on a limb to try and help me? How do I set up a win-win deal where I’m helping them and they want to help me? And we can keep pushing that to be more and more extreme, that just like you’re pushing me with darker and darker questions, you don’t normally jump straight to the end.
[49:22] You build up. So you start by doing good work, just being solid, really solid. Then you get really good. Then you start asking your manager, what can I help you with? What is it you need done? I had this idea, so I just did it and I thought it would help you. You just build. And then you start asking like, hey, I wanna grow. And it seems like we have a great working relationship. Could you gimme some tips on how to grow?
[49:49] Could you give me some things that you think are challenges I need to work on? Is there something special you need done? And then after you do that, you deepen it again. And you’re like, hey, I would really—for both of us, is there a role where you need a right-hand person who’s your go-to in a crisis? Because I love hard problems. I love being challenged with crisis. And I’m sure you have some.
[50:17] Is there a win-win where I jump on those? It’s good for me to have that chance and it’s good for you. You know, there’s somebody who’s always going to step up when you need it and you’ve built your way into it. So it’s a little bit— you’re kind of asking the classic frog in a pan thing. If you take your manager and throw them in the hot water of like, hey, I want to be promoted, how can I do anything you need so that you want to promote me?
[50:40] A lot of people are gonna be like, creepy. Okay, you got to boil that water a little slowly. And this is not manipulation, it’s relationship, right? If you’re dating, you send someone a note or express interest, you ask them out, you go to dinner, there’s a process of getting to know someone. There are a lot of analogies between different types of relationships, and there’s a process and you’re dating your manager in a way to build a relationship.
[51:19] It’s not because you’re going to get married, but it is a work marriage in a way, for a while anyway. And that’s okay. You build that relationship and then you hold a privileged position. This is something you haven’t asked. You can’t ask this question. People would come to me and say, why do you treat so-and-so so well? Or why do they get all the benefits? Or they would also say, why don’t— why didn’t you promote me?
[51:48] And I always, when they say, why didn’t you promote me? I say, why didn’t you earn it? Why didn’t you promote yourself? I want to move you up. Show me something. And if you’re asking about this person, oh, I’m happy to list all the ways they are contributing. And if you want to do the same, for the same period of time, I’ll put you where they are, right? Because they’ll be gone, by the way.
[52:11] They’re a climber. They’re gonna either move up in our company or move out. There will be a hole. Get moving. So I was a different boss, I guess, but I always tell people, like, you want a promotion? Here’s a piece of logic for you. Some bosses aren’t smart enough to figure this out. I want the most senior, most promoted team I can have. Why? Why on earth would I not want the best people on my team?
[52:33] So if you can rise to be at a new level, I want to pay you that and have that because I’d rather have a senior person than a junior person. Now I have a budget and whatever, and I have to fight uphill, but I have no problem fighting up to my management, saying, look, yes, I have an expensive team. Why are they expensive? Because my team is damn good and you know it. And I’ve moved people out of my team to other teams, and now they’re leaders on those other teams, and you know they’re stars there.
[53:02] We have a star organization. We build stars. That costs money, but it’s good for you. And I can tell that with a completely straight face and look the financial officer, whoever, in the eye. Another story. I’m coaching a company right now on this method, and I wrote the leader there. He’s the chief product and technical officer. I wrote him and I said, I can make your team higher performing, but it’s going to cost you salary when they step up.
[53:29] They’re going to want to be rewarded. Are you ready to pay for performance? So this is just somebody I’m coaching and I’m telling him, I can raise your team’s performance, but it’s gonna — you’re gonna have to hand out more stock options. Are you ready? I did that internally all the time. That’s how you make it work.
Ryan:
[53:48] When someone would say, “Why didn’t you promote me?” you would say directly back to them, “Why didn’t you promote yourself?”
Ethan:
[53:56] Absolutely. Those words, right? Why didn’t you promote me? Why didn’t you promote yourself? Where is the work? Where’s, you didn’t come to me. You didn’t get a special project from me. We didn’t make a deal and look each other in the eyes. You do this, this, and this and deliver. And that’s the bar. Hey, there is one engineer I’ve written about this. I made a mistake early in my career.
[54:22] I still regret this 20 years ago. An engineer came to me, he made a deal, and I failed to deliver. It was not intentional. I was new to Amazon. I didn’t understand the system. And by the time I went to get him promoted, I was too late and had missed the window. And I didn’t even know there was a window. And he rage quit. And he should have, unfortunately, because I blew it. But that was user error, not intent.
[54:50] And I never made that mistake again. Anyone I promised I would help them move up, sometimes it was when I said, sometimes unfortunately it took longer, I always got it done. But the people who just whined, they’re uninteresting to me. And I always tried to be clear to people the door was open. The other thing about promotion for everyone, no one ever in life said, you might be one of the few exceptions.
[55:14] I know you had a remarkable career. Very few people, maybe even not you, ever said, “Oh yeah, I got promoted way too early. They gave me a bunch of stuff I wasn’t even expecting.” Almost everyone in life is like, “This took too long.” That’s gonna be true. Everyone hates the timeline because who imagines ourselves to be best? It’s always us.
55:35 — How to handle managers that dislike career growth talk
Ryan:
[55:35] So you mentioned that relationship building with the manager. There’s this game we were talking about, on how you get promoted in the system. Some people don’t like the game to the point where you wouldn’t want to talk about it directly, and others are fine with being very transparent. Sounds like you’re the type of manager. Yeah, I could go to you and say, “Hey, I’m this level. I want to be this level. What does it take?”
[56:01] And you would just answer.
Ethan:
[56:02] I would.
Ryan:
[56:03] I could imagine there are some managers, though, that kind of push it off, or maybe it’s an uncomfortable conversation. What would you say to someone who’s under a manager that doesn’t want to talk explicitly about promos?
Ethan:
[56:16] Part of me wants to say find a better manager. Find someone who’s motivated because sometimes those managers aren’t ambitious themselves. And so they’re gonna have trouble relating to someone who wants to move up. But if that’s your situation and you have to work with someone like that, I think then what you have to do is look at who they’re rewarding. Look at who have they promoted and why. And you might think, oh, well, how do I know why?
[56:47] Well, one example may not show you, but if you see several people who got moved up under them, you can find a pattern. Who are they moving up? And then what I would say is if they can’t talk about it, number one, you might be able to talk to some of those people and say, like, I see that Ethan promoted you. How did that work out? How did that come to be? Or I see you got to senior manager or senior engineer.
[57:08] What happened? Figure out what they’re rewarding and go be that. And that’s a slower process. It may not be as comforting, but figure out their language. Everyone has a language to express this. You have to figure out how do they have that conversation? Again, I would go talk to the people that did get promoted and say, did you have any kind of conversation? Did they ask something? Did you write it down in your annual review that it was a goal?
[57:38] Like how I try to find out how did the manager make that decision? And then I would go conform to that pattern as best I could because that’s what’s going to work without being as direct as I am. That said, if you go do all this investigation and find out they basically didn’t promote anyone or there is no pattern, then you’re back to my, there is no system to work in there. You have to get to a place where there is a workable system that if the manager hasn’t promoted anyone or they’ve promoted very few people and very late, then either you accept that, that it’s going to be a little bit random and it’s going to be when they get around to it, or you get out.
[58:24] Here’s a trick. AI has made this super possible. It used to be harder. That manager communicates with people. They write, they speak, they whatever. Grab a bunch of their communication, throw it all into an AI and say, analyze this person’s communication pattern. I have this goal, which is I want to ask for a promotion. I’m very direct. They don’t seem to be. How do I approach this person? AI is amazing at personality typing them and telling you the words and methods to work with their ability.
[58:56] This, by the way, is a hack for anything at this point. Anyone that you have some email chains with or some of their public writing, grab it, tell AI this is a bunch of communication from Ryan or from Ethan. I want this thing, whatever it is. How do I approach them in order to get it? And it will answer it for you. And that’s like, now, if you’re on the far side of that, right? I’ve just told a bunch of people how to approach me.
[59:26] If there’s a clever person listening, they’re like, Ethan has lots of blog posts and I want this from him. So I’m going to get these emails now in the future where people won’t say, oh, I saw you on Ryan. Here’s my secret scripted email, but I’m going to get that. How do I defend myself against it? Well, one, you have to know who you are and what your boundaries are. Two, though, I think there will come a point where we will have to have our own AI countermeasures.
[59:53] So that’s a little futuristic, but the ability of AI to help me manipulate you is gonna get really strong. So right now I’m not saying manipulate, I’m just saying use it to be educated on how to approach that person who has a different personality than yours. But the manipulation is coming.
Ryan:
[01:00:13] This is a common situation I’ve heard and seen people experience, which is they talk to their manager about that promo they want, and the manager doesn’t say, no, you’re so far and here’s what you need to do. And they don’t necessarily say yes either. There’s this gray area in the middle where they dangle this carrot, but they don’t exactly give you the full story. So they might say, oh yes, you want to get promoted, that sounds like a good thing.
[01:00:45] You’re gonna need to do more work, and I want that for you, and we’re gonna do it. And then if you ask a hard question, when will it happen, or what are the concrete steps, they’ll go, okay, let me get back to you. Or what do you do in that case where it’s this gray area carrot dangling, but it’s very unclear if the promo is concrete or not.
Ethan:
[01:01:07] Yeah. So managers don’t like to be pinned down. There’s both good and bad reasons for that. What do I mean good and bad? Good reason is managers don’t have final control over promotions. So part of what they’re thinking is, I don’t want to promise Ryan something that I have to get through a committee. I have to get through a panel. Let’s say Google, for example. Google, at least in the process they had at one point, there’s a promotion packet and it goes to all these other people and the manager isn’t really there.
[01:01:36] And it’s this panel that decides. So I may truly want to help you get promoted, but I can’t answer for you, like, when is the panel going to say yes? So that can be one reason managers are legitimately fuzzy. The other reasons they’re fuzzy are they’re not sure when you’re going to be ready. They don’t want to be cornered. They don’t want you to think they made a promise. And one of the things that’s a problem is if I say there are these 4 things, I don’t want you coming back to me like, I did exactly those 4.
[01:02:11] I want this today. Because what if I came up with a fifth? Or what if I think one of the four sucks and wasn’t very good? So I want to preserve some room. The bad reason, of course, everybody fears is I just don’t ever really intend to do it. I just want to keep moving that carrot and keep you working and working and working. So how do you disentangle these? Well, first, if it’s a system problem, the way to disentangle it is to say, look, I know you face a panel.
[01:02:39] I know that you need our skip’s approval. You need this panel’s approval. I’m not asking for you to guarantee me that we’re going to get through the panel. I want to know what it’s going to take for you to be ready, to be enthusiastic, to go make my case. So you try and back the question off to something they can say yes to. Because if I face some panel, I can’t guarantee you a result.
[01:03:03] What I can do is guarantee you that I will try. So, for example, when I was ready, when I was hoping to become a vice president and I had had these discussions with my vice president, he came to me and said, Ethan, on this cycle, I’m going to do everything I can. I’m going to put you up, and I’m going to put my reputation out there, and we’re going to see if we can make it happen. He was real clear though, like Jeff Bezos approved at that point all the VP promotions.
[01:03:29] He could go fight for it. He could line it all up, but he couldn’t guarantee me that Jeff would say yes. So that’s how that got handled. That’s one way. Then for these cases of trying to pin them down where they want wiggle room, you have to say, look, I understand that answering me or telling me what you’re willing to do is still dependent on me delivering and that new things could come up. But understand, I need help with the fact I have no clarity.
[01:04:07] I don’t have any date expectations from you. I feel like it’s a moving target. Can you help me with that? As long as. What can you do for me? What— you try and draw them into your emotions. Imagine what it’s like to sit here, to hear that I’m a good performer, to want to work hard to achieve a goal, and to kind of have an amorphous target I can’t see where you’re saying, well, it’s the right direction.
[01:04:36] Can you help me out? And you can even say, I know that you’re probably not trying to leave me in the dark, but what can you do to shed some light on that? These are all variations. I would recommend people read the book Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss on negotiation, because it’s all about the psychology of how to get other people into your framing. And so you get them talking about—you find ways to draw them out.
[01:05:08] You ask them questions like, so tell me who else has succeeded, or tell me what success would look like, or tell me how I can measure myself. You can also ask them— this is totally for the people who’ve read Chris Voss, they’ll recognize this— you can say, when they say, well, you should just keep working towards it or whatever, you say, how can I do that? And that makes it their problem to explain to you how you can feel.
[01:05:36] How can I feel good about working towards such an unknown goal, an unknown destination? That puts them on the defensive to solve your problem. So last thing, it’s a manager who just keeps stringing people along. Well, you’re going to have to get out from under that manager or find a way to get a lot of leverage over them. But the way you figure that out is you look at what they’ve done for other people.
[01:06:01] Are they actually promoting people, or are they leading everyone down a path? And if you ever wonder, am I just suspicious or whatever? Again, it’s look around, talk around. What are they doing with others? You alone may feel misused, but if the evidence is no, people in this org are getting moved up and they are getting raises and opportunities, then you have to figure out how to earn it. And if nobody’s getting anything except strung along, you have to get out.
01:06:30 — What if your manager is in the way
Ryan:
[01:06:30] So we were talking about limited number of spots, quota, or promo. And the assumption is there’s these other peers that you’re competing with.
Ethan:
[01:06:39] Sure.
Ryan:
[01:06:39] But there’s also a form of that where you’re not necessarily competing with your manager, but there’s a limited spot because your manager needs to move up so they can bring others along with them. Yeah. And so maybe the leaders in your org, they’re not moving up, maybe they’re not ambitious or some other reason. What would you do in that case where you want to be in line for a promo and your manager is actually the one that’s in the way?
Ethan:
[01:07:07] There’s always cases. One case is the manager is ambitious but can’t get there for whatever reason. First question there is, can you help them? One of the deals that definitely worked for me that I made with some of my stars is like, hey, I want to move up. You want to move up. If we can do this thing together, we’ll both move up. And I enlisted multiple people in helping me get promoted so that I could promote them or vice versa.
[01:07:33] They got promoted, and then I could. Either way, it was a two-sided equation. So one question I would ask is, is there something you can help your manager with? And you can just talk to them about, “Hey, I’ve shared my career goals. I’ve been wondering, it seems like maybe you’d love to move up too. Is that true? And is there any way I can help you?” And that will make you a super ally unless they’re those ones who are uncomfortable not talking about it.
[01:08:03] Again, that’s tricky. Then you can just go to weird language of, well, what’s rewarded in this company and how can I help our group be more rewarded or something a little more oblique. Now, the second problem is your manager doesn’t really— there are some people who don’t want to move up, or they’re just not willing to push for it, or they don’t think it’ll happen. They’ve either given up, or they’re ambivalent, or they’re one of those people who figures it’ll come when it comes.
[01:08:35] And you’re more impatient than that. That may be a case where you have to get out from under them to a different situation, or you ask them, you have a different discussion with them and say, hey, I’d like to move up. If we can’t create that opportunity in this team, will you help me find it in another org? I could be a great ambassador for your leadership and our team elsewhere. Are you willing to help me rise or to find a spot?
[01:09:07] And one of the things that can work to your advantage is a lot of the managers who are a little less aggressive are more into taking care of their teams. They’re more into, well, the reason I’m not so aggressive is I’m at peace helping others, or I really believe. And so they’re more downward focused. So some of them are willing to actually help you elsewhere. Now, there are ones who are like, no, I need you here.
[01:09:35] And if I lose you, my chance of moving up is even worse than it already is. That’s tough. That, however, is your leverage, where you can say, look, if that seems to be the case, you can say, hey, here’s the honest truth. My favorite words are, my career is very important to me. No one can argue with that, right? My career is very important to me. And so I’m going to move up. I would love to do it with you here.
[01:10:06] But I’m gonna have to do it. And that’s just a way— you’ve expressed your first preference, but you’ve also expressed a willingness to make changes. And that’s just a way that— that’s essentially the polite way of saying either you get it done or I’m going to someone who can. But you say it in a way that they can’t like— don’t threaten me. You just say, look, my career is really important to me.
[01:10:31] And I have to, I’m gonna grow my career somewhere. I’m in a season, I’m gonna tell this story like a younger employee. I’m in a season of my life where I have this window, my wife and I, my husband and I, my partner and I are gonna start a family. And I only have a few years to really focus on work. So I’ve gotta move up now. I’ve gotta do everything I can to have a fast career while I have this moment.
[01:10:56] And I really wanna do that here in this org. If we can make a path for that, that’s where I wanna do it. But I wanted to talk to you about it honestly because I do have to do it. And so if it can’t be here, I’m gonna have to figure something out. And you put on your puppy dog eyes like, that’s a terrible outcome. And then you shut up and you let ‘em speak. And the way I told that, no one can be mad at you.
[01:11:21] You just told me you’re willing to work really hard for a few years. You’ve got this nebulous, we’re gonna have a family thing. I don’t know, maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, no lying. But if you haven’t totally ruled out you’re ever gonna have kids, that’s the easiest excuse in the world or whatever. I have these few years before I have to move home to country X to take care of my aging parents.
[01:11:41] There’s a million variations of it. This story about why you feel urgency now and you really wanna do it. We’ve got a great relationship. I really enjoy this work. I’d so love to contribute more in this organization, but I do have to advance my career. And then you just wait and see what they say.
Ryan:
[01:12:02] Yeah, this seems like another one of those gray areas because in the other case, the gray area was selling yourself. In this case, it’s, I guess, in a negotiation because I could see someone who looks at that and goes, oh, that’s not fully accurate. Or you don’t know if you’re going to have kids or what. You’re using that as a tool to—
Ethan:
[01:12:22] Yeah, I don’t think most people are sitting here in a podcast chair, thinking about what people might be thinking about. In the moment, they’re mostly taking in, okay, what am I being told? And I’ve got all these other worries. But even if they’re thinking that, the message is still clear. If you were to come back to me and say, well, you don’t really know your future.
[01:12:43] The future is unclear. I can always go back to, this is how I feel. You can’t argue with what I feel or what I believe, right? Nobody’s going to get into, well, you don’t know if you’re going to have kids. No one’s going to tell you that. So that’s what makes this—you can call it a trap, but that’s what makes this a trap. There are certain things you can’t say to people.
[01:13:11] And you can’t tell me not to care for my aging parents. You can’t tell me not to plan to take care of my family. These are totally off, you know? And by the way, if they do say that, you’ve got someone you got to get away from. Like, wow, your family’s really your problem. Okay, noted. Thank you so much. Door, please. Check, please. Good managers, clever managers will be like, all right, I see what’s going on.
[01:13:38] I see the negotiation we’re having. I see, I’m onto your game, but I also see that puts them back in my camp. We’re like, okay, I see your game. What do I want from you? I’m thinking now, okay, he’s listened to Ethan and Ryan’s podcast. He knows the game. Well, as a manager, I know the game too. What do I want from you? And what’s it gonna take? What do I want you to deliver?
[01:14:05] So yeah, what you keep asking is effectively, what do I do with people that don’t like ambition? Remember, there’s proper ambition and there is pushing too hard. I have had people come to me. They’re brand new out of college, and they’re like, I’d like to be a VP in 2 years. How do I do that? Okay, that’s a reality check problem. I don’t know. Is your last name Bezos and I didn’t notice?
[01:14:34] Otherwise, unfortunately, that’s probably not going to happen. Let’s talk about what could happen. And then if they’re like, no, no, no, VP, I’m like, okay, I see, door, you’re a loon, I don’t need it. But for normal ambition, there are people who find ambition a dirty word. Why should you worry about this? And the work is pure and just work and it’ll be yours eventually.
[01:15:01] And I guess those people, I’m gonna be really blunt, they’re probably not listening to this podcast because the people you and I attract want more. And if you have a boss or a manager who is busy being very zen about like, oh, it’ll all come in due time, you’re in the wrong place. Go start your own thing. Go come work for me or one of my friends. Find a place because there’s so many hard-charging people.
[01:15:30] Go find them. Now, some of those people will try to work you to death, and that’s a different set of guardrails. But go find someone who shares your basic desire to get somewhere in life.
01:15:43 — Did he ever have overly political reports
Ryan:
[01:15:43] So when you were a VP at Amazon, and I mean, you’re very cognizant of this game, did you ever have reports coming to you employing these tactics? Something where you thought, okay, this is polite messaging on top of a hidden message, which is, I want something from you.
Ethan:
[01:16:04] I had one or two people who were really good at it, but honestly, most people, maybe because I was very transparent, people weren’t. They were just honest with me. This is what I want and how can I get it? And I’d be like, here’s the bill. But I did have some people who were very smooth. I also had a couple people, I mean, I definitely caught some people lying, right? Just trying to run a game on me, and I fired them.
[01:16:32] When I say running a game, they were dishonest. They were actually claiming things that weren’t true. Those people got gone. The last class of people I want to talk about, honestly, I had some very ambitious people in one team I can think of that I couldn’t give opportunity to fast enough for their desires. We can argue about whether or not they were quite qualified, but they went to other companies that saw more value in them, and they had, or they had wildly successful careers.
[01:17:07] So sometimes even a boss like me runs out of opportunity because I attract these hard-charging people and I encourage them. It’s okay if they leave. Meaning sometimes those people would come to me and ask for something and I’d be like, it’s gonna take 6 months. And I’m thinking one guy is like, Samsung will make me a VP tomorrow. And I’d be like, you should do that. And it was okay. This one guy went and he went to Samsung, he got a huge role.
[01:17:37] It was a better job for him. That’s okay. But your question, did I see people using these tactics? Not as much as I’d like. I’d rather more people were trying to figure out how to grow their careers because I want to grow people’s careers. The ones I hate are the ones who I feel are asleep. They don’t want to work that hard, or they’ve got some issue that they’re angry about, but they’re passive-aggressive and they won’t put it out there so that I can address it.
[01:18:07] Or not. So I can tell them, okay, I hear your issue. That’s not gonna change. So now it’s accept it or leave, and that’s okay. Either accept it or leave. They’re both fine. Or, yeah, I can fix that. Here’s how we’ll fix it. I feel like even in a lot of high-performing workplaces, a lot of people are kind of stumbling around blind with no real plan. Some of those people are happy that way. So what I try and remember is, some people are in a season of their life where they just kind of wanna do their job and be left alone.
[01:18:38] Those are the people that the top performers get to pass all their mediocre work to.
Ryan:
[01:18:43] Yeah, I remember there was this tweet that went really viral. It was just an open-ended statement saying something like, why is it that you never hear the highest performers complaining about their manager? And implicit in that is that they leave, that high performers have optionality and they just go and find a better situation. You mentioned that if someone lied to you, you’d fire them. But when you fire people, you have to collect all this evidence of underperformance and kind of chase them down for some time.
[01:19:18] And then how do you fire someone for lying?
Ethan:
[01:19:22] Well, number one, if you could really prove the lie, you probably could terminate for dishonesty if you had ironclad proof that it was a lie. But sometimes you know something’s a lie and you don’t have it. I’ve written before that a manager in good standing at any level can get rid of any one employee, and there’s 50 ways to do it. So you, like, dark. First thing I can do is just start giving you crappy assignments.
[01:19:45] The second thing I can do is just say, Ryan, I know we’ve talked about promotion. I got to be honest with you. I don’t really see that coming. It would take a lot of change. And I think you better reset your timeline to 3 to 7 years. So you’re probably going to quit. The third thing I can do is rate you crappy. Communicate like, I’m seeing this as, pick your system. But this is, right now I’m seeing you tracking below average for the year.
[01:20:14] And I just want to tell you upfront, I see a low performance review coming, and you’re like, wait, I delivered this, this, and this. I’m like, yeah, but here’s my list of seven other things you didn’t do. I can always drive somebody out. And if you go to HR and you’re like, yeah, he’s turned on me, he’s got all these unrealistic things, the fact is, I’m known as a good manager and you’re somebody below me.
[01:20:38] Their HR’s job is to side with me unless I’ve done something illegal. So they’re going to say, uh-huh, uh-huh. It’s going to be very tough. And again, people hate this idea. This is a flaw of our human society, which is that a manager in good standing, if they do get it in for one particular person, they’re going to win that. And theoretically, at least, an innocent person can be totally screwed over.
[01:21:05] What normally prevents that is good managers don’t want to screw over good people. That’s pathological. Why would I want to get rid of a good person? But if someone’s really cancerous in my organization or dishonest, I have so many tools. Now, I can also start gathering all this evidence if I want to, and that’s not a bad idea, just in case I need it. But there’s so many ways to communicate to you that your life here is over and it’s only going to be crappy work from here on.
[01:21:36] And I can also ride you like, “Hey, our workday starts at 10. It was 10:05 this morning.” And just like, I can be on you for everything. And the worst on-calls and the most tickets. It’s very easy to make your life miserable, and it’s very hard to prove. Like, oh, Ethan, what are you gonna do? Go to HR, who doesn’t know shit from shit in this context, and be like, Ethan’s giving me the worst tickets.
[01:22:07] What? Like, but how hard? Let me just ask you how hard this would be. Okay, we’ve got a 500-bug backlog, and I go through it and find 20 really crappy things to work on and say, I think for your next on-call, these should be your priorities. By the way, I’ll be measuring you to them. Hint, hint. If you don’t do it, it goes in my evidence file to fire you. And they’re just nasty. And let’s assume I’m technically incompetent and I can’t do that.
[01:22:36] There’s still a way to do it. I go to Fred and I say, Fred, I was wondering in our bug database, what are 100 tickets you think are pretty useless and we should just close them? Innocent request. Now I take this 100 and I come to you and say, I’ve been thinking about some of these tickets, and I need some data on these 20. I want you to prioritize working on these 20 picked from that 100 and get them all done this week and tell me what was the total value of them.
[01:23:06] And if you ever come back and say, “Those are terrible tickets. How could you do that to me?” or “I even know you asked Fred what were a bunch of useless tickets,” like, yeah, I was double-checking Fred’s judgment. You still had to close all the tickets. I have a defensible thing. What I’m going to do now—thank you so much, Ryan, for plowing through those—I’m going to close the other 80 with no resolution because you’ve shown that Fred was right.
[01:23:28] But I’ve still jammed 20 lousy tickets picked by Fred down your throat without knowing anything about what’s going on. I can do this all day. You throw me scenarios, I’ll find another way to come around HR and make your life miserable. So what I do, to summarize, if I really want rid of somebody, I let them know it’s over, right? With words like, I just wanna level with you. I see after recent events, an allusion to me catching you lying, even if you don’t admit it.
[01:23:58] After recent events, I gotta be honest, I’m seeing this as a challenging year. And I know you’ve asked me about promotion, I think you might want to reset your timeline. That’s all I have to say on that. And then I start making clear that the punishment’s going to keep coming. You will evaporate. I just have to wait a little bit and you’ll either evaporate by quitting or getting another job, or you’ll evaporate by getting pissed at me and doing something else outrageous that I have instant cause.
[01:24:30] Luck again, though, I want to emphasize: sane bosses don’t do this to good people, but it’s a tool, and that’s the way our world of fallen evil humans works.
Ryan:
[01:24:43] Yeah, and this is another one of those gray areas, though, because in the case where you’re pursuing someone that obviously lied, you are kind of just, and you’re outing someone that’s bad. I guess it would be very unfortunate if you just didn’t like someone or there was something that didn’t quite click with you with someone?
Ethan:
[01:25:03] Well, there’s another way to handle that. Okay, so let’s assume you and I don’t click. It is, again, everything is a gray area in human relationships. Let’s assume you and I don’t click. And let’s even assume I’m a good person and I’ve tried to figure out how to work around it. I may have even talked to you and said, “Your style is you tend to whatever, some personality trait. You tend to look at the downside before the upside, and I really want to run a positive upside team, and I need you to be more upbeat.”
[01:25:32] You think you can do that? And you’re like, yes, I’ll try. But the truth is you can’t. I can just come back to you. The nice way to do it is say, Ryan, look, we’ve talked before about compatibility. You and I just, we’re not that compatible. I would like to help you find a place where you’re going to thrive. Would you be open to that? And, at the end of the day, it can be internal, it can be external.
[01:26:04] I will make introductions. I will help you. If you take me up on that, I just help you find a new place with a new fit. If you don’t take me up on that and you’re like, no, I really want to be here and I think you’re unjust, you need to be my way, blah, blah, blah. Then I’m like, well, I tried. Now I just go back to my million strategies to get you to decide you want to take the offer to move along.
[01:26:26] Why is that potentially justified? I’m not going to claim it’s totally justified, but the fact is we all have to work together. And if you’re too much of a pain in the ass to work with, too much of a disturbance to my zen, frankly, the corporate hierarchy has determined that I’m the important one. That’s why I’m the boss. And again, there’s people screaming, “How can you possibly say that?”
[01:26:50] Well, that’s why it’s an org chart and it goes up at the top. Okay. And I deal with the same thing above me. Either I make Bezos or whoever happy or I’m expendable. That’s our system of life. And we don’t live in a perfect world. I wish we did. We lived in some perfect world where that wasn’t true. But I have a whole team to run, and if you’re sucking up too much of my energy, I have to get rid of that.
[01:27:19] Now, I can think of some people who annoyed me enough I encouraged them, like, maybe we need to find you, you know, maybe let’s work together to find another place that’s like a more natural fit. And I think that’s fair because probably if we’re that different, you’re not loving it. It’s not great for you either. And so, you know, this is a little bit the breakup line of like, oh, it’s not you, it’s me, but you still need to go, like still pack your shit and move out.
[01:27:46] That’s the gentle way though that somebody doesn’t end up fired. And I can totally find—look, I probably have an opinion of some manager I think who’s just like you. I probably don’t care for them that much. I probably think, wow, they operate in this weird way I can’t stand, but those two are going to be perfect together. Maybe they will.
Ryan:
[01:28:36] As you said, a manager can fire any one employee that they wanted. Yeah. And HR is gonna side with the manager.
[01:29:02] Is there any edge case or any weird situation where the opposite could be true, which is, indeed, the engineer is in the right and they’re trying to get rid of an unjust manager, and they’re working with HR? Yeah.
Ethan:
[01:29:19] So over 50% of this is gonna be who goes to HR first. Because you get to set the framing, you get to make the complaint. So one of the things I would totally do if I’m the manager is before I started saying stuff to you, I would send a little note to HR that says, hey, I just want to let you know, I’ve noticed some challenges in Ryan’s performance. I’m going to start working on them, ABC, whatever.
[01:29:44] I just set the framing. And that way, when you come to them to complain, you’re running into this wall that I’ve already framed you as a non-performer. Going the other way, if you’re the employee, you want to be the first one to HR about the situation, and you want to frame it as not, I have a terrible manager, but you want to frame it as, I’m really trying to do great work for this company, and I’m really struggling because of fact, fact, fact.
[01:30:17] Citing behaviors of mine. So you never actually, at least, open the conversation by saying, “Ethan’s terrible and you need to fire him.” Instead, it’s how these factual situations—again, facts can be viewed many ways. You view them your way and get them out there. These factual situations are limiting your ability to produce and that of your peers. The second thing is, if you want to win one of these uphill battles, you’re probably going to need at least one other person to verify what you’re doing, like verify the problem.
[01:30:51] The third thing is it sure helps if you’re a superstar, right? Because if you’re Joe Average or below average, no one’s going to go out on a limb. You really need to be standing out enough that maybe HR already knows you or you’re top rated and they’re like, oh, a top rated employee or one of the people, or maybe your skip already knows you or your name is on this tool, right? Those kinds of things can influence HR.
[01:31:20] The last thing, of course, that you hope for is bad manager is this huge category. Is there a smoking gun where I’ve done something illegal, patently unethical, somehow unacceptable to you or someone else that can be documented? Or not. If the manager is generally viewed as well-performing or has a good relationship with their boss, it’s going to be very, very hard to get rid of them. So I’ve had stuff come to me from employees that have led me as a skip level to terminate a manager, but it’s because it was several people over time, and the facts added up to show my manager was actually doing things they shouldn’t.
[01:32:14] And when I say shouldn’t, not just low performing, but unethical or just really not super untalented. But that was usually my observation as well. Then everyone has this fantasy that justice is going to be served. And you’ve asked, does it ever happen? Sure. It happens in the movies and it happens one in a million, but in real life, it’s just so much easier to leave. And what will actually happen is you’ll leave and three other people will leave.
[01:32:47] And then finally the management will be like, oh, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll exemplify this for you. One of the people I coach, can’t say where, he was telling me, I have this real problem. I have this manager I like, but I’ve been—they keep losing employees. People keep quitting their team and saying it’s about the manager. And I’ve been trying to coach them to change and they haven’t been changing.
[01:33:14] What should I do? And I asked this manager, well, how long have you been coaching this person? And he said, 18 months. And I said, hold on. You’ve had employees in your organization quitting and pointing to this manager for 18 months, and you’ve been trying to coach them to change, and they haven’t changed, and you haven’t done anything. And they’re like, yeah, I like them. I want to see them succeed.
[01:33:45] I have this hope for them, and they’re nice. Okay. What about your employees who quit? And by the way, if this person didn’t work for you, but you were like, if I had told you the story, what would you tell me to do? Like, oh, I’d tell you fire that manager. I’m like, right. Well, why aren’t you doing that? Well, like I said, I like them and I don’t have a problem with them. This is why it doesn’t work.
[01:34:11] This is a real case of a real client of mine who’s got employee after employee quitting out from under a manager that they see as like, I’m gonna make them better. I like them and I’m gonna bring them through this. And what they’re not seeing is, one person after another is like, oh my God, I gotta get outta here. It’s not even the message isn’t reaching the manager. He knows what’s happening, but he’s like, oh, I’m gonna work with them.
[01:34:40] This is what I’m trying to tell you. And if that client of mine is listening, yes, I am telling your story without your names, because you need to fire that person for your own sake and for them. And he’s like, oh, but we’re not hiring. What if I can’t get a backfill? And I’m like, it doesn’t matter. Okay, you have a cancer who’s killing your team, live without them, right?
[01:35:05] But, or do something about that. But I’m just showing you how the inertia works because that manager that you think is bad, I think is great because they do whatever I want.
01:35:16 — What gives you leverage
Ryan:
[01:35:16] It sounds like there are 2 things here that give you leverage in these conversations. There’s how high-performing you are and how liked you are. If you’re high on both of those, it gives you power.
Ethan:
[01:35:28] Absolutely. So I often say the hardest person to fire is kind of like this manager I was just talking about. If you’re looking as a boss, it’s very easy to fire people who are disliked and low performers. They’re not that good, and nobody really cares. Everybody can see it, easy. It’s also actually if someone is disliked but either a high performer or not, if most people don’t like them, nobody’s going to care.
[01:35:57] And they’re thorny, too thorny in a bad way. That’s also easy. And thorny there means they’ve made themselves disliked with others, not just with me. They’re generally disliked. The hardest one to get rid of is the person who’s mediocre. They’re not obviously terrible, but they’re not very good. They’re below average, but everybody likes them. And why is that hard? Well, number one, there’s no smoking gun.
[01:36:22] They’ve never screwed anything up bad enough that you can just be like, that’s terrible, you’re out. And if you go after them, everybody’s going to look at you and say, But everybody loves Bob. Why are you down on Bob? Bob brings donuts. He’s friendly, throws a barbecue at his house every year. He’s always picking up work. Yeah, the work he does kind of sucks and is often late, but he’s always volunteering really hard.
[01:36:51] So yeah, be likable. Now, I’ve said be thorny. How can I be saying be thorny and be likable? You can do both. Okay, you’re likable all the time, meaning you’re friendly, you’re outgoing, you’re pleasant, you’re talkative, except when people are trying to do something you don’t like. And then it’s just that little pushback and that little push of, come on, just that much? Come on, really? This is our priority?
[01:37:24] Is this what you’re telling me you want me to do? Just that little face. It doesn’t take much. The other thing is, if that’s too much, you can push back, as I said, with humor. Be like, all right, but you’re using up one of your crap work tokens. I only give so many of those a month. So is this where you want to spend one? We’ll do it. But it’s only 3 a month. Nobody can really get mad at you for being like, hey, Boss, I only give out 3 shitwork tokens a month.
[01:37:53] If this is one you need to spend, I got it for you. But we are burning a token. Is this it? People will accept this framing. This is the weird thing about humans. I can push on you the fact that you get 3 shitwork tokens a month. You never agreed to that. You’re like, I’m the boss. If I want to give you 73 shitwork tokens, you’re going to spend them all and say, may I have another?
[01:38:15] But that isn’t what we do. We’re like, oh, 3 shitwork tokens. Okay. Because you set the frame. So that’s a way to be thorny and still be liked. Because if other people see you do that, they’re like, hey, that’s pretty clever. Ryan’s pretty smooth. They’re not mad at you, but you just brush the boss back in front of everybody. Even the boss is like, all right, I see. Because what are they thinking?
[01:38:40] They’re thinking, well, you said yes today, that’s good. And you gave me 2 more, that’s fine. I’ll deal with it if I get to token 3. But subconsciously you set the anchor that 3’s the line, and they’re gonna know that. And even worse, if you did it with witnesses, then they’re like, I kind of agreed to it in public. Even though I never agreed, I let it stand. And you’ve got them cornered because they can’t be like, no, Ryan, I’m the one who tells you how much shit work, and it’s unlimited tokens.
[01:39:14] Well, that makes them look horrible, right? And so nobody’s gonna do that. And this is how you be still very likable and funny, but lines.
Ryan:
[01:39:25] For job security, it sounds like likability is more important than performance.
Ethan:
[01:39:33] I mean, it depends on the context. Being liked never hurt anybody. And look, I’ve seen another decision I saw made, technically totally illegal. We were deciding on a layoff in a company I was in, and we had to cut some people. And one of the other leaders said, well, that guy’s married and has a family to support, and this other guy doesn’t. There’s no legality in that. You can’t bring people’s family situation, but that was what happened.
[01:40:00] So decisions get made on criteria that aren’t performance, and that’s a very real thing. So likability is one of them. And, hey, a question. If I wanted to save you and you were likable but lower performing, hypothetically, and there were a bunch of people making the decision, what I would say is, yeah, Ryan isn’t always our top performer, but this new room has to pull together.
[01:40:30] Who do we want in that room who’s going to light up the room and keep everybody’s morale up after we go through this grim event? I think we need Ryan at that table. And I’ve just turned your likability into a performance asset. And that kind of thing also happens because who do I want to work with? I want to work with really smart people, but I also want to work with people I enjoy who can pull together.
[01:40:58] And that’s the likability piece. High performance, there are cases where you will say, yeah, Robert is the only one who knows that old arcane system. And even though he’s really tough to deal with, we’re gonna need him. That also happens. That’s the Cal Newport so good they can’t ignore you path. But what’s going on in my mind is how can we cross-train someone on what Robert knows?
[01:41:27] So that we’re not in this situation? Because the truth is, I’d rather unload him. Nobody ever wants to get rid of the likable guy if he’s at all good. But the high-performance guy who nobody likes, we’re looking for how do we get out of this situation? How do we get out of our dependence? Because no one likes to feel trapped and depending on someone who’s unpleasant. And that’s why that’s dangerous.
[01:41:54] I also want to make clear, you don’t have to be like this super lovable teddy bear. Just be a decent person. Don’t be rude or judgmental. Don’t be that person who’s always talking down, super like— engineers hate this again. This is my list of stuff engineers hate. Managers have fragile egos. They have imposter syndrome. They’re always wondering, even if they’re technical managers, part of their mind is like, am I technical enough to keep up with the team?
[01:42:24] Well, there’s that one engineer who wants to show the manager, “Ah, you’re really out of touch, old man.” I don’t like that. And so if you keep showing me up in front of the team, you become marked for death for two reasons. Okay? One, I don’t like you. And two, I can’t have you doing that. So if I can’t win you over, then I have to shut you up because I gotta keep the rest of the team with me, and you’re undermining my authority.
[01:42:56] And humans are incredible rationalization machines. My mind will always come up with some reason at night why that’s justified. It always does. That’s what human minds do. That’s why there’s so much nasty behavior in the world. People don’t tell themselves, nobody wakes up in the morning and like, I’m a supervillain. This doesn’t happen. The supervillains wake up and they’re misunderstood.
[01:43:21] Nobody understands the greater good I’m doing. Nobody understands that I’m just getting by, taking care of my family. Nobody understands this is just the way the world is and some people gotta die. They always have some excuse, and it’s okay because just. And we all, we’re built to do that. Literally built to.
01:43:41 — How to defend against peers undermining you
Ryan:
[01:43:41] Last question on this dark topic, and we’ll go to the darker one.
Ethan:
[01:43:45] Darker? All right, this hole has no bottom. Let’s go.
Ryan:
[01:43:51] So we’ve been talking about promos and how there’s maybe limited spots in some cases. And not that you would recommend anyone do this, but let’s say your peers are going for that spot as well, and they know that you’re one of the people that wants it too, and so they undermine you. So they’re attacking you. How do you defend against being undermined by your peers where they’re saying, oh, he’s not the best candidate for that position?
Ethan:
[01:44:25] Yeah, so speed matters. Again, going first really matters. If you have seen this once, you can predict it will happen again. So if you get bitten once or see someone bite someone else once, you can predict that person did it once, they’re going to do it again, they’re going to do it to me. So then what you have to do is get in front of it with your management and say, hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is some undermining in this team.
[01:44:53] We have a competitive team. Some people will take shots at each other. I’m never going to do that. But that means I’m counting on you to recognize it because I’m not going to play that game. But I’m counting on you to see it and just please judge my performance by what I actually do, not by what anyone else says. And then you’ve planted the seed in their mind without accusing anybody of when someone comes and chirps, they’re like, oh, that’s what Ryan was talking about.
[01:45:21] And now you’re up 2 because I’m going to disregard what they said and not knock you down a peg. Meanwhile, I’m going to look at the other person and say, that’s interesting, and knock them down for undermining. So you really want to set that, like, if this is a problem you’ve seen, you want to talk to your management and just be like, hey, I’ve seen some people in the team, maybe while you’re not there, talking shit about each other.
[01:45:43] And it really disturbs me. I’m worried that if they’re talking shit about each other or other people around me, they’re also talking shit about me to you. And I’m not going to play that. And I’m not accusing anybody, but just please judge me by what I actually do. And if you ever have any question about what I’ve actually done, grant me 10 minutes to show you. Because if I can’t back it up, that’s great.
[01:46:09] Like, that’s fair. But if I can, judge me by what I’ve done. And that humble pie act of like, judge me by what I’ve done and give me a chance to show it. Again, who can object to that? Right? But you’ve set that anchor so that then if somebody comes and like, well, Ryan, blah, blah, blah, then they look, they’re playing into it. Now let’s assume, I know you’re going to ask me, well, what if they’ve beaten you to it and you find out they’ve been doing this and your boss is like, wow, really?
[01:46:40] How much did you have to do with that project? First, you may have to just be like, okay, once bitten, twice shy. Now I’ve learned. But you can, without being defensive, you can just say, haven’t done that much, huh? And that’s the Chris Voss trick of mirroring back to them, where they’re like, well, you didn’t contribute that much. And you say, contribute that much? And let them keep talking.
[01:47:01] Well, so-and-so said, oh, interesting. So-and-so said? And you just, this is a trick from the book, but it’s very powerful, called mirroring. You just say, repeat the last few words they ended with, and they will keep talking, and they’ll talk themselves into trouble. But eventually you just say, well, I’m really disappointed by what you’re sharing. I think if you’re willing to examine it, my work speaks strongly for itself.
[01:47:27] But I certainly want to make sure I’m judged rightly in the future so that we’re both on the same page about what I contribute. What’s the best way for me to showcase what I’ve contributed to you so that you’re fully informed? Because that’s another little dig, very subtle. Maybe you’re not fully informed right now, but how can I make you fully informed in the future? But I haven’t said, oh, you’re not fully informed.
[01:47:52] I just said, so you can be. So I’ve set this anchor that, you’re not fully informed, but I’ll make sure you are in the future. These are just all little techniques. Lastly, I know I say this a lot, if you’re in a team with a bunch of snakes, not all teams are like that, find your way out. Another thing, if there is a chance, rather than counterattacking the person who’s undermining you, that puts you down in their gutter.
[01:48:28] Instead, figure out a way to catch them out or set a trap or otherwise expose them as a shit talker. Maybe your team probably has a bunch of neutral people who just don’t care. Wait until that person who’s got that behavior probably shoots at other people too. Go find those people and say, hey, I heard Ethan say that you didn’t contribute that much. I just want to let you know, I thought you contributed a lot.
[01:48:58] I’m not sure where that came from. And you do that with a few people, and that just forms the, right? And you’re not—you never said, I see he’s running you down. Say, I’m not sure why he said that. I thought you did a lot. It’s that subtle. Just like, hey, I see you. And you do that with a few people, and suddenly they’re all like, oh, that other person’s always. With a little bit of help, people are very good at seeing through others.
[01:49:26] Once your eyes are open to this person’s behavior has double meaning, it’s much easier to see. So you just have to help people open their eyes a little. You can even just be really curious and say, I noticed today Ethan was saying bad things about Fred’s work. You’re talking to a third person. Why do you think that was? What caused them to bring that up? It’s so strange.
[01:49:51] You’re not even saying, “I disagree with it.” Just, “That was a little weird.” You just leave it. Their mind will go, “What was weird about that?” Huh, maybe seeds of doubt. Planting seeds and being patient, great relationship tool, both in terms of planting seeds of, “I’ll help you,” and planting seeds of doubt where you need to. That’s that doubt, like where I’ve said my career is very important to me and I need to move it forward, I’m just planting that little seed of doubt of, “Either you take care of me or I take care of myself.”
[01:50:21] I just let that grow. Plant those seeds.
01:50:24 — What if everyone is good at politics
Ryan:
[01:50:24] When I think of politics, it feels like this adversarial game. If everyone was playing this game optimally or using all these tactics that you were saying, does that change what is the best thing to do?
Ethan:
[01:50:38] So I will answer your direct question in a second, of does that change what’s optimal? Politics, the way you’re describing it, and all these sort of dark scenarios, they’re never ideal. This dark scenario in a real—like, where do we start about getting credit? In the best world, managers have a pretty good idea of credit, but all the team members are sharing honestly what they’ve done, and we’re all trying to grow together.
[01:51:03] And like I said, with this company I’m working with, we’re trying to get all the boats to rise. The company gets higher performance, which means it does better in the marketplace, which means everybody’s shares goes up and we can give more out, and everyone wins at some level. So there are positive ways to do this. It does not have to be zero-sum or prisoner’s dilemma, but those situations do arise.
[01:51:25] And if everyone—we know the prisoner’s dilemma, to cite a problem, hopefully if somebody is watching, they don’t know it, Google it, but I’m assuming they all do. In the prisoner’s dilemma, we know how it ends, which is everyone stabs each other all the time and it ends up nobody makes progress, but nobody loses progress. So in this highly political, everybody doing this, what you would have is you’d have a set where because everyone is maneuvering in this politically optimal way, you’re right back where you started.
[01:51:55] No one’s getting an advantage. So you’re back to neutral. What I would say to do is if you recognize that case, oh, everyone here is very politically astute, I would be like, so my problem is I’m playing poker at a table of excellent poker players. I can hold my own, but a much better thing is go to that table of suckers and clean them out. Go somewhere else that’s a different game or a different level of play.
[01:52:26] Where I’m the star. I often share it this way. When I chose to do what I do today, which is coach and teach online, I realized I have 3 talents. I’m a pretty good public speaker. I know a lot about careers, and I know a fair amount about social media from having worked at Twitch and been a Twitch streamer. I am certainly not, and by no means was anywhere near the best Twitch streamer. I’m probably nowhere near the best public speaker.
[01:52:57] And while I’m a career expert at some level, I may not even know the most about careers. But when you intersect those 3 things, I’m very near the best. So I went and found the one poker table where, no, I have very little competition. So what I would say to do in that case is go find the place that fits you. Because if you’re that good and everyone else is that good, go somewhere where the competition is softer.
[01:53:24] Now, some people are like, ooh, I don’t want to do that. I want to win, or I want to be at the toughest place. Well, that’s fine too. It’s a lot of effort to stay. Let’s use sports as an analogy. You want to play on the top team, whether it’s World Cup or whatever, getting the benchwarmer spot on the top team is a lot harder than getting the star spot on, like, the 6th team. And that is a choice.
[01:53:53] The star on the 6th team, though, probably makes more than the benchwarmer on the top team. So it is, what do you want? If you want to say, I was part of the team that won the championship, you might have to take the benchwarmer spot. And if you want the big paycheck, you might want to go somewhere else. And those are both valid choices. They’re just choices.
Ryan:
[01:54:13] In the hypothetical, I guess, you’re at the poker table and everyone’s playing optimally. Does the way the people play the game change?
Ethan:
[01:54:23] It does in that it changes in that nobody tries simple moves anymore, meaning the way you might bait someone or bluff someone who’s greener isn’t going to work. Once you recognize it’s all stars, it makes you more conservative in that there aren’t going to be any easy shortcuts and any mistakes are going to be caught and punished. So I think it makes you play a lot more cautiously because a mistake is at that table.
[01:55:08] If you make a mistake, you’re done.
01:55:11 — How Jeff Bezos burned him for empire building
Ryan:
[01:55:11] Darker hypothetical.
Ethan:
[01:55:13] Darker. Here we go.
Ryan:
[01:55:15] Well, so we talked about empire building before. It’s incentivized if you want to grow as a manager. And my question to you, because you had so much success as a VP, did you do empire building?
Ethan:
[01:55:30] Yeah. So I mentioned earlier, the human mind is great at rationalizing. I think in hindsight, I for sure did some empire building. But at the time, you probably don’t tell yourself you’re empire building. What you tell yourself is, with all these people, I could do so much more, right? You frame it as, man, I have all these great ideas. We’ve got a big backlog. If only I had 375 more people, imagine what we could do.
[01:55:54] And it’s not your budget. So why not ask for it? So I got totally burned on this. When we were growing Amazon Appstore, we had launched the store and we had our annual meeting with Bezos, and we said, we launched the store and we took him this huge ask for all these people. And I remember what stands out to me most is I think we had nobody in marketing. We had no dedicated marketers because we had started this lean team.
[01:56:22] It was something absurd like we need 25 marketing people. And it was going to be like, this is not exactly right, but it’s like we need 5 PR people. And we had this idea like, oh, we’re operating in 5 countries, we need 1 PR person per country. So we had some justification in our own minds, but we were just asking for everything under the sun. Well, if we had all this, I’m sure we could do a lot, and wouldn’t it be great?
[01:56:51] Well, Jeff tore into us. He asked a couple questions like, what are these people going to do? And what are these people going to do? What are they actually going to do? And our answers fell apart because we were just sort of like, well, they’re going to do marketing. That’s why they’re called marketing people. We need more marketing and 25 is a good number. And I remember very distinctly, he asked one question, we gave a crappy answer, and you could tell he’s like, hmm.
[01:57:17] So then a second later, he asked another question, and we gave another crappy answer. And he’s like, okay, I don’t believe any of your numbers from here on. I’ve asked you two questions. They were both nonsense. I’m not going to go through everything else. I don’t believe any of it. Here’s what you’re going to do. Go back and bring me a sheet where the maximum size of any bucket of anything you’re asking for is two or three people, and it says exactly what they’re going to do.
[01:57:46] And I will go through that line by line and tell you what you can have. And that’s what he did. We went away and came back with this line by line, and he went through it and like, 2 people for PR, I can believe you need some PR. No one. And he just literally with a red pen with all of his direct leaders watching, no, 3, none, 2, okay, both for that, but I want this, this, and just took us over the coals.
[01:58:19] He wasn’t wrong. He was actually right. I was relatively newer. One of my managers was newer. We had gotten big eyes because we’d launched the project and thought, well, let’s see what we can do with this. It’s a good project. Let’s see what they want to do. And what we found out was not very much. They wanted us to be lean. That was for sure empire building. But I would say in that case, it was driven out of laziness as much as this idea of I’ll have a huge team.
[01:58:46] Not that a huge team wasn’t also appealing, but we were just daydreaming rather than thinking. When people set out to really empire build, they’re either asking for people and resources they don’t really have any use for, or they’re asking for stuff they do need. And what they’re not doing is worrying about what they’re taking it away from because the company only has so many resources. So my job is to advocate.
[01:59:12] The way I was successful empire building later, if you want to call it that, was coming up with new ideas that the company wanted to invest in. We’re going to do this. Look at the money. We’re going to do this. Look at the customers. We’re going to do this. Well, that’s a lot of growth, Ethan. Another challenge. You can’t hire all those people. And I’d be like, okay, here’s what let’s do. You hold 100 heads for me and release them in groups of 20.
[01:59:38] And if I don’t fill the first 20, I don’t get the second 20. Well, I got really good at filling heads and with good people, by the way, not just filling them, but I found ways to turn my heads into performance. But then I was very aggressive asking for more. I’ve done this much. I’ve built leaders who can do it. I want this. I want that. That was me being the I want guy. The here’s my proposal.
[02:00:02] Here’s my new idea. A story of empire building, sort of. I ran the Amazon Appstore team. We sold apps. Our job was to build an app store for the Kindle and for phones. We had this idea. We were supposed to compete with Google and Apple, who own their platforms. It was a very hard job. And we were trying to figure out how can we compete with Google and Apple? What can we offer they can’t? And we had this somewhat harebrained idea of, well, they can’t ship physical goods.
[02:00:35] We’ll go to all the game makers and offer to be their swag department. We’ll make their T-shirts and their coffee cups and whatever. We’ll tell them you should work with us because we can help you with your Merch by Amazon. So we built this group called Merch by Amazon, and we started with printing T-shirts. Well, my leadership came to me and said, why are you working on a T-shirt printing project?
[02:00:57] And you have people on a t-shirt project from within the Appstore? I said, well, we have these reasons. Well, the bottom line is t-shirt printing didn’t change the app business, but Amazon now prints more than $1 billion of T-shirts a year. And we built a T-shirt business. It was a matter of me fighting for it and saying, I have a theory and we have the ability to do it. And there’s a business model behind it.
[02:01:22] And then when it turned out the business model, this is the key, when it didn’t work for what I planned for, it was working to sell clever slogans and people’s party T-shirts and people’s political T-shirts. That was selling great. So I just pivoted right away and said, this isn’t really about apps anymore. It’s about how many T-shirts we can sell and how much money we’re making.
[02:01:44] And I just—and that became a new empire. Now we spun that off and it went elsewhere in the company. Part of empire building in a good way is being good at turning things into money and being willing to be flexible. My theory of why to make print t-shirts was a total failure. It’s going to make game makers prioritize putting their apps on Amazon Appstore. They didn’t care. Merch was such a small thing to them, wasn’t—but we found other money, and so we just used it for other money, and we kept it.
[02:02:20] Another thing I’ve done before is I’ve gotten heads for a project. That project has tanked. I don’t go and say, oh, that project tanked, you should take the heads back. I’m like, that project tanked, but you know what? Great news. I put those heads on this thing that’s working, and now it’s going twice as fast. So you’ve got to always know where do you shift the resources to where they’re making money or delivering results?
[02:02:43] And if you’re doing several things, if one thing fails, you just immediately put them on the other thing and do it twice as well. And they don’t take them away. I think it’s undeniable. And this, this doesn’t look good of me to say, I was an empire builder in ways. The only defense I have is I made it pay off for the company to the goals the company wanted and/or in hard cold cash. Sometimes those weren’t the same.
[02:03:07] I’ve talked about rationalization. I’ve rationalized it to myself where I feel like I delivered value. Some other people looking at and listening to this, some of my old peers would be like, bullshit, Ethan, you were just really slippery. I hate that idea that they might think that. I would say, well, I did deliver a lot of value, right? At least I made a lot of money and you can’t deny that.
02:03:27 — How to retain your headcount
Ryan:
[02:03:27] So if you were empire building, is there ever a case where they clawed back headcount because maybe you didn’t need all of that headcount? And if so, how’d you defend against your headcount getting clawed back?
Ethan:
[02:03:42] Amazon didn’t shrink much during the times I was there. So pure clawbacks, I don’t think I faced too many, but as I described, that’s because I was playing offense. When something wasn’t working, I was upfront about it not working. And before they could say, well, we could use those elsewhere, I was talking about what I had already done with them. ‘Cause they were on my team, so I already had them assigned to something else, something more valuable.
[02:04:10] So they would have to come and say, no, no, you can’t move them to that. We have to take them back off of that. And I’m like, well, isn’t that important? Look at— so I sort of prevented that by staying ahead of it. I never left headcount open at the end of the year, ‘cause that was their favorite thing to take back. Amazon often did this thing. Where at the beginning of the year, whatever, we’ll pick a random number that’s too small, but to illustrate, they would say, okay, we have budget for 1,000 heads this year across the company.
[02:04:46] We’re going to let people open 1,500 and we’ll see who fills them and we’ll cut it off when we get there. Well, I put a lot of effort on hiring, so I played offense. My heads were all full before the gate came down. And I did that year after year. And other teams, they would be like, oh, we were too busy working and now it’s November and we haven’t hired yet. What do you mean we can’t? Sorry, what you’re talking about is any kind of resource competition.
[02:05:15] You’ve got to think about how do I seize those resources and make my use of them something no one will argue with or that it’s too late to argue with it. There are some things that once the ship has left the dock, it’s gone. I was very good at getting my ship out to the ocean. And by the time they’re like, hey, we needed that ship, you’re like, well, I’ll give it to you when I get back.
[02:05:39] Like, it was too late. And that part of empire building, if you wanna say, for a place I was very maliciously empire building, I knew how headcount worked, and I was always the first to hire and fill my team so much that I taught a class on how to hire quickly, because I knew others wouldn’t do it. And that was my way to get people. That was, in fact, another argument I made was they’d say, oh, we don’t have any headcount left to give this year.
[02:06:11] And I’d say, well, isn’t there a bunch of other teams not filling their headcount? Tell you what, they’re probably not gonna get to it. Let me hire a little ahead and we’ll, you know, they’re not gonna get to it. And that was another story I told of like, hey, across your whole org, all these other teams are behind. You have headcount you can loan me that they’re not going to get to.
[02:06:30] And that was just literally me, taking other people’s heads, but knowing I could get away with it. Now, I put them to good use. Remember, I talked earlier about you have to be a good performer. My teams were always at least delivering their stuff. And so it wasn’t like they were going to look at me like, why would we let you do anything? Your shit’s all broken. I never had that accusation. I’ve shared before though, I was very willing to hack to get things out and I probably shipped some stuff that was too raw.
[02:07:00] That was though, keep the speed moving, keep in front, don’t get bogged down in the perfect project. Get it out there and show progress and then iterate is better than, “Oh, but it’s not quite ready yet. I can’t let it out yet.” Because if I can’t see it, it’s not real. People could see my stuff and they’re like, “It’s got warts.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s there.” It’s different as opposed to your thing that if I ever pulled the shoot at somebody else, I’d be like, yeah, maybe their project’s perfect.
[02:07:30] They’ve been telling us that for 2 years.
02:07:31 — Career recommendations for the current landscape
[02:07:31] Where is it?
Ryan:
[02:07:33] With all of these changes with AI, I think you could make a case that it’s a boom in some places, a bust in many places. And I know you have a lot of experience across different companies and periods in the tech industry. So when you look at today’s landscape of tech careers, what advice would you give people in the uncertainty of potential scenarios with all this AI stuff that’s happening?
Ethan:
[02:08:01] I wish I had a perfect crystal ball with AI because I’d make a fortune on Wall Street. But I do think there are gonna be winners and losers, and I do think some types of jobs are gonna get eliminated. I think other types are gonna change. I think some will also get created that we don’t understand yet. So what do you do to position yourself for that? Well, I think breadth of learning is more valuable than depth, flexibility.
[02:08:25] And so, of course, I am a fan, as we talked about, of develop your soft skills because that’s not a target of AI at the moment. AI’s strongest target is things that have rule sets, coding languages, law, math, things that have firm rules. It can be optimized around a lot easier. You’ve said how many times today regarding soft skills, well, it’s a gray area. That’s where AI is going to struggle because how to act like a human at that level and how to convince people, and it doesn’t have a body or a face and it can’t hug anyone or shake hands.
[02:09:04] It’s got a lot of limitations in this pure, does the code run or not? Is this contract viable or not? So I think leaning into some of those skills that require human presence is a big tool, a big tactic. At the same time, you can’t be AI ignorant or resistant. You have to be aware of the tools, able to use them. I think the people who are spending absolutely every moment trying to stay on top of AI, only maybe I’ve called it like winning the race off the cliff.
[02:09:46] You will be the best person at using the tools. But as those tools chip away at what you do or obsolete what you do, you’ll be the last one kept around to operate them until they don’t need you either. It’s a kind of a Pyrrhic victory. Now, again, there’s at least two analogies that get bandied around. You mentioned engineers and coding in our opening. We know that spreadsheets didn’t eliminate bankers or financial analysts.
[02:10:17] They increased the demand. Financial tools have increased the interest in doing all kinds of weird financial instruments and analysis. So there are more bankers, not less. Similarly, it was thought that ATMs are going to eliminate bank tellers. Didn’t happen. There is an argument that these tools are only going to increase the demand for things. In other words, more people have seen what code can do for them.
[02:10:46] There’s more people playing around with vibe coding, and they’re going to reach a point where they realize I actually need a software engineer to help me with this. And so it’s going to increase demand. I don’t actually know which of those wins. I’m sure that sitting and pounding a keyboard the way I grew up doing it is not going to be the same. So the jobs are going to change. What do I advise? Having the best eye you can on where is the value going?
[02:11:14] What are people valuing? What I think they’re valuing more and more now is more people can produce more code or more legal documents or whatever. Who’s deciding? Who’s explaining those? Who’s deciding what’s needed? Who’s deciding what to prioritize for release? Who’s deciding what to tell customers? Let’s say the engineers on Gmail can now write 10 times as many features. Well, we don’t need 10 times as many features.
[02:11:43] We actually might need fewer, that are better or different. Who’s deciding? That’s that whole taste or judgment. I think that’s going to be very highly prized, and I’d rather be in the judgment seat than in the running the tools seat.
Ryan:
[02:12:03] In the last few years, there’s this trend of flattening orgs or getting rid of the layers, and I wanted to ask you, in your experience, is that in the tech industry, is that just something that ebbs and flows with the booms and the busts, or do you think that’s a new permanent way of operating?
Ethan:
[02:12:26] The delayering is a cyclical pressure, and it’s a cyclical pressure when companies are very focused on headcount, on keeping headcount flat. Companies go through periods of expansion and contraction or rationalizing. And when they’re trying to rationalize, they’re always trying to flatten because there’s this belief managers in the middle don’t do anything. And so how do we get rid of them? But I want to talk a little bit about history.
[02:12:58] There was an early dynasty in China that in 600 BC implemented the first testing for civil servants. And by 200 BC, this had actually become a formal process with a written exam. So if you think of administrators as basically the same as managers, we’ve had manager layers since 600 BC, to the point that they were selecting them with a test. I believe AI changes a lot of things.
[02:13:28] I don’t believe it changes human nature to where there’s no longer gonna be this idea that you need one person to organize other people’s work or to speak for it or to centralize it. And so I think it’s cyclical. I don’t think it permanently changes. It might be that AI tools increase what is considered a team, like how many people can be on a team because the manager has automation helping them.
[02:13:59] But I can just as easily argue that because each individual on the team is producing more and more decisions are needed and more judgment is needed, more communication about what’s been done is needed, that it increases the need for people acting as managers. Right now, this flattening idea, it’s got a couple of poster children like Jensen Huang, who’s got 60 direct reports. Is everyone Jensen? They’re not.
[02:14:30] And by the way, those 60 people, I coached some people in his organization, they are extremely senior. So can one brilliant guy lead 60 other brilliant people? Yeah, maybe. Can I do it? Can you do it? Can the average first-level manager scale from 10 engineers to 100 and still do a good job? I doubt it, right? I really doubt it. So I think it’s cyclical. Predicting that human nature is going to be different is a really bad prediction because it’s been the same for so long.
[02:15:05] And the idea that a tool is magically going to make humans different, I’m skeptical.
02:15:11 — How to avoid negative layoff optics
Ryan:
[02:15:11] In the doomer AI case where there’s less technical roles, I think people might worry about layoffs and those kinds of things. What are the top ways to protect against layoffs? And also, I’m curious to know how do you avoid the negative optics?
Ethan:
[02:15:31] Yeah, so let me address your second question first, which is the optics. I think right now, AI-driven layoffs or downsizing from big companies is so common. You tell that story exactly. You say, look, my org was eliminated. My whole org was eliminated. That’s a simple way of saying it’s nothing to do with me. And that’s so common now that a recruiter isn’t gonna be like, oh, you were at Google, but now you’re— or again, fill in the blank.
[02:16:00] Meta’s done a lot of layoffs. Amazon‘s done them. All the big companies have. Saying that you were laid off from one of these big companies when your org was closed down or significantly reduced no longer has the tarnish it did. But the rest of how you prevent that from tarnishing you is you make it a quick fact and you pivot. And so you say, yeah, unfortunately my organization at Meta was eliminated, but the good news is fill in your story.
[02:16:29] That gives me a chance to do something new. That actually gives me a chance to bring the Meta philosophy or the Meta insights on whatever, fill in the blank, again to other companies. That gives me a chance to bring Amazon‘s experience with scale to you. And so I’m actually excited. It sucks I got laid off. I admit I wasn’t looking for that, but it’s opened my eyes that there’s a chance to bring that to someone else.
[02:16:55] And you change the topic quickly to the future. So truth about the past, quick move on. Now, how do you avoid a layoff? First, sometimes you can’t. If they whack a whole org, you may be done. But even in most layoffs, I know top managers or executives, they try to place their key people in other orgs. So I know a leader at Amazon was shutting down a whole big org. And she had a list of her top performers.
[02:17:31] And she was calling other leaders and saying, “Make a space. You want to make a space for this person.” How do you get on that list? The layoff key is the decision is often not made by your manager. It’s made by your skip or a couple levels up. So you need some visibility as a top performer. Top ratings is one key. They’ll look by rating, but being known for an accomplishment, something like that Matt Round Tool that I talked about earlier, or something, a tool with your name on it, having a unique skill.
[02:18:01] We talked about the curmudgeon engineer that’s the only one who knows something. If you’re the only one who knows something that’s still needed, I can cut half the org, but I have to keep you because you’re the only one who knows this thing. Those are the different techniques. And again, I’m mixing technical knowledge, building tools or having unique expertise with social engineering, being known to the skip, skip and whatever.
[02:18:27] It’s always, every answer I give should be a combination of what I said: be good and be likable. Both are additive, maybe even multiplicative.
02:18:39 — How to develop executive presence
Ryan:
[02:18:39] Yeah, we talked a lot about the social engineering and kind of the negative and the politics. I do wanna talk a little bit about the positive side of soft skills as well. What is executive presence, and how do you develop it?
Ethan:
[02:18:55] Yeah. So executive presence is very hard to define because it’s something others decide about you. They look at you and they either decide you have it or you don’t, and they’re combining a few things. So what is executive presence? I have 2 definitions. One of them is from a book and it’s academic, and it says it’s 60% gravitas, which is like the weight of your accomplishments, what you’ve done.
[02:19:17] It’s 30% communication skills, 10% appearance. This is from a researcher who has done all this work to figure it out. I think it’s a fine framework. The other way I look at executive presence is, are people coming to you for your opinion, particularly on things that you may not directly be involved in? Are they coming and saying, hey, Ryan, we’d love to get your take on this because you have really good insights, or we’d love to get your support on this because we know people look up to you.
[02:19:46] That’s the other sign of presence, is you’re being sought after even when it’s not directly your work. You’re being valued. It’s those 2 ways of looking at it that define executive presence. If you want me to really boil it down to a phrase, it is, do you command respect in a room? Do people listen to you? Do they look to you? This is a little overly political, but are they busy, like reading your gestures?
[02:20:21] So if you’re talking and I pick up the phone, are they like, oh, well, we can ignore Ryan ‘cause Ethan is? That’s the sign of a lot of presence.
Ryan:
[02:20:31] When you framed executive presence as people wanna know your opinion, I’ve seen that where there may be someone who’s a quiet engineer, but they’ve been there a long time and they know everything, and a lot of people go to them for their opinion. So I could see that being one path to executive presence. I could also see a case where it’s not grounded in their being objectively correct all the time.
[02:21:00] Something about the way they stand, the way they speak, what they accept, what they don’t accept, and it’s—that’s a little harder to define.
Ethan:
[02:21:11] I will tell you a story, which is I speak with tremendous confidence, and sometimes I can sound like the voice of God. I can sound like I am declaring truth from on the mountain. I have the tablets. And my wife, who knows me very well, she once told me, she said, Ethan, I’ve learned that you sound like you know. And so sometimes when I think something different, I don’t say anything because you sound so sure.
[02:21:46] And then it turns out you’re wrong. And I’m like, why didn’t I say anything? I knew we needed to turn right at the last corner, but you said, no, it’s straight. And you sounded like you knew. And I bought it. That’s my executive presence. Going too far, right? Because I think it’s straight, but I don’t know. But I’m saying, oh, I’m sure it’s straight. And she’s hearing, I’m sure it’s straight. What are those traits?
[02:22:10] Well, some of them are very superficial. The number 1 and 2 are confidence and decisiveness. If you undermine yourself and say, well, I think maybe it’s straight, people are definitely going to challenge you. Whereas if you say it’s straight, the next—we don’t turn, it’s two, two lights, then a right. Very specific. Everybody’s going to buy it. One thing I do in my executive presence class, I teach a class on it, is I share the fact that stats with numbers are 62% more believable than stats without them.
[02:22:43] Now, the truth is I just made that up. I’ve never looked it up, but 62% sounds so specific, and I delivered it like, oh yeah, this is true. Maybe you bought it, probably you bought it, but a lot of people listening were like, really? 62%? I was just lying through my teeth, or at least embellishing, right? Specificity delivered with confidence, speaking up quickly. The list of traits are being tall and white.
[02:23:12] You don’t have to like it, but it’s true. They’re both like, if you look at presidential height, if you look at how many white men we’ve had as president, not just here, go around the world, go through history. These are things, okay? Doesn’t mean they’re good. It means they’re true. Deep voice. We respond better to people with deep voices, which is why when I do the voice of God, I go even lower.
[02:23:35] And so did all the actors who’ve ever done God. So apparently God’s a baritone. You never see a squeaky God. Another trick is speaking slowly. Usually pausing for emphasis makes you seem confident. And gestures, body language. When you said all the things that aren’t just being a great engineer who knows all the facts, it’s this feeling like your trustworthy uncle. That’s the picture, right?
[02:24:06] The uncle who’s like your dad’s older brother and runs a business. He’s fun, but he’s really smart and he owns two cars and has a beautiful wife and three lovely children. It’s exuding that successful, comfortable in every situation. Another big factor is never getting flustered. They’re never out of control. They may show anger, but it’s always like this. It’s not this wild, screaming rage and spit, blowing spittle.
[02:24:40] It’s this lean in, like, how dare you, little one? And so it’s emotion under control. It’s, you know, if you don’t like it, I guess, or if you do like it, it’s all these ape dominance tricks. What makes the top ape in the tribe who gets the bananas? It’s just the human version of those brought into a room.
Ryan:
[02:25:00] This reminds me, there was that one CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, and she was famous for her deepened voice when she was speaking. And there are recordings of her not doing the CEO voice, and it’s different. Different. Yeah, it’s different. So I guess she picked up on that, and she’s trying to exude executive presence.
Ethan:
[02:25:26] And she’s not the only one. Margaret Thatcher, the historic prime minister in the UK back in the ‘80s. I think she was the first female prime minister. I may have that wrong, but I think so. She, early in her career, was accused in the media of screeching, of being high-pitched. She said, that’ll never happen again. She systematically trained herself to speak low and slow. Basically, and this again will bother lots of people, took on a man’s voice to compete in a man’s world.
[02:25:56] Now, this goes down into that whole should thing again. Should she have to do that? No. Did she do that? Yes. Did it work for her and Elizabeth Holmes? Yes. So until our world changes, that’s different. And so yeah, that is one of the signs. The good news is you can be successful and have high executive presence without any one of these given traits, but you’re gonna have to have some of the others.
[02:26:23] So you’re either gonna have to be really good at what you do. That’s the engineering viewpoint. The example I always point to there is Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett, no one that I know of has ever said, “What a dramatic speaker, what a showman.” And yet he commands tremendous respect, tremendous executive presence. That’s your case of the engineer who’s the expert. It’s because he’s Warren Buffett and his investment track record.
[02:26:51] It’s not any of these other factors. We look at somebody else, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. They are both showmen. They were very good. They may have had great ideas, but they are icons in our industry because they were also very good at all the speaking and presence. They controlled their stage presence. They did things in a very exacting way.
Ryan:
[02:27:17] Well, it’s interesting you mentioned the Elon Musk one as an example of showmanship because when I see a public speech of Steve Jobs, it’s very polished. But yeah, when Elon speaks, it doesn’t seem so much like showmanship. What are those traits in him that you’re saying are—I think the showmanship in him that works for him is he can deliver relatively outrageous claims with very 100% conviction.
Ethan:
[02:27:51] He can make you believe that at least he believes. So if we look at the recent SpaceX IPO, he’s talking about how he’s going to build factories in space. Maybe if you start really thinking through all the things that would have to be true to make it possible to build things in space and make it useful, it’s a very long list of problems. But he says it with his total conviction. Whether he says these words or not, he’s like, nobody thought we could do electric cars.
[02:28:25] Check. Did that. Nobody thought I could build a private rocket company. Check. Did that. And I’m telling you, next is space factories. And he just says it in a way that it’s inevitable. The sun will come up tomorrow, water is wet, and Elon Musk will build factories in space.
Ryan:
[02:28:43] It’s—
Ethan:
[02:28:45] I think his showmanship, whether it’s an act or not, is conveying utter conviction of ideas that are somewhere between incredibly cutting edge and total fantasy. What you think there depends on what you think of Elon. Is it one or the other, but he’s able to get out in that space and make it plausible because he’s done stuff that people didn’t believe was possible. So his essential pitch is, you didn’t believe me before and you were wrong.
[02:29:22] Are you gonna dare to doubt me again?
02:29:25 — How to network in a natural way
Ryan:
[02:29:25] Obviously it’s an asset if you’re liked, and you should build relationships at work. How do you actually go about that?
Ethan:
[02:29:35] I think networking, there’s a recipe to do it. It’s very authentic, very effective. And that’s figure out some stuff you love, stuff you’re passionate about, stuff you would like to share with people you’re proud of, you’re interested in. Do those things or work on those things and figure out just put in a little extra effort to figure out how can I give this to other people? How can I make it available?
[02:29:57] How can I package it as a tool? How can I give away my advice, give a class, give a talk? The key is to give. Take what you like doing and give it away because there are other people who don’t like that thing or don’t know about it or want to know more, and they want your help with it. So it does require that you have some sort of expertise, but it doesn’t have to be wild. It just has to be solid because there’s other people who aren’t good at that thing.
[02:30:26] And if you can figure out how to give away some value, so my first way of doing this at Amazon was I mentioned how I was really good at hiring. So I started teaching a class to other managers on how to hire really fast and well. Then I started teaching some other stuff, and that led to my teaching. I found other ways to give stuff away. So I started streaming on Twitch, giving away advice, and I built an audience.
[02:30:53] That’s all network. But it was all based on what could I give away and why was I willing to give it away. I loved it and I was good at it. It was fun for me. It wasn’t work. So I often share a story. There was a guy at Amazon who liked to ski and he was an engineer, I think, but he went to the local ski slopes and he got their bulk ski tickets. And he had a deal with them where they would ship him tickets and he would resell them internally so that people could get a ski ticket for those hills at the discount bulk price.
[02:31:32] Well, he just basically did it because he liked skiing, he liked helping people, and he liked to get cheap tickets himself. So it was a way for him to get bulk pricing. But through doing this, he made hundreds of connections with people who got discounts through him. It meant if he ever needed anything, he had all these people he knew, or if he called up a random person, there was a good chance, oh, you’re the ski ticket guy.
[02:31:53] Yeah, I’ll help you out. Why do I give this example? He wasn’t sharing anything technical. He wasn’t doing anything he didn’t want to do or even that he didn’t benefit from, but it built a network. And everyone can find some way to do that, to share something they’re interested in or love or don’t mind doing, that they’re really good at, it’s easy and fun for them, or at least not too hard, and other people appreciate it.
[02:32:19] What most people think of when they think of networking is we’re all standing in some room for some random purpose, and I have a cocktail, and I have to go talk to people I don’t know and be like, hi, I’m Ethan. Why are you here? Let’s find something in common so you give a shit. And that’s an introvert’s nightmare. And I get it. And it’s hard to build a relationship where there’s no shared interest.
[02:32:48] What works about the skiing example or anything else is the one guy liked to ski. Well, the people who were getting the tickets also liked to ski. So they immediately had something in common. Oh, are you going this weekend? How was the snow? Conversation is easy. And then once you’ve talked a little bit, it’s easy to go deeper. That’s how you build a network naturally, organically. Every engineer has some piece of technology that they know more about than the average engineer and that they’re excited to talk about.
[02:33:22] Talk about it. You can talk about it in recordings. You can talk about it in forums, on Reddit. It doesn’t matter where. Share value.
02:33:30 — How to network with powerful people
Ryan:
[02:33:30] I like this version of networking, but of course I gotta ask the dark version.
Ethan:
[02:33:34] Of course you do.
Ryan:
[02:33:36] Which is, I stumbled upon this post and it is the basic principles of politics. And it was saying, step 1, be aware of who’s powerful and who’s not. Step 2, help the powerful people as best you can. Yeah. Step 3, make sure they know that you’re helping them. So this is a little bit of a darker, more Machiavellian framing of networking. A lot of people, let’s say they’re going for a promo, they want to think, okay, how do I make that VP that’s making that decision like me?
[02:34:12] Is there a way to do it organically that you would recommend?
Ethan:
[02:34:17] There are ways. Let me give you a few. First, let’s take this VP. You can take a couple shots, like, “Hey, I’ve built this thing where I get bulk ski tickets. I don’t know if you go skiing, but if you do, 375 people around the company are using it. Is it something you’d want to use?” That’s one way. It talks about something you’ve done, and maybe you’ll get lucky and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I ski.”
[02:34:42] How do I get some tickets? That’s one way. Same thing with if you’ve built a tool or you’re sharing your expertise, you can be like, hey, I built this interview tool, or fill in the blank what you did. I don’t know if it’s of use to you, but a lot of people in your org are using it, so I thought you’d want to know it existed. And that’s just a way of dropping in like, you may or may not directly value what I do, but I’ve got a line on a bunch of your people.
[02:35:07] And they’re really like in your dark world, powerful people always want to know who’s influencing my people. They’re like, oh, you’ve attracted attention from a third of my people. I better know you and keep an eye on you. And that keep an eye can be like, I got to watch you. But it can also be like, maybe there’s a way to use you. And so that’s a door in. But the other door is if you built a network, someone in your network knows that person.
[02:35:37] And so what you do is you go to one of their direct reports or whatever and say, hey, I really would like to get to know our VP. I haven’t figured out. We don’t have any common interests I can figure out. You know them. Would you be willing to put in a good word for me or suggest that they do a skip level with me? Or can you help me get in front of them? And because you’ve built a relationship with the person in your network and you’ve helped them out with ski tickets or whatever, they’re like, yeah, I can help you out.
[02:36:06] Let me think about that. So I’ll give you the dumbest example that blows my mind. I do charity work for Ukrainian refugees that were driven out of Ukraine by the war, and they’re in Poland. And early in the war, I wanted to get a bunch of suitcases of medical supplies and other gear shipped from the US to Poland free on a United Airlines flight. So I went out to my network. It’s a very empathetic story.
[02:36:35] So I had that to my advantage. I said, oh, I want to get medical supplies to Ukraine. And I need somebody who knows people in United Airlines that can help me get 10 suitcases sent for free on this flight. I was thinking, who knows what’ll happen? I get an email back from someone in my network who says, I know the chairman of the board for United. I’m going to connect you to him in email. Now, this is using a sledgehammer to kill an ant.
[02:37:03] But I get this email a little bit later, I get put on email with this guy, chairman of the board for United, who’s like, hey, I hear you want to help some people displaced by the war. What do you need? And I wrote him an honest note being an executive. I’m like, dude, this is such a waste of your time. Just delegate me to someone. Here’s what I need. And he was like, it’s cool.
[02:37:24] I like to help people. Well, all the bags went on the airplane for free, but when the guy who was flying with them went to drop them off, the whole team from United met him with a gift basket, which is just stupid overkill. The point I’m making, though, is I had built a network, and then I needed something random, and I didn’t even ask a specific person. I just put out there into the world, I need help reaching someone in power at United.
[02:37:56] And I ended up with the chairman of their board. I could tell three more stories that are almost the same level of, I reached out for help and I got this overkill. You go through an intermediary who wants to help you. Here’s the key. I’ll give everyone a key. Helping people makes you feel good. So when someone in your network asks for a favor, if it’s a favor you can grant easily, you get to feel so good and it didn’t cost you anything.
[02:38:28] So, let’s jump to the situation of the guy who introduced me to the chairman. For him, he gets this note, he sees it on LinkedIn, he’s like, oh, he needs help, he’s doing something good, he’s helping refugees. Wow, that’s really good. If I help him do that, that means I’m really good, and I know the chairman, and he’s gonna go along with it. Wow, all I gotta do is send an email and I look like the tooth fairy.
[02:38:59] Now, if my friend is listening to this, I’m not saying your motivations were that base because it’s legit to be like, oh, refugees, I want to help them and I can. So it wasn’t like he was like, oh, I get to feel good. But believe me, I’m sure he did feel good. And that’s a great feeling. So the reason networking works is you’re finding someone and giving them a way to feel really good and magnanimous.
[02:39:23] And we all love to be able to pat ourselves on the back about what great friends we are. I’m just opening the door for you to have a chance to do that.
Ryan:
[02:39:33] When you were a VP at Amazon, did you have people coming up to you and clearly there was an ulterior motive and they were trying to, I guess, quote unquote network? What’d you feel in those cases? What’d you do in those cases?
Ethan:
[02:39:48] So I’ve already shown you I’m very blunt. I had engineers three levels below me or four levels. I had big organizations. So way down the org, they’d come to me and be like, hey, can you mentor me? Or can I have a monthly one-on-one with you? And I’d be like, so I have absolutely no time for this. I have no time to put you on my calendar, but here’s the deal. I’m gonna give you one meeting.
[02:40:11] You’re gonna bring me something really interesting I don’t know. And you’re going to bring me value in that meeting. And if you do, we’ll have another one. That’s your shot. Go do it. That’s— and if they wanted something, I would just tell them like, what’s the price? I’ve said, bring value. Okay. I will do what you want. Surprisingly, I will say yes. But what are you going to show me? Make it interesting.
[02:40:37] And that was actually my challenge to them often, which is, my job’s kind of boring. It’s a lot of meetings, a lot of pushing paper around. Bring me something interesting. If you can keep my interest, we’ll keep meeting. As soon as you become boring, well, it was more of a chance than sorry, I’m too busy, right? So a lot of people were good at it, and some of them never came back, and I’m okay with that.
02:41:01 — How to learn hidden incentives
Ryan:
[02:41:01] Most people I feel like are not as direct with their incentives. And so in those cases, how do you find the things that people want or what their goals are, how you can help them? In a way that can make some win-win interpersonal dynamics?
Ethan:
[02:41:17] So I think you want to build a trusting relationship so you can have more of that talk, even if you can’t use as blunt a language. But before you do that, or as you do that, I think there are four ways to figure out what people want. One is to directly ask them. We’ve kind of talked about that. The second is listen to what they’re saying. What are they talking about in their all-hands? What are they talking about in the staff meeting, whatever?
[02:41:42] What are they saying are the problems? What are they saying are the goals? Because those are—they’re talking about the things they want and don’t want. The third way is ask their direct reports, ask others in the organization who know them or have a relationship with them. This is called triangulation. Rather than asking them directly, you go out and you cross over and you see what this person says they think they want and this person, and you figure out, okay, what are they telling others, even if it’s only little bits, or what are others inferring?
[02:42:17] So you triangulate. The last way is observing them. Actions speak louder than words. Where are they putting their money? Where are they putting their time? Where are they hiring? Where are they spending their time in meetings? Their actions are going to show what matters to them. So four ways: ask, listen, triangulate, observe. Those are the four ways to figure out what they want. And then, more or less, those are the same paths to start going at them and adding value.
[02:42:50] You start moving towards the things they value and then finding ways to come to their attention, or whether you send it up through friends or you send it up through a status report, or when you bump into them in the hallway, you find different ways to showcase that you’re working on the things they value and asking how you can help. And again, this is less direct than the Ethan, let’s make a deal kind of way.
[02:43:24] And some people are even bothered by that idea that I’d say, let’s make a deal. That door was open to everyone. Make a deal with me where you deliver more value and I will find a way to help you move you up. That’s a fair deal. It is the corporate deal. The more valuable you are, the more I can pay you. So bring more value, I’ll give more value. Fair deal. And therefore, I don’t think dealmaking is bad.
[02:43:45] It’s just explicit. But for the people who aren’t so transparent or transactional, they do still have all the same goals and motives at some level, which is progress. You just have to find a way to do it in their style. And their style is less explicit, more implicit. You’re going to have to tolerate more ambiguity because if you’d like to have that clear statement of you do these three things and I will do my best to get you promoted next cycle, you’re not going to get that from them.
[02:44:16] So you’re going to have to be like, well, I can see who they’re promoting and what they’re valuing. I’m going to do those things and trust. You’re going to have to weather more ambiguity. I have found that if you build a relationship with people, most people, they may never be willing to be transactional or explicit with everyone, but they will do it with you inside the confines of that built personal relationship.
02:44:43 — What happens behind the scenes with HR
Ryan:
[02:44:43] When I was working at Meta, when someone’s underperforming and then they get managed out, it’s more clear even if no one says anything. But there were cases where someone came to work on Friday and then on Monday they were gone, and there was no clear evidence of why they would disappear. So in those cases, it felt like there was some secret HR thing that had happened. And at the time I was just a software engineer, and I just thought, okay, I don’t know what just happened to that person, but they’re gone.
[02:45:16] And it was not performance because I had worked with them. As a VP, I imagine you knew a lot of the things that happened. And so in those cases where people just disappear suddenly, what is it that goes on behind the scenes at the HR team?
Ethan:
[02:45:33] Well, I mean, a lot of those so-called disappearances, they’re the case where someone did something, frankly, that put the company at some kind of risk. So they’re usually the bad things. Racism, theft, embezzlement, sexual harassment. I will tell a story. I know someone, they had a strong political opinion on a topic and the company was doing something they saw as inconsistent with that. And they leaked an internal memo to a reporter, and then they got caught.
[02:46:06] They didn’t think enough about how the company’s IT systems worked. And they left a paper trail. And after the news report came out that obviously the reporter had had access to information, the company tracked it back down to them and they were gone. I actually, now that I think about it, I saw several people fired for leaks. So a case that you might not think of that gets people broomed that isn’t like interpersonally gross, like a sexual harassment thing, is stuff like that.
[02:46:44] Leaks, sharing competitive information. Sometimes they’re just dumb. Another story I tell, we didn’t end up firing this guy, but we very easily could have and no one would have blinked. At one point I ran a video game team, and that team made violent shooter games. One of our artists one day brought in his actual real firearm collection, spread it all over his desk. And when other people walked in, his desk was covered with guns.
[02:47:10] He was totally innocent. He was making up new weapons, and he wanted his guns as models and inspiration. And it never clicked with him how having a desk full of guns in a California office might wig some people out. Now, if we’d have just been like, guns in the office, done, nobody would have said a thing. We figured out, okay, there’s a difference between thoughtless and actually planning on murdering your teammates.
[02:47:39] So we’re just gonna send you home with all your stuff and tell you please never do that again. But that could have been gone. So people make the dumbest—the stuff that happens you would never believe. One time I came back to my office from a business trip to visit another office. My female executive assistant and one of my female employees greeted me at the office door and said, we got to tell you what happened while you were gone.
[02:48:11] And every alarm bell for a manager at this point is going off. It’s where, it’s Amazon, so it’s mostly male. I have a female leader and my EA, who are both women, saying they have to tell me what happened. I know it’s going to be bad. Well, what had actually happened was so unbelievable. What had happened was my employee came in, the leader, and found a pile — we had dogs in our office.
[02:48:38] We had a pet policy, right? You could have dogs. She found a pile of poo under her desk and she’s like, gross. So she calls the building maintenance, like, dog had an accident. The woman gets there to clean it up and says, This is not dog poo. So they call security, like, there’s human poop under the desk. And so security is pretty smart. They ask her, like, has anybody been showing unusual attention to you?
[02:49:04] You know, blah, blah, blah. And she’s like, well, now that you mention it, there’s this one janitor and he seems to hang out and whatever. So they go grab this janitor and they quiz him like security does. Well, he cops to it. And this was his way of showing— obviously he was not normal the way we did. It was his way of showing interest was he had— but when I say you wouldn’t believe what goes on, of course he was fired and given a restraining order to go with it.
[02:49:37] Like, you can’t come near the building again or her. But when I say you wouldn’t believe — ‘cause when I tell these stories, people bringing guns in, like, “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine if I just spread them out all over my cube,” or “I’m gonna show my affection or interest by” — you wonder what were they thinking? And the answer is they weren’t thinking in a normal way. People both do things that are unethical and they’re very intentional, but they also do some stuff that later you’re just like, wow.
[02:50:11] That’s why those people disappear.
02:50:13 — Did he burn people to get ahead
Ryan:
[02:50:13] We’ve talked about gray areas all throughout this conversation, and you mentioned this situation. I think you said it was like Joe Blow that gets the F or whatever. Yeah, this other person gets the A. There’s this implicit framing of one person’s gonna get ahead and one person’s gonna get put behind. And so in your career, were there ever cases where you had to burn someone to get ahead?
Ethan:
[02:50:43] I would love to say no to that. I’m cautious to say no because of rationalization. There are definitely places where I competed with people. There were definitely places where I was trying to make sure I looked better than others. I’d like to say that was always me doing superior work. Is there ever a case where I targeted someone to burn them down? I don’t think so. I think there were definitely places where I did everything I could to make sure I came out ahead.
[02:51:17] I think one of the cases I feel worst about wasn’t anything I explicitly did to someone on purpose, but when I first joined Amazon, and when I mean first, I mean the first week. I had been hired without being told what my job would be. It was a secret project, and all they would tell me was the general area, but I couldn’t know what the project was, and I had to accept. So I got there and I went to my boss and I said, hey, I’m here now.
[02:51:44] What the hell am I doing? And he said, well, we have 2 jobs open. One of them is building our next video product, our first video product. And the other one is building the ingestion systems that will be used to ingest the video and also will support our music project and our books project, what became Kindle. Which one do you want? Well, I’m an end-user guy. So I’m like, I want to build the end-user thing.
[02:52:14] I’m not an infrastructure person. I want to build the video product. He’s like, great, done. What I had no idea, another manager started the next Monday, and they had apparently told him he could build video, and he got the infrastructure project. He joined for the job I had asked for. I had no idea, but the result of my action was he got put in a job he didn’t want. And I think it sucked for him.
[02:52:41] That’s the closest I can think of to where something I did really screwed someone else in a, and that lasted, that was his job for the next 2 years. Now, the other thing, if I had been told, well, there’s 2 people, I would’ve still fought for that job. I’d have still said, can’t I have it? I’m good at that. I have history in that. Why didn’t you pick me? So I would’ve still fought for it.
[02:53:11] But it would’ve been because I wanted that job, not to screw him, but it had that side effect even though I didn’t know in that case. But I would’ve pushed for it, sure, because I want to do what I want to do just like everybody else.
02:53:24 — What he says to people who hate politics
Ryan:
[02:53:24] When we make these videos, it’s very polarizing because there’s a big group of people who say, thank you for saying it as it is. This is so helpful, and I’m going to be aware of this and use some of these tips in their career, and this is how the game works. And then there’s a group of people that don’t engage with the content fully. They just hear something that they don’t like on a moral level almost.
[02:53:47] They hear, “Oh, how could you think that? How could you say that?” And what would you say to those people that say the premise of all this stuff, the premise of the game, is distasteful? It’s not something they even want to believe, for instance.
Ethan:
[02:54:04] Yeah, so I have a good friend who takes exactly that viewpoint. And we argue all the time. And the premise is this game sucks and no one should have to play it. And the fact you’re talking about how to play it means you’ve already bought into the evil side. What I would say is this game is real, and I wish it wasn’t real in some ways. I wish we could all be judged on our intentions and on our merit, and we were all seen, you know, we all had unlimited opportunity and we were all rewarded for what we really did.
[02:54:40] I wish those things were true, but I don’t know how to make them true. So what I say is I try to make them as true as possible for people working with me and around me. That’s why I’m so transparent, not only with you. I was pretty transparent at Amazon, and I made deals, and I did everything I could to keep them. And I’ve been honest about, I still regret 20 years later, this one guy I let down. It still bothers me.
[02:55:10] But humans, human society is full of nasty people. And it’s also full of limited resources and competition. And I think this is reality. And so I get that all the time. I hear people are bothered by the reality, and they want me to make the world just. I don’t know how to do that. I know how to work towards it, but that’s going to take well beyond my life or your life. And we see that because if we look at all the nasty things that happened in history, like slavery or oppression or limitations on women’s rights, I dismiss none of those.
[02:55:49] But they’ve been ongoing battles for a century or more. They’re not going to be solved this year or next year. So I coach women all the time how to get ahead in a biased world. Does that mean I support bias against women? Absolutely not. But I can’t fix that this year, and those people have to try and move their career ahead this year. So what I would say to the people who dislike it is I am trying to deal with what’s going to happen this year while also working on rights.
[02:56:18] I think people can throw stones at me, but when I talk about, I started a charity in Poland to help refugees from Ukraine, it’s not like I don’t believe in causes and I’m not willing to tilt against windmills and try and right injustice. That’s my particular cause. You may wish I worked on your particular cause, but if you just objectively say, does this guy try and do good? I do. But I also have to deal with what is reality today?
[02:56:46] Moral situation. I made a friend who’s Ukrainian. Her husband voluntarily joined the army in Ukraine. He served 2 years. He wanted to get out after 2 years of volunteer. Ukrainians need soldiers. They wouldn’t let him out. He was going to be sent to the front in a place where he would likely die. We knew that he could be bribed out of the army. It was relatively little money. It’s about $1,000.
[02:57:15] So a friend of mine and I gave his wife $1,000, and she went in and bribed her husband out of the Ukrainian army. Probably some other dude we don’t know died in his place. So American wealth, because we knew this woman, saved this guy’s life, killed this other guy. It’s very real. And I am completely okay with it because I know her and she’s my friend. I didn’t want to kill the other guy. Maybe I didn’t.
[02:57:39] I get to have plausible deniability. Maybe it’s all happy. Nobody died. But I deal in that reality. She was important to me and I could help her. He had served some time. He had done some duty for his country. I was okay letting him out. Right decision or not? I don’t know. Like me or don’t. I’m okay with my decision. Same thing as all the corporate politics. I teach people how to deal with the world that is.
[02:58:10] The world that is was he’d served some time, and probably he was going to die, and this woman I cared about was going to be hurt, and it was going to cost me relatively no money to save his life. I was okay with that. There are 50 ways you can say that was an evil decision of mine. There are also 50 ways you can say, wow, you did something remarkable for that woman, and you’re trying to help other people there.
[02:58:38] So here’s the thing I think about some of the critics. They have an ideal in mind. It’s a great ideal. I support their ideal, but you got to understand it’s an ideal that we’re far from. And just because I deal with reality today does not mean I think your ideal is wrong. I’m just trying to also live today and help other people do that.
02:59:03 — Top book recommendations on power dynamics
Ryan:
[02:59:03] I polled people on Instagram, and one common question people were asking is, do you have any book recommendations on power dynamics or people or these kinds of topics that we discussed that you’d recommend to people?
Ethan:
[02:59:20] I have several. So my all-time favorite book on this is called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. It’s a book that explains how we sometimes treat other people as objects without meaning to. But if we objectify people, which means we treat them as a roadblock, how do I press the right buttons to get the response I want? That doesn’t usually get a good reaction because they feel manipulated.
[02:59:48] But if you treat them as a human and, hey, I know this is hard for you, I know you’re busy, how can we make this work? Here’s what I need. And with warmth, they’re more willing to help because people seen as humans will treat you back as a human. That’s that book. Second book is Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference. That’s all about negotiation and about understanding how human motivation works.
[03:00:13] All of this is human psychology. So all of these things are human psychology. The third book, even though I hate to recommend it for all your interest in dark side, is The 48 Laws of Power. It’s a very thorough catalog of the dark ways people think and manipulative tricks. You can either become that person who manipulates or you can at least become aware of how psychology can be pulled on and see some of it, and it will open your eyes for better or worse.
03:00:45 — How he would speedrun career growth today
Ryan:
[03:00:45] In video gaming, there’s this premise of speedrunning, and this is basically trying to get through a game as quickly as possible.
Ethan:
[03:00:53] I worked at Twitch. I know speedrunning.
Ryan:
[03:00:56] Imagine you’re playing the game speedrunning, any%, you’re trying to just get to a VP level and you start at the beginning. At Amazon, what would you do? What might you change today?
Ethan:
[03:01:11] Yeah, so first thing is I would not be planning on getting a VP at Amazon. That’s not gonna be a speedrun at this point. And the reason is the company’s not growing the way it was. It grew while I was there, grew 100-fold. That meant endless opportunity. It’s not true anymore because it’s not got the growth. So what I would do if I was at Amazon today is I would say, how can I suck as much information and technique out of this company in 18 to 24 months to get more skilled, and then I’m going to have to go somewhere that’s high growth.
[03:01:43] And so I’m going to try to become an expert in a skill that will get me bought externally, which probably means AWS. It could mean a few other things, but I’m going to try and become enough of an AWS expert that someone who needs AWS knowledge will hire me in at a higher level in a high-growth place. And then I’m going to go find a high-growth place that wants to use cloud computing. Hopefully the stuff I’ve been working on, and I’m going to pitch to them, bring me in and I’m going to be your solution to adopting this fast, well, and cheaply.
[03:02:19] Then I’m going to deliver on that and talk to them about, okay, how do I move? That’s where I’m then going to run this. How do I move up? I want to grow in this way. I want to lead. Now, the next thing you’re going to need to do is speedrun. You’re going to need some management skill if you want to be a VP. You’ve got to be good at the job. You’re not trained in that. So you’re going to have to start studying the psychology, the organization, the risk-taking, the decision-making.
[03:02:42] The next thing I will say is favor gambling, favor taking risks. You’ll probably move up faster by shooting for big wins and missing a few because you can always— unfortunately or fortunately, you can always leave behind the smoking ruins of your disaster at one company and try again somewhere else. And eventually, if you take enough big swings, you will hit one. So I’m going to use a baseball analogy from the book Moneyball.
[03:03:14] You can either bat for on-base percentage, and I want to swing to get a safe trip to first base. And that’s actually easier than trying to hit a home run. But if what you want is the home run, you got to swing hard and wild. A little bit, and you’ll strike out more, but you’ll get a few home runs. And that’s actually what makes you famous. Nobody cares that you got on base. They like to see the ball fly over the wall.
[03:03:38] So that’s—I would leave Amazon with my expertise, with the Amazon name on my resume, go somewhere high growth and start giving them value, asking for advancement, and taking risks. If I succeeded, I’d move up. If I didn’t, I’d hop again. And that would be my way. When I found a high-growth place where I was succeeding and moving up, I’d then ride that. That would be the end of my speedrun, but that might be the 3rd or 4th company.
[03:04:09] There was a time, I know many people who went from entry-level at Amazon to VP. They’re VPs today, but I don’t think that’s repeatable without 35. There is no speedrun of that today. There’s like a slug run. I don’t know what the opposite of a speedrun is, but it’s very slow. And that’s what a playthrough— what’s the playthrough where you complete every quest? It’s that one.
[03:04:34] And it’s slow as shit. And that’s what’s left. And it’s because a company that grew from 14,000 employees when I joined to 1.4 million when I left is now still more or less 1.4 million. The opportunity is not there. And the same as you were at Meta. Meta used to grow like crazy. Now it’s shrinking. I’m sure many careers were made at Meta, but I don’t think they’re being made the same way now.
[03:05:01] What you did at Meta, because I know you had a lot of success there, I don’t even know— do you believe that’s repeatable at Meta today, this moment?
Ryan:
[03:05:12] Maybe through the early engineering levels, but not at the higher levels where the business case matters more, I would say.
Ethan:
[03:05:19] Right. So that’s why to VP, it’s not possible. You totally could stay at Amazon to go L4, which is the entry level, to L5, maybe L6, but from there it’s out.
Ryan:
[03:05:31] Go out somewhere that’s gonna be faster because other people are gonna value that expertise way higher than Amazon does.
Ethan:
[03:05:38] One thing I’d say about Amazon that makes this interesting, interesting answer. They have 50,000 L4s or whatever, 30,000. I don’t know the number. They have 50,000 L5s. That means you’re just a number. You can go somewhere where you’re the only AWS native engineer. That is turning being one of 50,000 L5s into leverage in another company. It actually drives Amazon nuts because they can’t afford to pay all 50,000 L5s what each one is individually worth to externals.
[03:06:16] So they’re always getting snapped up by companies who are like, having that person in here is going to save us a ton on our bill and our implementation time. So they’re worth $300,000 to us, but Amazon‘s only paying them $200,000. Buy them out.
Ryan:
[03:06:31] Thank you so much for your time and your transparency. For people who want to find more of what you’re doing, where can they find you?
Ethan:
[03:06:39] Two places. ethanevans.com is my website. It links to everything else. Or find me on LinkedIn. I’m Ethan Evans there. You’ll find me in a heartbeat.
Ryan:
[03:06:48] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Ethan. I really appreciate it.
Ethan:
[03:06:50] Thank you, Ryan. It’s always a pleasure. I know you have an endless list of questions, so someday we’ll continue.
