Ethan Evans went from being fired twice for poor soft skills to becoming a Vice President at Amazon, leading a team of over 800 engineers. This was the most brutally honest interview I’ve done so far. In our conversation, he opened up about what VP promotions really look like, how performance is reviewed at the top, and what it was like working with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy. He shared hard-earned insights on stack ranking, PIPs, and the power managers hold, along with the advice he wishes he could give his younger self.
Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps
(01:01) Experience before Amazon
(05:03) Getting fired twice & learnings
(16:02) What VP promotions look like
(26:03) Promotion failure story
(29:14) Integrating Twitch into Amazon
(33:48) Jeff Bezos vs Andy Jassy stories
(36:53) VP performance reviews
(46:11) A manager can fire anyone they want
(50:45) Advice for his younger self
Transcript
(01:01) Experience before Amazon
Ryan:
Before we get into the juicy parts of you growing to a VP at Amazon, I think that's a level that a lot of people can only, you know, dream of or imagine of. Really curious to dig into what is even happening at those levels. I'm curious to lay out your full career story. I know there's some interesting stories about you being fired in the .com boom prior to joining Amazon, and I imagine there's a lot of interesting learnings there. So let's get into the beginning of your story, which is your experience before Amazon.
Ethan:
Yeah, absolutely. So just your original point, I never expected to be a VP at Amazon. That just evolved like many careers do.
I started working and that's where I ended up and I'm very happy with it. I wanted to be an engineer and I grew up right when home computers were beginning, and so I actually wrote Apple a letter. A physical letter, pre-email and said, Hey, I wanna come work at your company. How do I do that? And they explained to me that at that time they only hired engineers from five universities: Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, all in California.
I was in Ohio, so that seemed far. Carnegie Mellon and MIT. I didn't get admitted to MIT, I did go to Carnegie Mellon. I was on this plan of, I will go work at Apple. What actually happened is I did a master's degree at Purdue and then I started going through startups, basically all with a thread of high speed networking.
So the first company was a physical layer, networking, had an incredible run there, got promoted a couple times, not unlike your early story. Then I joined an internet search firm that was acquired by Lycos, one of the original search engines. From there, I went to a network management company that worked at the management layer of large networks for telcos.
From there, I went to internet advertising and audio streaming. The internet couldn't handle video. At that point, I had a short detour at a company that made lighting, entertainment lighting, like dance club stuff which is an interesting detour. And then Amazon hired me and asked me to build Prime video.
Based on the work I had done streaming music. And so there is a chain of one after the other, but the startups were all very different. Very small, very high growth, and candidly, most of them other than the first one, flamed out right before the .com. And that's also where I managed to get myself made redundant twice. So it wasn't just once, it was really twice, both times helped along by the fact that I was abrasive.
Ryan:
I'm curious 'cause a lot of people early in career, there's the decision between going to smaller companies versus more established ones. What was your thinking behind working at startups?
Ethan:
Like a lot of people, I guess my original thinking was driven by my friends.
I had friends who had joined this startup that was local to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. It was founded by some professors who'd left. They were talking about how cool it was, and they were getting these things called stock options, at that time, because I'm older, no one had ever heard of and they were explaining it and I'm like, wow, that seems amazing.
It wasn't really a conscious choice of small or big. It was this apparent gold mine. And my roommate who had joined a little earlier, so my college roommate who then was my roommate when I started in this company also, he joined a little earlier than I did. He joined before that company IPOed, and he made his first million dollars by the time he was 25 or 26.
With inflation now that would be like two or 3 million. It worked incredibly well. It was the startup dream. I joined a little later. I only made enough money to put a down payment on a house, but still, I think the real estate agent was pretty surprised when I was probably 25 and putting cash down on a house.
I went that way because that's where my friends went. It wasn't until later that I really started understanding what a career looks like and making intentional choices.
(05:03) Getting fired twice & learnings
Ryan:
You mentioned being made redundant twice, or I assume that means exiting the company.
Ethan:
Let go, laid off. Yeah.
Ryan: You mentioned it was because you were abrasive. Did you see it coming and what's the story behind those layoffs?
Ethan:
Oh, I'd love to tell you. I saw it coming. It's not that people didn't try and warn me. My very first performance review I ever got, my manager said, I think sometimes Ethan's solution to problems would be, let's knock their heads together. So I was pretty combative. He saw it. I didn't get let go at that company. But, this was a consistent theme. I used to say you probably know the phrase, oh, that person, the loose cannon. I modified it, I say, yeah, people say I'm a loose cannon, but that's only 'cause I'm pointed at them, right?
I'm busy telling them how wrong they are. Ah, so obviously that whole statement, I'm busy telling them how wrong they are, is very arrogant. That was me. So as I went up in leadership levels, I rose based on ability and jumping into projects. I rose to a vice president and startup level, but then I had conflict with my peers.
The first peer was a product guy. He was basically saying, we are dreaming that we're gonna build all the things we're going to build in the time we're going to build them. He was predicting that our product was impossible to put together with the time and resources we had. He was actually right. I was fantasizing.
I was mad that he wasn't committed to the mission, so I ended up fighting with him because he was saying something that was true, but it wasn't lined up with my religion, which is, but we're a startup team together. We're gonna do it. And he was pushing back on that enthusiasm. So we argued.
That company hit hard times. I wasn't let go only because of that, but we were downsizing and I had an opportunity at another startup. And so part of what I did is I talked to the CEO and I said, look. I have the chance to just bounce to this other startup and you can save someone else, and he's, that sounds great. In hindsight of course, he was probably also pretty glad to get rid of the contention in his team.
Fast forward to the next startup, classic situation, I was leading engineering. And the sales VP, we were short on money 'cause it was the .com bust. The sales VP was lying about what the product would do. He was talking it up and making a sale based on stuff we hadn't built. And of course, as the head of engineering, I'm like, we don't, we can't, I was arguing with him about we can't do that.
The thing I didn't realize was it was either sign that contract or go out of business. And the fact is the truthfulness there matters, but he needed to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars, and then we would have to do our best to deliver it or go under. Again, in that case, I really was let go and it was technically a layoff, but I was the only person laid off in the layoff.
They presented it to me as a layoff, but you're the only one in the room being laid off. I'd call that being fired. That was a hundred percent about removing conflict. So you asked, did I see it coming? The important thing I would say is no, but after it happened twice, I damn sure looked at who's the common element in this?
It's me. And why? Why is that? And while I was sitting around in a bad period of the economy trying to find a new job and struggling to do so, I absolutely asked, What do I need to change? What do I need to be, do differently? And so it was after that, I completely, very significantly changed my personality.
I changed how I interacted at work to not get into arguments and shouting matches with people. Now I just handle those very differently. I ask questions, I listen. People don't steamroll me, but I don't escalate confrontation.
Ryan:
You mentioned that, soft skills obviously became an important part of you being a leader, but when you were earlier in your career, you were a little bit more abrasive. You went in the direction that you thought was right. No one would doubt that soft skills are important, but I'm curious, like early career. Do you think being abrasive and super aggressive in your direction was actually better?
Ethan:
I think if I had soft skills with that energy, it would've been the best. But even today, I tell people, look, you have to be somewhat pushy. The best phrase someone recently taught me or used, they called it being strategically annoying. And I like that because annoying isn't as bad as abrasive or confrontational, but it gets at that, you can't just be compliant or helpful.
You've got to have an opinion. And be willing to fight for it. It's really a question of how do you fight? I was fighting more in the classic way of getting red in the face or raising my voice or using critical terms of that's his dumb idea. There are better ways to argue or to debate, and I was doing it the bad way. I think I got away with that for a long time because I was right many times or driven, but ultimately the best way is to have the skills to do that.
Ryan:
You mentioned in some of your writing that when you lost your job as a VP at the startup that one of the big sources was sneaky corporate politics. And let's say you were someone that was in a leadership role and they wanna get ahead of that. What's the story behind the politics there and how do you do it right, or how do you do it well to prevent that kind of situation?
Ethan:
There's two things going on. First, when you're loud and abrasive and confrontational, if you are, if you push too hard, people who disagree with you will stop telling you. They'll just stop talking to you and start talking to others about you instead. So you want to be careful when you are strategically annoying. That you aren't so much in people's faces that you shut them down and they go behind your back instead. So I caused those situations by causing people to say, this guy is crazy. We'll just go see if we can get him removed.
The second thing is, I didn't build enough alliances with others. So let's say I disagreed with person A very strongly. I didn't have enough alliances or close enough relationships with B, C, and D so that when A would go to them, they would tell me. Instead when A went to them, they're like, yeah, we see he's a problem. I literally dug my own grave in hindsight. And what I would say you need to do is yes, how you interact with person A matters, having the social skills there, but the other part is building your set of allies, or at least people who respect you enough to include you in the conversation.
And I failed to do that. I didn't realize as an engineer, and I think many engineers fall into this, we think that being right is what matters. And we don't realize that relationships and how other people feel about it matters just as much, even to the point where people will pick a worse solution that feels more comfortable. That happened all the time.
Ryan:
It sounds like you got repeated feedback through situations that happened in your career early where soft skills might have been something that could have been better. And later in your career, it sounded like it was one of your strengths. So I'm curious what made you flip the switch?
Ethan:
Yeah. It is this incident of being let go the second time where I was a layoff of one. It was more direct than the first time I left the company. It was very pointed. And I also had trouble because it was right after nine 11 and the first .com bubble. I had trouble finding another job. And so that really; there was an interviewer.
I was at an interview and I was telling the story of all my accomplishments and trying to get the job, and he said, everything you say sounds fine, but I just really struggle to believe that if you were that valuable, these companies, even though they were struggling, wouldn't have found a way to keep you around.
I actually realized he was right. If I were that valuable, they'd have kept me around. And so I asked, that caused me to think, okay, what's the gap? The gap isn't my technical skills. It isn't my ability to drive and get projects done. It's my ability to work well, play well with others. And so then I got deeply into, and I recommend this to people, the psychology of work and what motivates people, of course, how to interact, how to ask questions, how to draw people in.
As an engineer, we love, we're taught in school to make statements. The statement is, the answer is this. The method is that the code should be this, as opposed to, ask questions. Once I realized, oh look, this works, I can lead and motivate people and inspire them and this is a fun puzzle. Then I was hooked, and so now I study it full time in a way.
(14:02) Joining Amazon
Ryan:
I saw, after you worked at some startups, you decided to move across the country and take the job at Amazon, which is a pretty big move. I'm curious what the story is behind that move and how did you know it was worth joining Amazon?
Ethan:
This is a fun story, I don't know if I've ever told. I was working at that search engine, Lycos, and Lycos had a partnership with Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble knew nothing about being online at that point, but they wanted to be. And so they partnered with this online company, and part of my job was to figure out why they were losing to Amazon. So I had some calls with some people at Barnes and Noble.
I talked to them and what they were doing and what they could do and what they couldn't do. And so I learned about Amazon by viewing them as a competitor to our partner, and that's what taught me like, oh, this Amazon company is completely different, way ahead of what was called bricks and mortar. Like the physical world. Then when Amazon called me, because they actually reached out, a recruiter reached out. I was able to talk about how I knew Amazon as this competitor to Barnes and Noble, and how I had been impressed and what I had done with Barnes and Noble to try and help them compete and how hopeless that looked.
And I think that probably appealed to Amazon of, okay, this guy is seeing where we're going. As for taking a risk, I was at yet another startup that was struggling with product market fit and funding. And Amazon wasn't. So there was both the being impressed with them, but also being sick.
Amazon had IPO'ed at that point, was a public company. They were not profitable, but they still, look, they were 10,000 people, which now they're way over a million. Right? So 10,000 seems quite small, but to me, working in firms of dozens or hundreds, it was like, oh my God, this has gotta be stable. Look how big it is.
(16:02) What VP promotions look like
Ryan:
When you got to Amazon, I saw you were hired in as a senior manager, and eventually you got promoted to director first, and then later to a VP. I think there's not a lot of information on what those jumps even look like. So I'm curious, for instance, the promotion to director.
What are the expectations, like what does a promo like that even look like?
Ethan:
It's interesting. Times have changed. Amazon was smaller. I remember seeing the paperwork to become a director and the paperwork said to be a director in Amazon, this person should be one of the 100 most important leaders in Amazon.
But of course, it was already outdated and there were well over a hundred directors, when I saw this. So things were moving fast because it was a hypergrowth company. What they were looking for specifically was someone who could lead a business, or an effort on their own, that only needed high level goals.
And in my case, my promotion specifically came from some good luck and a good decision so I could then, I think this is common. Promotions either happen as what I call lifetime achievement awards: someone's there and they do good work and eventually the process grinds away. Or they have an outsized event.
In my case, two things worked in my favor. The first is there was a project that came up. I made a very high risk call. My management disagreed with doing the project, but they had told me, show that you can be the leader. So I specifically said to my SVP. I said, unless you order me not to do this, double negative, unless you order me not to do this, I'm gonna do it.
And he's like great, hang yourself. I built the project and it worked, and it turned out to be a big success. So in my eventual promotion, the key line was. It was a partnership with TiVo, the DVR company. The key line was, without Ethan, we wouldn't have had TiVo. So I made my chops on being a high judgment decision maker who could make things happen.
The second thing is my VP, in between levels, was leaving. I had gone to him and said, look, I wanna be promoted to director, and I threatened to leave very politely if I wasn't promoted. It was gonna make him look really bad if he left and I left 'cause the project would fall apart. As opposed to being threatened by my threat in a way, he had pressure to make sure he secured me. And the specific words I use are interesting.
I learned soft skills, I was very careful and the words I used, I said my career is very important to me. Which no one can argue with that. My career is very important to me, and I need to know if it's as important to Amazon, because if it's not as important to Amazon as it is to me, I have to think about that.
And of course you can hear the, hey, take care of me, or I'm out. But I never said anything that someone could be like, screw you. You can't threaten us. I just said, my career is really important to me. And if it's not as important to you, as the representative of Amazon, then I need to think about that.
It's led me to the philosophy that you can find polite and civil ways to raise any topic. So my promotion came because I proved I could lead a business and move Amazon video forward. And because I, again, strategically annoying. I was willing to put pressure on it. That boss wouldn't have done anything if I hadn't been pushing. He wasn't the sort of guy who was just like, oh, I should probably promote Ethan. It was a hundred percent, because I put the squeeze on him. I was like up or out.
Ryan:
That wording is so, it's subtle, but it's so good. I could imagine that it could have gone way worse if you had said, I need this promotion. You need to help me. Rather than implying it and being polite with the wording. And I think I've seen in many people's careers as well that sometimes their growth comes from being politely pushy. Maybe they, not exactly threatened to leave, but it's clear that they're asking for something. And the manager feels the demand of that. Not in a stressful way, but just in a. When they're thinking of who to promote, they kinda, that's the first person on the short list because they're asking.
Ethan:
As a leader, people won't like to hear this. I believe in telling the straight truth. It's one of my taglines. As a leader, there have been times where I've had two equally qualified people on my team or, approximately equal. And one of them is. Agitating for the promotion and threatening to leave. And the other is a nice person who's willing to wait. And so they wait. And a lot of people say you just rewarded the jerk.
Maybe, but I had a triage. I'm gonna get one promotion done this quarter or this year because it takes work and you only need so many leaders at the next level, and I have a very realistic choice of move up this person and keep them, even though I'm a little bit being held hostage or move up this person and lose the other one.
I'd like to tell you I always did the right thing and helped the team player. But I can't actually tell you that's true and I certainly wouldn't tell you other leaders do that because we have to think. About our short-term problems to some degree, and it's not a perfect world. Yeah, if you're that person who's expecting to be rewarded because you are the silent, hard worker who's always collaborative, maybe you dislike me for it, and you're like you sound like a bad boss.
I'm actually willing to tell you the truth and tell you that almost everyone's doing what I'm doing. They're just not telling you. So I don't know. Bad. Good. It's the reality.
Ryan:
You mentioned in your promotion story, you said, explicitly, there's a wording in your promo packet or somewhere that said, X would not have happened unless Ethan was there.
And I think that's a really important distinction when it comes to, crediting and stuff like that, and promos. There's a lot of people in big companies, there's multiple people involved. And people ask, should I hoard it so that I get credit or what? But really all that you need is that narrative is obvious. If we pull Ethan out of this, that wouldn't have happened. And if that narrative is true, you get credit. And that's often what drives these promos.
Ethan:
If that project would've just been fine, it wouldn't have hurt me. I might not have gotten promoted, but it wouldn't have hurt me. But if it had blown up, I was the one who pushed for it over the leadership's, not disagreement, but advice not to do it. Had I gone against that advice and then it been a big disaster, you know that could have very easily cut the other way, which I think gets the part of the point. If you wanna grow rapidly, you're gonna have to take some risks, but the risks are recoverable. Remember I was also a jerk earlier in my career and lost some roles, and I still became an Amazon VP.
Like venture capital, taking some risks and having some of them work out and some of them fail, still moves you forward faster than always playing it safe. And if I have any one regret, it's actually that I didn't take more risks. I could have gone further I think. If I had my career to do over again, I'd probably take a lot more risk. By the time I was trying to become a vice president, I had been at Amazon a long time.
I finally truly understood how everything worked, and that was a long designed process where I lined up stakeholders. I got my manager on board to support me. I had a good relationship with my manager, something a lot of people struggle with. I was lucky enough that my vice president was stable in his role for about two and a half to three years while we worked the process.
My timing was good because he was reorged within six months and after that, so had I been just six months later, I'd have had a new boss and it would've been a setback for sure. Rebuilding trust and all that. I can go more deeply into it. The big thing I did there is I've developed this idea I call the magic loop, which is working with your leader, your manager, to figure out what they need you to do and then form a partnership with them that amounts to, I'll do everything you need done. You do one critical thing which is make sure I'm rewarded for it. And that's our deal is, I can either work for you as a standard cog in a box, or I can really push and go above and beyond, but there's gotta be a payoff and can we line up and agree to that?
And my manager, I remember he came to me one day, my vice president said, okay. I'm gonna try and get your VP promotion through this cycle. I'm going to do everything I can. I can't promise you anything. But he was at a place where he's okay, we're gonna take this shot. I'm gonna lay my reputation on it.
And I had, it took two and a half years to get him to where he was ready to put his credibility down. Luckily that paid off, right? We both got it done. He was happy. I was happy.
Ryan:
That partnership makes a lot of natural sense. You help, your manager helps you, and they want you to grow.
Ethan:
People think managers are withholding promotion at any level. That's not true. Speaking as vice president, I want all the directors I can have. Because the better my team is, the easier my job is. So I want high performers. I want you to be good enough. I want you to have the skills, but I can't do that for you. So people say, why didn't you promote me? And I'm like, you did not promote yourself. You did not get there. If you can get there, I want that. It's good for me.
(26:03) Promotion failure story
Ryan:
I know you have a story from, right when you started at Amazon, where there was a high performer on your team and you established that partnership with them, but you weren't able to get their promotion and they ended up leaving.
Ethan:
Yeah, so I had a star young engineer who made this deal with me and I made the deal in good faith. He said, oh, I will help ship our very first version of our product. I'll do whatever it takes. You get me from what we call the SDE one, which was the new college hire level, to SDE two.
And I'm like, great. Got it. I'll do that. I had always worked at startups where when you wanted to promote someone, you just went to your boss and maybe HR and said, we should promote this guy, and you did it. Amazon had a process and they only did promotions twice a year, and they had a cycle. Our project launch was a mess.
Not his fault, but we had problems. I was busy looking at the problems and trying to fix the product. The cycle came and went. He's, hey, where's my promotion? I went and asked, oh, how do we do this? And they're like, yeah, you can do that in the spring maybe. The factor was my, and I've written about this very publicly, I own it, it was my ignorance. And so the problem is we made a deal in good faith that I didn't know how to keep. So that's my error. The advice for someone making the deal is figure out: is your manager a veteran? Do they know what they're doing? Do they understand the process or do you? And this is a common problem because people get new managers very often.
So even if I hadn't been the idiot in this situation, it could have been somebody else who was hired in. Can, do you understand the process? I think part of the issue is that engineer, which is not his fault, but he also didn't know. And so it was an ugly discovery for him, oh, we missed the date and sorry.
He didn't know to tell me like, Hey Ethan, you gotta be doing this. You know there's a date. Is that his responsibility? It's not. It was mine. But the tricky part is it's your life. And so if you're the engineer in that situation, probably people all know the story from Scrum of chickens and pigs, right? The pig is committed. The chicken's only involved in the ham and eggs restaurant. The manager is the chicken in this. Their life isn't on the line. It's you. You're the one who's gonna get hurt. So know the process and make sure the manager's, okay, I'm gonna do this. And you're like, okay, well by September 15th are you gonna have a document done?
And if they say, why does September 15th matter? That's like a warning sign, right? Why does that matter? Oh, that's a deadline. Oh, there's a deadline. Like that. That conversation would've been very revealing if he'd have known to have it. And I feel terrible about it. It's why I've written about it publicly is, I don't want it to happen to anybody else.
So this guy left. He joined another big tech company. He's had an amazing career there. It cost him a year. And I feel bad about that, but the truth is careers are 20, 30 years long or more. Things in life are going to cost you a year sometimes. That's not fatal. So when you hit that, I just wasted a year, you can either mope about it and be depressed or you can move on. He moved on and was successful. I've moved on and been successful. You can make that change.
(29:14) Integrating Twitch into Amazon
Ryan:
So after you got promoted to VP, I saw that you switched business verticals or you went to the Twitch partnerships or managing the Twitch partnership and then later into gaming. I'm curious, it sounds like the Twitch acquisition was right before you became in that role. Were you the VP in charge of plugging them in, or what's the story behind that role?
Ethan:
Amazon's a big company, so it had a process that every time it bought a company and we spent $970 million on Twitch, so a billion dollars. They take a VP and they make them, what you'd call the integration liaison. The person who's going to facilitate making sure you get your billion dollars worth. The trick is they leave the CEO in charge. So Emmett Shear, we talked about, you're aware of Emmett. Emmett was still in charge of Twitch. I was not his boss. Instead, I purposefully sought out that role. We talked about working on soft skills. I had become vice president running Amazon's app store, and I had a team of 800, and so I was now very good at running a global team of hundreds of people, but that's where I had authority. I decided to challenge myself and go take a role where I had a goal: help Twitch integrate, but I had no authority.
I was simply an advisor to the CEO. I had no team. And I had to achieve this goal without being able to give this guy any orders. And here's a guy who's just been made wealthy for life. He's 15 or 16 years younger than me. He's in a business that serves mostly teenagers and people in their twenties, he's 33 or so. I'm late forties at that point. How am I going to influence him in how to run his sort of millennial Gen Z business when I'm neither? And I wanted that challenge to work on my soft skills. So I gave up the team of 800 to go figure out how to do this. It's a fascinating story that worked out really well, and I really enjoyed working with Emmett, as well as of course, learning the live stream on Twitch and all kinds of stuff.
Ryan:
When I see these founders with rocket ship trajectories, I don't know the exact size of Twitch at the time, but maybe hundreds, maybe low, thousands of employees at such a young age. I'm curious, when you work with a young founder like that, as a seasoned manager with tons of experience, what are the gaps that you notice in someone that has such a unique management trajectory? Or are there none?
Ethan:
Oh, no, there were plenty of gaps. I think Emmett would agree with that. If he were here with us. We might not agree on what the gaps were. So first to give you scope, Twitch was several hundred employees at that point and grew within the next couple years to be a thousand. So he was on a very rocket trajectory.
The biggest problem was Twitch was a classic venture funded company. It was bleeding cash, at a huge rate. And in fact, one of the gaps was, in the beginning, Emmett and certainly members of his team, didn't even think this was a problem. They had always been able to get venture money, and now the way they originally looked at it, I remember people in Twitch on the management team looking at me and saying, now that Amazon's bought us, you guys have lots of money.
Why do we need to worry about profitability or advertising? Can't we just focus on the gaming? And my job was to help move them to profitability. So I'm like, whoa, Houston, we have a problem. They don't even see it as a worthy goal. Meanwhile, the management chain above me, 'cause I ultimately reported into Andy Jassy, who's now CEO of Amazon.
He wanted profitability quite soon. So you're trapped between a group of people who are like, eh, why does this even matter anymore? You guys have all the money in the world. So that was one gap. Another gap that I would say Emmett learned the hard way over time. It's very easy to be loyal to your early employees, but not all of them can scale.
And so Emmett went through a big learning cycle of, I'm gonna have to hire in somebody over this person who was with me from the beginning. And I'm gonna have to explain to this person who's a friend of mine, love you. You're gonna make a lot of money because your stock options are now Amazon shares. But you're not gonna remain whatever chief product officer or fill in the blank. And that was a big discovery, I think, for Emmett, that he had to replace some friends or level them, and a few of them quit and were angry.
(33:48) Jeff Bezos vs Andy Jassy stories
Ryan:
You mentioned that you reported to Andy Jassy, the now CEO of Amazon.
And I imagine you had some proximity to Jeff Bezos or had been in meetings with them. Comparing and contrasting the leadership styles between the two, is there something that stands out from each or maybe a story that you think illustrates those things?
Ethan:
Yeah, so I knew Jeff pretty well. Yeah. I'm not gonna claim he is like a best buddy of mine, but I've probably had about 50 meetings with him and about 50 with Andy in different contexts. So I know them both, spending dozens of hours with them. And working for them.
The biggest difference is Jeff's the founder, and what that means is he can take gambles with the company that others won't. So a story I remember is in a budget discussion, our chief financial officer was trying to slow down Jeff's spending on something. And he said to Jeff, Jeff, we only have so much money in the bank, trying to just pump the brakes a little. Because Jeff was, let's do this and let's do this, and the price tag's going up and the CFO said, Jeff, we only have so much money in the bank. And Jeff looked at him and this was the previous CFO to the current one.
And he said, Tom, how much is that because I might wanna spend it. And he was just telling his CFO, thank you, your job is to count the pennies and my job is to allocate them. And don't confuse your role and my role. And Andy is a more classic, I don't recall if he has an MBA, I think he does, but he's a more classic business leader.
He's not going to tell his CFO, stick a sock in it. He's going to see that he has to partner. And that's because it's not his toy, right? He is the paid leader. But it's not his company. And that no matter how much I respect, and Andy, that's just very hard to get over because when it's your toy, Jeff definitely felt that he could, metaphorically, take the whole company to Vegas and bet it on black.
He had that right. I built it, I can do what I want with it. Whereas for Andy, he helped build it, but he has to actually do what the board wants with it and what Jeff wants with it, and that's just different. Both Jeff and Andy put great demand on me and other leaders. For me personally, for my style, I felt Jeff was emotionally behind me and supportive, and I felt Andy was always waiting to see if I'd screw up. And so if we brought in 10 executives who worked for both of them, not all of them have had that experience. I found working for Jeff much more inspiring and not just because he was the founder, but because he seemed enthusiastic. Andy seemed more ready to ask more probing questions, and I, at least as a personality, need that leader who, yes, they ask all the questions, but then they're like, okay, I'm on board. Let's do it. We'll do it together. And I never got a we'll do it together from Andy. I always feel like I got, okay, it's your plan. You're on the hook now. Let me know when it's done. It didn't inspire me the same way.
(36:53) VP performance reviews
Ryan:
You mentioned being scrutinized, and I saw that you had written about how you started the Prime gaming vertical with some peers, and you mentioned that it had failed multiple times.
I'm curious, what does a VP's performance review look like if the business vertical they started is failing?
Ethan:
So this is a flaw of a big company. Because often when I say something was failing, we would hit most of our goals, ship this, build that, add this feature. We might even hit some financial goals, but we weren't achieving the vision.
The vision of Prime gaming, the original vision Jeff wanted was to make Amazon a real player in the video game business. At one point, his vision was, how can we be as big as Tencent, which is the largest gaming company in the world out of China. So we met a bunch of goals, but we were never on track to become like that.
And certainly Prime Gaming has never done anything like that. Amazon Game Studios, all the gaming pieces, they're very niche. So when I say it failed multiple times, I think it failed against the vision. You can get a good review for ticking all the boxes and hitting like all these interim goals and not really be on track for doing anything significant.
Right before I left the Amazon app store to join Twitch, I told a peer, I said, this year I'm gonna hit every goal and it's gonna be meaningless. And the proof of that in some ways is now 10 years later, Amazon has shut down its app store. They use it internally, I think, but all external use has been, for phones and whatever, they've given up after 10 more years.
I saw that coming 10 years ago. But big companies can get lost in, we're hitting the goals. And they confuse hitting the goals for doing something actually valuable. The bottom line is I was rated well as a VP. Every year of my career. And yet when I look at, did some of the things I do really succeed?
I'm very proud that we launched Prime Gaming and we put Amazon in the game business, but it hasn't gone anywhere and it won't surprise me if in two, three, or five years. Amazon shutters that. Now, it also won't surprise me if they get some leader who figures out how to make it big, but there's a lot of zombie products in a big company that no one quite wants to pull the trigger on shutting down because that's a big decision and an admission of failure. But no one really knows how to make it big either, so they just bump along.
Ryan:
It sounds like even forward looking, like being in it. You hadn't achieved the goals yet, and you looked at the goals and you said, these are not. Impactful. Did you ever have a thought of let's make the goals more ambitious, or let's change the goals so that they're the ones that align with the vision?
Ethan:
Sure. The problem is, you're going to be judged on them. So there's a tension between the goals you think matter and the goals you have any idea how to hit. So I'll tell you, for the Amazon app store. The goal was to somehow compete with Google on Android phones when Google comes pre-installed and Amazon is a side load. Like that, people have to decide they want and then opt into.
I had no idea how to compete, basically, with an endemic store, a pre-installed store on its own phone. That was the goal. Of course, I argued strongly against being judged against that because I didn't know how to do it. I would say other leaders who came after me who were quite hardworking, didn't, obviously, didn't know how either.
For my review and my pay. I want goals I know I can nail. And for the good of the company, I actually want goals that I have no idea how to do. And so when I said this, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna nail all these goals that I fought to be measured on, and I'm gonna miss all these goals that actually matter because I don't know how to do them.
And it turns out maybe they were impossible. Again, if you think about this aspiration, oh, Amazon wants to beat Tencent in games. If you work at some e-commerce startup saying Ryan, we want you to take a goal to be a second Amazon. You might be like, I get why that would be valuable. I do understand that's a great vision, but I'll pass.
(41:10) Stack ranking & PIPs
Ryan:
With your tenure as a manager at Amazon, I wanted to talk about management practices, stack ranking, performance based layoffs, PIPs, those types of things. So I'm curious, Amazon's pretty famous for stack ranking and, really aggressively managing people out.
What are your thoughts on these types of systems?
Ethan:
About 10 years ago, Amazon ran an experiment where after getting years of bad press for stack ranking. They removed what was called the unregretted attrition goal. So Amazon has a goal every year for what they call unregretted attrition, which means people, the nice way of saying people we want to leave and we don't care if you pressure them into quitting or they get fired.
It's just there's a number and you put people on a list of folks you want out and you can either improve their performance to where you take them off the list, they can quit ,or you can fire them, but you have to hit a goal, and it's usually like 7% a year. Sometimes it's as low as four, sometimes it's as much as seven.
So Amazon uses lots of words to cloak this process, but the bottom line is, it's fire the bottom 5% or so. Here's the thing, when we remove the goal. Managers immediately stop having hard conversation and talking to their struggling performers because without the pressure of having to do it, it was just easier to focus on your good people and let that problem person hang around because it's not, in a big company it's not costing your burn rate that you know about or care about, and you don't have to have that unpleasant conversation, and you also don't have to be the bad guy. One of the worst things about being a manager is you may have someone who isn't very good, but is well liked. They're friendly, they're outgoing, they bring donuts, they organize the parties.
Everybody likes them. And so now you have to not only have a hard conversation with them, but if you do move them out or if they talk to other people like Ethan's trying to fire me. Then everybody's like, why are you trying to fire Ryan? He's awesome. We love him. It may be that you have lots of performance problems, but other people aren't feeling those.
So when we remove the goal, people stop having the hard conversation. So the next year, Amazon put it back and it's kept it every year since. So on the one hand, many managers avoid actually performance managing if they're not forced at gunpoint, an unfortunate truth. On the other hand, because there's a list and because there's a goal, you would then be in a situation where someone who had a chance to succeed, maybe you had to put on the list to make your quota. And you asked how well the PIPs work. I think most PIPs are a combination of dishonest and or psychologically unrealistic because once I've decided that I'm gonna put you on this list, or once I've decided you're enough of a problem that I need to write up this plan and have this ugly conversation with you. Mentally, I've already moved to, we have to get rid of Ethan, right?
We have to get rid of Ryan. They're not good. Recovering, it doesn't matter what you do unless it's amazing, I've already decided. And so my cognitive bias is gonna be self-fulfilling. So what I recommend, this has happened. I coach people. I have had half a dozen people reach out to me for coaching and say, I was just put on a PIP at Amazon.
I really want to succeed. Help me. And I've tried and they've all gotten fired. And so now when people call me, this is funny, they call me and they say, I'm on a PIP. And I'm like, so what you need to do is spend that time on the PIP looking for your next job because you're going to be fired. And they're like no, I'm gonna overcome it. And I'm like, good luck with that. Tell me what happens. And three months later I get a note that says, you were right. I was fired. And the reason I cite, both people I coached and people I don't, is of course you could just expect, maybe I'm a lousy coach and I didn't dig them out of the hole, but the people I didn't coach got fired too.
Once you're at that stage, it's gonna happen. Very few people ever dig out of them. Now, I believe some managers in their minds start a PIP with honest, good intentions. But at least at Amazon, you have your HR business partner and your boss asking you all the time, how's it going? When are we gonna exit that person? I need them on my quota. If you actually want to take someone off a PIP, more than likely your manager is going to be saying who else are you gonna put on? 'cause we still have to meet the number. You then you're looking around and you're like I put the lowest performing person on my team on, and now I'm being told if I take them off of PIP, I have to put somebody else on.
So the conclusion is companies stink at performance management. They don't train managers how to do it. They don't train managers how to have the conversation early. They don't create a system where you can talk to people and say, this isn't working out. Maybe you wanna leave because that opens you up to a lawsuit. We just have a dysfunctional performance system.
(46:11) A manager can fire anyone they want
Ryan:
In your writing you wrote something that said a manager can fire anyone they want, and HR is not there to protect you. I would've thought there's checks and balances to this, that that is not true. Or I guess I would hope that it's not true. What is stopping a manager from painting the report in an unfair light? Or is there nothing stopping that?
Ethan:
I love that you call this out. I agree with what I wrote. The nuance is, as a manager, I could get rid of any one employee I wanted, but I can't get rid of every employee. And so if I create a pattern where I'm driving one employee after another out, I will eventually get caught and burned for that because we do look at what is a manager's turnover rate.
My point was for any single employee, I can absolutely, if I choose to, end that person's career at my company. And at Amazon, it's as simple as putting them on this list. It's partly who strikes first. So by the time you go to HR, I've already put you on this list and told my story of why I think you're bad. And now you're going no, it's unfair, he hates me. The problem is the people, all the people they've heard from who are legitimately bad are saying the same thing. They're saying, no, I'm actually good. My boss hates me and doesn't understand me. So they hear that story every day. So when you legitimately tell it, and it's actually true, and it's just, I hate you, you end up sounding like everyone else.
And so that's why it's stacked in my favor. Now I have never done this, but I've looked at the system and just seen, I have people all the time who say my boss told a lie about me. Again, it's your word versus mine, and I'm the one who's got the higher level, maybe the more tenure. If I choose to say Ryan looks really busy, but he's mostly just doing pull requests on other people's code. I can downplay what you're doing. 'Cause see, I can tell this story of, Ryan is an amazing engineer. He makes everybody's code better because he does all these insightful reviews and he's upleveling the whole team.
That's narrative one. Same facts. He did 700 pull requests this quarter or whatever. Narrative two is, Ryan actually doesn't contribute much. He thinks he does, and he spent all this time doing code reviews, but look at how little he has actually written himself and really, he's just busy nitpicking people and churning away. Sure his numbers look good, but those numbers are actually a sign of the problem.
Now, I've taken your same performance and spun it two ways. My point that people aren't gonna like is, a manager can do that, and maybe they're doing that because they're a jerk and they've decided you threaten them and they want to get rid of you. Maybe they just have a different view. You think you're doing really valuable stuff and they don't, and they're saying what they honestly believe. But the point is performance that you would think is really easy to measure- look at these numbers. Look how many valuable code reviews I did- can be used either way. Nothing about software engineering performance is so objective. Bad managers truly bad or evil managers do get caught eventually, but clever managers, who just want to get rid of one person, would be able to do that.
Because they're in the driver's seat, and more importantly, they get to make the preemptive strike. They get to tell the story about why that person's a problem before that person ever knows it's happening. And so it's yes, you can slap the mosquito after it bites you, but it doesn't take away being bitten.
Ryan:
It's unfortunate that's true, but it also illustrates the power of storytelling in a way. The exact same facts can be spun as a bad thing or a good thing.
Ethan:
People are gonna hear this and believe, oh see, managers are just like personally firing people because they hate them. I am sure that happens.
It's not in a manager's best interest. They are judged on accomplishing their goals. Good managers are trying to find partners they can work with, that will help everyone achieve. I just wanna be honest that if you do have a difficult boss and you make them angry and they're a vindictive sort of person, beware, they hold, like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. They're the one with the gun, and you're probably gonna lose. If you have a boss like that, don't get in the knife or gunfight either. Figure out what can allow you to make friends with them or find a different manager. That's the actual point. Don't think that somehow HR is gonna come investigate and rescue you. That just isn't what they do.
(50:45) Advice for his younger self
Ryan:
I wanna be mindful of your time and so I have one last question for you, which is, if you could go back to your career right at the beginning when you had just graduated and entered the industry and give yourself some advice. What would that advice be?
Ethan:
So I'll answer in two ways. One of them I did and one of them I really didn't. The thing I would do is always prefer high growth. My whole career was in companies that were growing very rapidly, and I compare that. People talk about a career ladder. My ladder was always an escalator I could climb, but it was also moving up for me.
And so the reason I got where I went is because Amazon grew 100 fold while I was there. From 10,000 people to a million, revenue grew like 80 times. The escalator went up and I rode it. I also climbed. So that part I would keep the same. The thing I would change is probably not surprising you. I would wake up much sooner to, jobs are still with other humans. It's great to be an expert. It's great to be right, but build the skills to have the relationships, make the friends, get to know lots of people, and you don't have to be an extrovert to do that. I was a classic introvert. I've certainly learned to be more extroverted. But with online tools like LinkedIn or pick your tool, you can make a reputation and build connections from the safety of your keyboard in your darkened room all by yourself.
And so do whatever works for you, but get known because it works so much better. Amazon called me for the job, not the other way around, and you want that happening. So build that reputation.
Ryan:
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Ethan. At the end of the interview I'd like to give you an opportunity where people can find you or is there something you'd like people to check out?
Ethan:
So the easiest place to find me is either Ethan Evans, VP on LinkedIn or ethanevans.com, my website. I'm well known for teaching classes about how to get past the promotion hurdle we've talked a lot about. So if my style of straight talk in this interview works for you, then that's what I do all the time. And if that's your flavor of ice cream, then I'm your vendor.
Ryan:
Thanks so much, Ethan. Really appreciate your time.
Ethan:
Yeah, my pleasure, Ryan. Thank you for having me.
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