Amazon

Check out other reviews to find something good about Amazon or AWS. I hardly have any points that are not stated in other reviews.

Amazon is proud of being data-driven, and that is fine when the data is chosen correctly and applied wisely. Here are some examples of applying it wrongly, but still sticking to the point of "I am driven by data" crap.

A manager I worked for tracked individual story points delivered by members in sprints and used those points to compare and push developers for delivering more. It doesn't matter whether you were on-call during one of those 2-week sprints (and didn't work on sprint stories) or the other person worked 18 hours a day – you have to be on par. If you tried to explain that sprints shouldn't be treated that way and it's all about team effort, he would brand you as having an incomplete understanding of Scrum!

Another manager in Dublin uses the number of code commits/reviews you sent out to measure your delivery effectiveness. A code change or configuration change that takes 2 minutes is counted the same as a code change you would be working on for 4 days to introduce a new feature. I wish he had the backbone to publish his data-driven logic of counting code commits to measure developer effectiveness to the wider developer community within the company and seek feedback.

All those measurements are done secretly, by the way. There is no upfront notice of "This is what I am tracking to measure developer's delivery effectiveness." If you believe you are right about your data-driven "developer effectiveness measure," why are you coy about it?

As managers, you oversee the projects executed by your team. You change priorities and reallocate resources. But acknowledge that such activities will delay the delivery of the other projects from which you pulled out resources.

Don't again madly stick to the old dates and pass the blame to the project executors – what you call tech leads. You pulled out the resources and, as a reasonable person, own the responsibility for the delay. Don't blame the executors for not coming up with 'creative ideas' to deliver it on time, despite you changing priorities and taking away resources.