A Few Hundred Thousand Words Later, Here Are Some Quotes

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member. All of my articles are intended to be evergreen (readable and valid forever). Some weeks I have fresh content; other weeks I'll update/rewrite something from 4+ years ago because I want to keep the quality of all articles high.

When I go on vacations (admittedly often compared to most people), I pre-write and schedule articles to be published while I'm gone. That can be a lot of writing when I'll be gone for a few weeks at a time. As I'm currently preparing for a family trip to Austria (guten tag!), I decided to make my life a bit easier. Particularly as this article will literally be sent on my birthday.

I've been saving some of my favorite quotes from my articles (either ones I find or ones people quote when emailing me), and I decided I'd share them in an article.

I hope you're all having a lovely day!

If You're Never Wrong at Work, You're Probably Not Leading

• "Adding value can't possibly exist at the intersection of playing it safe."
• "It's easy and tempting to say, 'I trust all of you; your plan sounds good.' It's much harder to say, 'I understand what you're saying, but I disagree.'"

Finishing Your Tasks Doesn't Mean You're Doing Your Job

• "If you expect your manager to identify problems and tell you how to solve those problems, you're essentially a drain on resources."
• "Owning is mentally taxing, and helping is relaxing and significantly easier." To provide true value to your co-workers (or spouse), what’s the answer? You need to take full ownership over things.

The Behaviors That Turn Engineers Into Senior Engineers

• "The gap between mid-level and senior engineers usually isn't technical skill. It's behavior, judgment, communication, and the ability to make everyone around them better."
• "If you can boost the value of a top employee by 10%, it's likely more valuable than boosting the value of your bottom employee by 50%."

The Ten Commandments of Maintaining Legacy Code

• "By definition, legacy code is not a sign of failure — it's a sign of success. Code only survives if the product it supports is successful."
• "'Just this once' is essentially a joke phrase. Nothing is just this once."

Three Mistakes That Changed How I Lead

• "You can sit through training for years. One mistake you care about will teach you more in a day."
• "Your actions send unintended messages. Be very careful and think about what you might be messaging."
• "No one is personally valuable enough to be worth destroying a team."

The Cheese Pizza Problem: Consensus Is Killing Your Best Decisions

• "When everyone has a voice, the outcome gets safer, slower, and more boring."
• "Bold and inventive ideas always scare or offend someone."

Relying on Your Manager Isn't a Career Plan

• "Being able to solve our problems is infinitely better than having a great excuse for being a failure."
• "Every hire, from college graduate to experienced employee, should prioritize meeting everyone important in their first week."

The AI Gold Rush Looks a Lot Like the Dot-Com Bubble

• "The boom is real, as in there's real opportunity. And the inevitable bust will be because we're overly excited about the land grab."
• "We first replicate what we know with the new medium. And then we recognize what we can do differently."

Anyone Can Have a Big Idea. Thinking Big is About Charting a Path.

• "Following the rules is never an acceptable excuse for a poor result."
• "Rules are good guidelines to follow, but leaders also need to know when the rules should be broken."

Big Companies Don't Get Slower Because They Become Stupid

• "Essentially every person you add makes everyone else slightly less efficient on average."
• "A reduction in speed and inability to pivot quickly almost inevitably come with growth."

9 Hard Lessons You Learn as a Director at Amazon

• "When you become a senior leader, absolutely no one cares about your effort. If anything, a lot of effort means that you're probably screwing something up."
• "Your currency for getting things done is trust and relationships."

22 Somewhat Random Bits of (Mostly Tech Career) Advice From Dave

• "Early career folk should care less about their current income, and more about tech exposure."
• "If you're building something fancy and complex and exciting, 80% of the time you're overbuilding."

My Experience at an Amazon Recruiting Trip

• "AI has made a real mess out of recruiting. It's an arms race between people trying to cheat recruiting systems and companies trying to figure out how to keep their interview process as cheap as possible."
• "I'm still convinced that there's no good replacement for in-person interviews."

Diversity Metrics Are Easy to Fix. Real Diversity Means Hiring People You Disagree With.

• "The underlying assumption behind our diversity programs is that increasing protected class diversity will lead to the benefits of cognitive diversity — and that overly simplifies the topic."
• "It's very difficult to hire someone who thinks differently. Because you likely see that difference as 'wrong.'"

A Simple Framework for Giving (and Receiving) Feedback at Work

• "No one can change if they feel attacked."
• "Upward feedback is a gift from an employee to a manager — and most managers rarely receive it."

I Wrote a 90,000-Word Novel With AI in 2 Days. You Probably Shouldn't.

• "AI is great for some things. Not all things."
• "AI influencers have repeatedly proclaimed the end of human labor in a few short years. Yet Amazon still uses humans to put books into boxes after hundreds of millions in AI and robotics investments."

Interview Mistake: Trash Talking Co-Workers

• "If you complain about your current boss, your future boss will assume you'll continue to do the same."
• "You do not look smarter by insisting your past co-workers were less smart."
• "By acknowledging the contributions of others, you make your own contributions more believable."

Keep Calm and Carry On - Calm Beats Chaos Every Time

• "You control 100% of 50% of a relationship."
• "Our personal growth, corporate process growth, and growth of those around us all revolves around our ability to make mistakes, and learn from them."

Why do the Amazon Leadership Principles Work?

• "If you say that you value something, but don't encourage it in any way, it creates zero results."
• "Your personal influence, without any additional mechanisms, doesn't scale."

You're Not "Letting People Go" — You're Firing Them

• "They don't want to go. So you're not 'letting' them go. You're kicking them out of the door."
• "You promote people who make your life easy, and you look closely at the performance of people who make your life hard."

The Easiest Way to Get a Yes at Work

• "Make it extremely easy to say yes, and hard to say no."
• "If you're already doing the work, I would have to go out of my way to stop you. It feels weird to stop someone who is doing the work."

Your Strength Got You Here, but Doing The Opposite Will Take You Farther

• "In the right situation, your natural behavior rewards you. At other times, your natural behavior in a situation is wrong. Your superpower becomes your Achilles heel."

Twelve Career Lessons They Don't Put in Onboarding

• "Being skilled at your job is table stakes. Those [promotion] processes are run by humans who are motivated and driven by how they emotionally feel about you."
• "I've repeatedly seen people do things poorly at work, but I've rarely seen them do the same thing poorly for many years. People usually give up early, or they improve."
• "HR is there to protect the company. If you're in a bad situation, I assure you that HR is not your friend."
• "Don't stay in your lane. The most interesting learnings come from less obvious sources."

Confidence: A Legal Performance-Enhancing Drug for the Office

• "Confident people are our leaders — or more precisely, we make leaders out of confident people."
• "You don't need permission to lead. You just need to look, sound, and act like a person others instinctively follow."

Stop Saying These 8 Things at Work

• "An interview is a sales job. You're trying to sell yourself to the company. Their job is to discover why you're not the perfect candidate. You want to win. Don't help them in their job."
• "'I don't know' is not a complete sentence at work. It's not that you don't know forever. It's that you don't know yet."
• "Saying something is easy is counterproductive — you're setting the value of your work when you talk about how hard it is."

Think Your Skip-Level Is for "Visibility"? That's Cute. It's Not.

• "At every level up in the management chain, you pay attention to the connections between an ever-increasing list of people and things — and necessarily focus on fewer details."
• "A skip-level meeting shouldn't be about you. That's not the point."

5 School Habits That Make You Worse at Your Job

• "In school you're rewarded for putting excessive effort into every task. Work doesn't work that way."
• "Experienced employees learn that ambiguity in the workplace signals valuable autonomy."

If Your System Never Fails, That's the Real Failure

• "Poor operations are clearly bad news. But perfect operations are a waste of money."
• "There is no prize from customers for almost any business for having the least downtime or the best codebase."

The AWS Outage — Lessons on Worst-Case Scenarios

• "Disastrous events are inherently unavoidable with large-scale, complex systems."
• "Engineers regularly underestimate the worst-case scenario for situations."

8 Ways to Stop Being Crushed by Infinite Work

• "In adult work, there is an unlimited amount of work to do. You just try to get the most important stuff done."
• "Urgency and priority are absolutely not the same thing."
• "The most efficient way to solve too much work is to not ever do the work."

The 4 Major Impacts of Amazon's Decentralization and Ownership Model

• "It's not my job to decide who's right or to do what's fair. It's my job as a manager to ensure my team is as functional as possible."
• "Letting junior people make decisions means junior people making junior mistakes."

4 Problems Managers Run Into

• "In interpersonal conflicts, it's rarely obvious who is at fault — and if you think the answer is obvious, it's likely that you're biased."
• "Leaving a bad team dynamic alone is like a festering wound."

The 5 Whys in Action

• "Our blame can't be about the humans making mistakes but the systems we've built. Because humans will always make mistakes."
• "If you ever land at a human error, you know you haven't found the root cause, because our critical assumption is that humans will always make errors."

Well, I hope you found some useful quotes there, or maybe stumbled on an article you haven't read yet. Have a great day!