Former Amazon principal engineer says he spent '1-4 hours' reading daily — and it's part of the company's 'secret sauce'

Business Insider

2 days ago

When Steve Huynh was a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings began with a "study hall."
Amazon had a "reading culture" even among engineers, Huynh recently told the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, speaking of his time at the tech giant. Employees frequently drafted six-page memos, he said, which they shared with the company to update progress and demonstrate new projects.
"I spent on the order of like 1-4 hours every day reading while I was a principal engineer," Huynh said. "What an amazing culture that I think that almost every other company should replicate if they could."
Huynh, who said the company's embrace of writing and reading the 6-page memos was part of its "secret sauce," said Amazon employees' writing was often constrained to the format during his tenure at the company, whether it was a business strategy, system design, or press release.
Huynh started at Amazon in 2006, only a few years after the company turned its first profit and while Jeff Bezos was at the helm. Bezos famously instilled this culture of memo-writing from the top down.
Bezos insisted on dense, direct memos in 10-point font. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote that "we don't do PowerPoint," instead opting for these six-pagers. "Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely," he wrote.
Before meetings, Amazon employees read these memos together. On the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, Bezos explained why he didn't ask employees to read the memos in advance.
"The problem is people don't have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo, or maybe not read it at all," Bezos said. "They're also bluffing like they're in college, having pretended to do the reading."
Andy Jassy, Bezos' successor and Amazon's current CEO, has worked at the company since 1997. When first pitching what would become Amazon Web Services, Jassy described writing his own memo.
"I remember this six-page narrative, we called it a vision doc. We asked for 57 people, which felt so ballsy at the time. I was so nervous, I wrote 30 drafts of this paper, and Jeff didn't blink," Jassy said in a 2017 talk to the University of Washington.
Jassy has continued the culture of memo-writing under his own leadership. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, Jassy wrote that a mere six-page allotment made the memos "much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right 'why' questions."
"I got really really good at just reading these documents to get up to speed," Huynh said on the podcast, explaining that reading enough six-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format.
Huynh no longer works at Amazon. He left to pursue YouTube content creation full-time, as he told BI in 2024. But Huynh still reveres the company's reading culture — even if he acknowledges it may not be easily reproducible.
"The difficulty would be, you actually have to be disciplined and principled," Huynh said. His interviewer, Gergely Orosz, argued it could only be done from the top down. Huynh agreed.