When Steve Huynh worked as a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings kicked off with a “study hall.” he shared on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast that Amazon fostered a “reading culture” among its engineers. Employees regularly created six-page memos to report on progress and showcase new projects.
“I dedicated about 1-4 hours each day to reading during my time as a principal engineer,” Huynh stated. “It’s an incredible culture that, if possible, other companies should strive to replicate.”
He attributed the success of Amazon’s memo-writing practice as part of its unique approach. During his tenure, this writing format was a staple, whether for business strategies, system designs, or press releases.
Starting at Amazon in 2006, shortly after the company recorded its first profit under Jeff Bezos’ leadership, Huynh noted that Bezos pushed for concise, direct memos. Bezos famously favored them written in 10-point font, stating in a 2017 letter to shareholders, “we don’t do PowerPoint,” instead championing the six-page format. He acknowledged the variability in memo quality.
Prior to meetings, team members read these memos together. In a 2023 interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Bezos detailed why he chose not to have employees read the memos beforehand: “People don’t have time to do that and often come to meetings having only skimmed or not read the memo at all,” he explained.
Andy Jassy, Bezos’ successor and current CEO, also embraced this culture. When pitching what would grow into Amazon Web Services, he recalled writing his own memo, crafting a “vision doc” that underwent 30 drafts. “Jeff didn’t blink,” Jassy recounted during a 2017 talk at the University of Washington.
Jassy maintained the memo-writing tradition in his leadership. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, he mentioned that the six-page limit made the memos “much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right ‘why’ questions.”
“I became adept at quickly reading these documents to get up to speed,” Huynh added, noting that reading numerous six-page memos helped him articulate his thoughts in similar formats.
Though Huynh has since moved on from Amazon to pursue full-time YouTube content creation, he remains an advocate for the company’s reading culture. However, he acknowledged its challenges, emphasizing the need for discipline and strong principles to implement effectively, a sentiment that his interviewer, Gergely Orosz, supported.