Keith Likes Numbers
Chapter 5 in my ongoing story about privacy and autonomy in the workplace
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Keith likes numbers. He likes their clarity, their consistency, their order. He likes that 2+2 always equals 4. He likes that numbers don’t change.
He’s always been like that, ever since he was a little kid. Growing up, I always had my nose in a book. Our family would go on these long road trips—I’m talking, cross-the-entire-continent-to-see-my-grandparents-in-British-Columbia long—and I’d take three or four books to read, but Keith, he’d just stare out the window and go into this weird kind of slack state, his jaw drooping, his eyes lidded, and our mom would turn around and ask him what he was thinking and he’d say, “I’m counting.”
He counted everything: telephone poles and cows and makes of cars. It was that last one that impressed me the most, because he could tell you that in the last 50 miles he’d counted 36 Chevys and 47 Fords, etc., etc., and that didn’t count trucks, mind you, that was a different count. He had all that in his head in perfect order.
It was no surprise that when Keith went to college, he majored in business, focusing on the finance and accounting side. He liked to joke that he got all the way through college without reading a book cover to cover. He dipped into those that were required and read just enough to pass the tests. It’s not that he wasn’t literate—he could write pretty well, in fact—but he didn’t like the messy ambiguity of language, its openness, the freedom it offered to construct meaning any way the writer wanted (which could then be turned around and interpreted differently by a reader). Words were too messy for Keith.
But numbers, and especially business numbers, oh boy, Keith liked that. He liked that if you knew the cost of producing and distributing something, you could set a price, and if you knew the number of people who bought it at that price, you’d know your profit (I’m putting this in my crude, English-major terms.) And he could go at these kinds of calculations all day, spinning out projections based on slight modifications to this factor or that factor, to penetrating X percent of this market, or to making Y improvements in production efficiency. He didn’t mind playing with these variables, you see, as long as there was a rationale behind it. And he could do that—play with variables, spin out projections—all day long.
As you might imagine, this combination of diligence and absorption in numbers paid off when he got into the workplace. Straight out of college he joined the accounting team at KPMG and for two solid years he thrived there, basking in the sheer pleasure of all the calculations they asked him to do. Keith was well liked at his work, partly because he was (and still is) just an affable guy, always up on the latest sports scores, not inclined to push his opinions on anyone, and partly because he just quietly worked his ass off. When one of his bosses asked for something done on time, you could guarantee that Keith would deliver, no matter how long and hard he had to work to get it done.
When he was at KPMG and I was in grad school, he told me how he had to work 70 hours one week to hit a deadline, including working right through the weekend.
“Why don’t you tell them the project is bigger than they thought?” I asked him. “Ask for more time?”
“I’m not going to do that Dan,” he replied.
“Why not? What’s so critical about this deadline that makes it more important than your life?”
“My boss asked me for it, so she must need it. She’s got to deliver the numbers upstream, for the quarterly reports. It’s my duty to get it done.”
That’s another side to Keith: he defers to authority. If his boss asked for it, it must be right. If his company needs it, it’s not up to him to ask why, it’s up to him to do it. He would have made a good soldier. There was just a kind of blind obedience there, an utter respect for the authority of the institution, that I could never fully wrap my head around.
Keith and I didn’t argue with each other very much, in part because I think neither of us could really fathom being inside the other’s head. I know this was true for me: I’d ask him to explain his thinking, and he’d work from such a different set of assumptions and core beliefs than me that at some point I’d just throw up my hands in bewilderment at his thinking. But we argued about this obedience to authority issue, because it really bugged me.
He’d say, “You actually think you know better than my boss, don’t you Dan? What makes you think your opinion is so damned important?”
“I just think you have the right to push back when it’s taking so much of your time. Maybe your boss didn’t understand what she was asking.”
“She understood, and it’s my job to deliver. It’s not my job to complain or complicate things.”
There wasn’t really anywhere to go with this argument; we weren’t going to convince each other. But Keith threw me a bone on this one.
“Look Dan, it’s not going to be like this forever. I’m doing this for two years, and then I’m going to ask for a promotion.” And he did: at his two-year anniversary, he asked for and received a promotion and a slight raise in pay, and he set his two-year clock in motion again, pressing his nose to the grindstone, but knowing that he could pass on some of the scut work to the junior associates. Because here was the other thing about Keith: along with the absorption in numbers and the deference to authority and the loyalty, there was ambition. Keith wanted to move up, and he had done the calculations on how fast that should happen and he had a schedule to keep.
So when he got to the four-year mark and he was told that while he could get a slight bump in pay, there was nothing open at the next level, he finally got a little pissed. “It’s politics, Dan,” he said. “They’re not giving me the promotion because I didn’t kiss the director’s ass. I’m not playing those damned games.”
I surprised myself by arguing the opposite side. “That’s the way you’ve got to play it to succeed—you’ve got to schmooze a little bit,” I argued. I was a big believer in what I liked to call the “long con,” playing for the long term; it’s what kept me at Wizards for so long.
But that’s not how he saw it. To Keith, it was black and white. He had hit all his marks, and therefore he should be promoted. And if they weren’t willing to do that, he’d find another company who would. And that’s how he landed at Amazon.
The sheer pace at which Amazon hires people might make you think they’re not so picky, but in truth the hiring process (at least for the white collar jobs like the one Keith applied to) is pretty damned rigorous. That rigor—that sense that this wasn’t a personality contest but rather a data-driven selection—really pleased Keith.
He explained it to me as it went along, and added detail once he was inside and got the full scoop. It went like this:
An algorithm matched his resume to the hiring criteria and referred it to a recruiter.
A recruiter scrutinized his resume and his LinkedIn profile to see if he met the functional requirements for the job, then referred him to the hiring manager.
The hiring manager placed a 30-minute call to Keith, which included two questions to assess functional skills and two carefully-worded questions (selected, he learned later, from a vast question bank) to assess alignment with Amazon’s vaunted “Leadership Principles.”
Satisfied with Keith over the 10 others he assessed, the hiring manager set up a “loop,” a set of five hour-long interviews, all with people who had been thoroughly trained in the hiring process, and one of whom was the designated “bar raiser,” whose primary job was to assess whether hiring Keith would “raise the bar” at Amazon. (I joked with Keith that they should call this person the “ball breaker”; he didn’t laugh.)
All of the people in the loop had to assess the candidate against their subset of the leadership principles, and they had to submit written assessments into the hiring portal within 24 hours of their interview, but no one could see the assessments until all the interviews were complete.
Once all the interviews were completed, the team met within 48 hours and revealed and discussed their detailed written assessments and rankings. Only if they all agreed would the person be offered a job …
And Keith was.
He was so excited!
“My god Dan, the rigor of that hiring process was so beautiful!,” he told me on the phone after he got the offer. “I could just hear how the questions were set up to allow for numerical ranking, how they were so insistent on weeding out subjective responses. No one asked me about my ‘style’ or any of that squishy bullshit. And the job offer—it’s so logical: there’s salary but also this graduated set of stock incentives that accrue over a four-year window. It’s like this wonderfully logical incentive structure for me, but it lets the company see if I’m meeting their standards too. The incentives go both ways. I love it!”
Honestly, it sounded perfect for Keith, and I could already hear him binding himself to this four-year commitment with the fervor of the newly converted. What surprised me, though, was how highly he spoke of these “leadership principles” that he had studied in order to ace the interview. “They’re so tangible,” he effused. “They’re not some mush about values and goals—they’re just real clear, testable statements about how we’ll act to build the company.” Already he was using “we” to describe his fellow Amazonians.
For all his enthusiasm for the job, though, I have to say that he was pretty vague when it came to exactly what he would be doing. “I’m on the Human Dynamics team, Dan. They were really attracted to my finance and statistics background, because they’re trying to bring best-in-class data analysis to human performance. I mean, they got really excited when I talked about how much I like figuring out the impact of hard-to-define variables on outcomes and they think I can bring more of that to their team.”
“So you’re going to be one of those people figuring out how long warehouse workers get for their pee breaks?” I poked him.
“Screw you Dan,” he shot back, “that’s just some bullshit that some liberal reporter used to make potshots against the company. Besides, I’m on the knowledge worker side—managers, developers, engineers—it’s going to be a lot more sophisticated than measuring pee breaks.”
“Good luck measuring productivity with those folks,” I said. “What are you going to measure, how fast people type, how many lines of code they write per hour? I’m just not sure how much you can do there, or how much you can measure.”
“Well, that’s what I aim to find out,” said Keith. I’ll say this for him, if anyone could figure it out, he was the man.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.