Five mid-career officers are a few months into their tours at Amazon and FedEx, and the Navy is set to dispatch many more to Fortune 500 companies later this year. The program that sends junior officers to a year-long stint at Fortune 500 companies is set to expand more than six-fold next year, with 33 spots at 20 companies.
The lieutenants and lieutenant commanders are the first cadre in the Navy’s Tours with Industry program, which will soon expand six-fold, to include enlisted sailors and a host of well known companies, including a few months into their tours at Amazon and FedEx, the first group to try out the Tours with Industry program announced last May. Later this year, the next class, culled from a wide swath of officer communities will report to several other companies well known to the military as well as to the general public: Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Walmart, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and USAA are among them.
Three and a half months into his tenure at the Seattle-based Amazon, one of the first participants says working at like a tech company is nothing like a squadron, but that his Navy skills are still useful. EA-18G pilot Lt. Cmdr. Jared Loller said that the tech company is pretty much nothing like an aviation squadron, but he’s finding use from some of his Navy skills just the same.
“It’s not really anything like working in a squadron,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jared Loller, an EA-18G Growler pilot who’s now working in the quality department at Amazon, where he keeps operations flowing in the warehouses and works to improve customer service.
The biggest shift, he said, is to seniority: where the military had a rigid pecking order, everyone at Amazon “sits at a round table.”
“It’s kind of hard to describe. There’s not a whole lot of seniority to the team,” he said. “I might be senior in position, but certainly some people have a whole lot more experience than me.”
Loller works as a program manager in the quality department, dealing specifically with keeping operations flowing in Amazon’s warehouses around the country and improving the customer service experience. when a
The biggest difference, he told Navy Times in a Jan. 17 phone interview, is the leadership structure. Where the military has a religiously observed pecking order, everyone “sits at a round table” at Amazon, he said.
That can be both a good thing and a bad thing, he explained. In some situations, he’s called on skills he honed as a operations officer to cut through indecision. In a Jan. 17 phone interview, Loller told Navy Times about his transition to the tech world, three months in.
Sitting at the round table
“Really, sometimes it’s just like herding cats. You have a group of very smart people sitting at a round table, and you only have an hour for the meeting. … , because you’ve got another group of people waiting at the door to come in. You have to get some things done,” he said.
On the other hand, that autonomy and collaboration has its benefits.
“A lot of times people say, ‘Well, we can go this way or we can go this way.’ And most stuff you run up to your boss, but you don’t really have to do it right away,” he said. “So you make the decision, then decide the impact and then you tell your boss.”
In the Navy, however, there’s not a lot of collaboration below the department head level, and COs would be briefed daily.
But, Loller said, That low-level decision making is a huge perk of working in the private sector, he continued, because his Amazon team can try out ideas before submitting them up the chain, lowering the likelihood they’ll have to settle on one and risk spending a lot of money just to backtrack if it doesn’t pan out. theory doesn’t work out.
“The military has a lot more riding on it, but I think the decision-making in the military could probably be, if trained properly, could probably be executed at a lower level,” he said.
And Amazon does a good job organizing everyone’s time and streamlining intra-office communication, he added.
Setting up a meeting is a very specific process, where you reserve a room, check people’s schedules and then invite them during a free block, then vacate the conference room at the appointed time, because the next group will be waiting right outside the door.
“Keeping up with the Navy’s message traffic system, even when you’re in the squadron, is just a painful task,” he said. “Whereas here, there are specific [distribution] lists, and you can get on or off, or some of them are automatic. Here it’s just delivered to your email and you have a little bit more functionality. It’s not a separate system that you have to download onto your machine.”
Hard work
That’s not to say that working at Amazon is necessarily easier than at a squadron. But There are other aspects of the job that feel similar, or even more taxing, than working in a squadron.
Loller has traveled a week or two of each month since he began his Amazon internshiptour, he said, and unlike in the military, he doesn’t get a day off on the back end if he’s on business through the weekend.
“It feels kind of like work-ups in a squadron, to be honest with you,” he said of flying to Arizona, California and Florida to visit fulfillment centers. “The only difference is, I’m not flying late at night like I was before.”
And 10- to 12-hour days are the norm, he added.
“I kind of assumed that companies in the civilian sector are all about producing, so whatever that takes,” he said.
The biggest surprise about the job, he added, is how everyone at Amazon speaks programmer — familiar with language of software coding that’s needed for everything from customer interaction to logistics management.
“This is a tech company, so I guess I didn’t appreciate how most every person in this company can speak to software development or programming at least on some level,” he said.
About 90 percent of Amazon’s workforce is doing some sort of programming, he said, whether it’s designing and maintaining the web site itself or creating the software that controls warehouse operations.
“It’s been a struggle for me learning how to speak to programmers and software developers and research scientists and people like that who live in that kind of world,” he said. “I’m a little bit of a fish out of water there.”
Loller is assigned to an administrative support command in Seattle, where he completed his fall physical fitness assessment. He also writes up a monthly email report for Navy Personnel Command in Millington, Tennessee. But otherwise, he said, he’s been able to focus on his Amazon duties.
He’s scheduled to leave in June or July and bring his Amazon know-how back to the service. , he said, but it’s too soon to tell what will be the next set of orders.
