The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
An oddly gauzy piece. As an ex-Amazonian, I recommend the (complimentary, insider-written) book "Working Backwards" for those interested in a substantive look at how Amazon ticks.
> At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff.
Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
I am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart.
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
Amazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM.
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.
Two things can be true. They treat their employees poorly and they have invented many things which have vastly benefited millions or even billions of people.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] threadGauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
cringe
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.