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Amazon engineer here! I love our culture of strong ownership and autonomy, and that we'll take risks, tolerate failures and give things around 7 years to mature
by colmmacc 9y ago
Amazon engineer here! I love our culture of strong ownership and autonomy, and that we'll take risks, tolerate failures and give things around 7 years to mature and pay off. It's super rewarding to be able to own things and see them through, and to see things like AWS, Kindle and Alexa go big places. I've had my own projects work out and I've had things abandoned, and both experiences have been positive in the long run, if a little painful at the time.
As for the AWS thing ... I joined AWS pretty early in its history and even then we had amazon.com workloads and it was definitely the same infrastructure (data centers, network, operations, etc) as Amazon.com . My first two years I was writing code and building AWS services, while also supporting retail operations and dealing with the order pipeline - and I worked in Infrastructure; things were fairly integrated.
- uji 9y agoI agree with rothbardrand@ here, I recently moved from AWS. Amazon is very top-down where developers are heavily managed by their immediate managers (and thats why they need so many MBAs). Our team of 15 engineers had 4 managers, who would push engineers to the edge to meet deadlines. From what I observed, this leads to very high turnover rate, and teams with lot of junior engineers who are asked to assume roles of previous project leads. New hires are brainwashed about increase ownership and responsbility. But after some years, they all realize the game and move over to different company.