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Amazon is high documentation, high meetings culture. The documentation is reviewed by peers, bar raisers, and leaders in a process called document read before b
by fumar 4y ago
Amazon is high documentation, high meetings culture. The documentation is reviewed by peers, bar raisers, and leaders in a process called document read before being official.
Edit: Someone asked for more detail on high meeting culture. There are constant meetings between cross-functional teams, various leadership stakeholders, and ongoing operational planning. That is not including your day to day meetings within your sub team or the follow up meetings from doc reads or the new team launch meetings, etc. Amazon tech is a high meeting culture.
- cateblanchett 4y agoso the worst of both worlds
- xenonite 4y agoWhy? I think this sounds great.
- gregoriol 4y agoIf you are writing for reviews, you are not writing for your peers. The question is: who will be using the documents?
- htrp 4y agoRead an amazon 6 pager... then try to write one, about anything. and then invite all of your co-workers to pick apart every single line of your document.
- fumar 4y agoCorrect. Be careful about sharing a document in progress, notes, or just simple thoughts in text. People will pick it apart word by word. Why? It is the culture Amazon created. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it's a waste of everyone's time.
- von_lohengramm 4y agoSure, but oftentimes technical documentation is severely lacking. PRFAQs, initial design docs, etc. are thoughtfully created and thoroughly reviewed, but the actual implementation lacks the documentation required to make onboarding (be it new team members or new dependent teams) as smooth as it could be. My favorite is finding an out of date Wiki page from 6 years ago that contains a partial list of API method names, descriptions if you're lucky, and then nothing else, not even a link to the service's AAA page/etc. or a high-level summary of what the service _does_ or _why_. With how many moving parts there are and how inaccessible non-platform-level documentation is, the new hire experience at Amazon can be rather daunting. Even SDE1/2s that are a year in often have a very incomplete picture of what's going on in their own domain space. Too much tribal knowledge.
- FigmentEngine 4y agothis statement needs some detail, "high meetings" is obscuring that meetings use the docs (not meetings with no agenda or lots of presentations). meeying use docs as the primary driver, be that a narrative or analysis of a dataset
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]