

Amazon CTO named as CTO of the Year for Cloud Computing and AWS - don420
http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212501217

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gruseom
I think what Amazon is doing with AWS is a superb technical achievement and
positions them well for the future. It's all very impressive, even as Google
gets more mainstream attention.

There's one thing that holds my admiration back, though: I've read in a few
places that Amazon is not a great place to work. Would those of you here who
have firsthand knowledge, or have friends who do, care to comment on this?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about free massages or foosball tables or
any of the stuff in that endlessly-recycled article about "fun" workspaces
we've all read a hundred times. I want to know what the culture is. Is Amazon
a place where creative people have respect and are free to do great work? Is
it a place where great hackers would want to be? That kind of thing.

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jeffbarr
Ok, I'll bite.

I've been at Amazon for 6.5 years. People work pretty hard and are recognized
and rewarded accordingly. There's still a startup feel to the company. This is
manifested in the intensity with which we work and in our rather frugal
approach to spending money on fancy office furniture and other frivolous
things.

There's a really deep technological core to the company. I remember an
occasion which took place just a few weeks after I started there which really
made this clear to me. An engineer benchmarked an "a" and a "b" distribution
of the same version of the Linux kernel. "a" was 5% faster and he took the
time to figure out exactly why this was the case and to see why this had
happened. When you are running hundreds or thousands of servers,a 5%
performance degradation can alter your cost structure significantly.

We have fun by doing great work. There may be a foosball table or two
somewhere in the organization, but by and large our energy is focused on doing
a great job for our customers.

Every company likes to claim that they are customer-driven. That is truly the
case at Amazon. If you do something heroic to help a customer in need, you may
even be recognized in front of your peers at your team's next all-hands
gathering.

Creative problem solving is encouraged, but it is most likely going to happen
within the space of your team.

Reasoned, fact-driven arguments prevail in meetings and in the overall
decision-making process. You won't get too far with an argument that starts
out with "I am guessing that..." If you do your homework, collect up the
facts, and have genuine numbers to back up your hunches, you will do great.

As a developer you will be on pager duty 1/N of the time, where N is the
number of developers on your team. After some piece of code wakes you up at 3
AM twice in the same week, you'll figure out that it is a weak link in the
chain and you'll figure out how to strengthen it. This continuous improvement
process helps us to make our systems more and more reliable over time. Of
course, sometimes the fix is to rearchitect. Figure it out, put the plan
together and make it happen.

We do have a "get it done" approach. There's nowhere to hide and no room for
slackers or pretenders. Working in our environment tends to weed out those
kinds of people pretty quickly.

Benefits are good and once you've proven yourself the pay is good too.

Like I said, I have been at Amazon for 6.5 years. I am still thrilled to come
in to work every day (when I'm not traveling or working from home, that is).

Sound good? Track me down and I'll tell you about our open positions...

~~~
gruseom
Fair enough, though I think we have to put an evangelist discount on
everything you say.

Based on what I've observed, I have no trouble believing that Amazon is
extraordinarily customer-focused and still has a startup feel. That's not
quite what I'm asking about, though. I'm trying to figure out whether good
hackers are esteemed by the culture or downtrodden by it (as they are in most
organizations, and were in most startups of Amazon's generation). Not because
I'm looking for a job, but because I'm interested in testing a pet theory.

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river_styx
Now how about some recognition for the grunts who actually implemented all of
it.

~~~
jrockway
No no, it's much more interesting to read about what color shirt the guy
wears. I mean, that's pretty important, and is clearly the key to Amazon's
success.

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jrockway
I am also impressed with Amazon's other offerings, like the order fulfillment
service. As a programmer, it bugs me to see people solving the same simple
problem again and again; in this case filling a warehouse with packages, and
paying someone to stick a mailing label on it. With Amazon, that problem is
solved -- they store your stuff and send it out, freeing you up to do
something that's never been done before.

The "cloud" services are the same. Instead embarking on a year-long project to
build Yet Another Data Center, you can just bust out your credit card and
start uploading your files.

Very meta, and very efficient.

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spazmaster
he deserves it. awesome!

