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Employee #1: Amazon

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Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#11

Post by LeifCarrotson »

protomyth wrote: post #8
AstralStorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

How is that the Peter Principle? It sounds like he was shunted into a ceremonial position rather than any incompetence on his part in the position.

He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. This implies that he wasn't very good at being a CTO. If he was, he would have had a bigger role in the projects and a larger team with which to accomplish his desired tasks.

This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle, but the result is the same. It is the opposite of the Dilbert Principle, where incompetent people are promoted into a position at which they are sufficiently abstracted from real work that they can no longer do too much damage.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#13

Post by gumby »

AstralStorm wrote: post #4
0xmohit wrote: post #2

This is interesting: Craig: Had you and Jeff stayed close? Shel: Not really. When he replaced me in my original job and I was moved into the CTO slot, I was nominally in charge of architecture, but in fact that just meant rubber stamping projects that were 95% complete by the time I saw them. That was all after having told me that my job was mine as long as I wanted it. And I didn’t have resources other than myself t…

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

I wouldn't call that the Peter Principle; he wasn't promoted above his skill set (per se) due to things like time in grade, which is what Laurence Peter wrote about. In the Peter Principle book the person causes damage through having responsibility without the ability to execute in that particular role.

As others mentioned it was more a great way to reward someone who now didn't really have a specific spot. This is frankly the most common use of the CTO spot. The best description I heard from a founder-moved-into-CTO was "Chief Talking Officer": they trotted him out to give talks but basically he had no other responsibility.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#14

Post by gumby »

abc_lisper wrote: post #12

The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?

You could just look him up in the S-1 to answer the question.

I have talked to him a couple of times and although I have no idea what the sum is yes, he made enough over the years to retire.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#15

Post by djsumdog »

strangetimes wrote: post #5

I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...

Tour de Babel is one of my favourite posts. I feel it's a pretty objective look at languages.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#16

Post by afarrell »

danielvf wrote: post #3

On modern technology: "You walk down the streets, you have to weave around people standing there in random orientations in the middle of the sidewalk looking at their cellphones. Then you see people speaking robotically so that their speech recognizer can understand them. Now they are running around in mobs in parks with their phones in front of them trying to catch imaginary animals. I don’t necessarily see all that…

People, or at least children, have been running around in parks trying to catch invisible animals for decades. As adults, it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#17

Post by mikeleeorg »

Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out?

Shel : Stay up late.

Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same thing.

We both learned on the job and stayed up late trying to put that site together. It's almost hard to remember how "primitive" that was now that there's Google and SO.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#19

Post by kamaal »

AstralStorm wrote: post #4
0xmohit wrote: post #2

This is interesting: Craig: Had you and Jeff stayed close? Shel: Not really. When he replaced me in my original job and I was moved into the CTO slot, I was nominally in charge of architecture, but in fact that just meant rubber stamping projects that were 95% complete by the time I saw them. That was all after having told me that my job was mine as long as I wanted it. And I didn’t have resources other than myself t…

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

No, he was likely promoted because he wouldn't cause much trouble as approving authority.

This is sort of being politically nice is rewarded in every institution. People like this are not given any genuine power per se. But since they listen to the powers and more or less do exactly as they say, they are put in positions where they can't be much trouble and are rather useful the higher authorities political goals.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#20

Post by abc_lisper »

gumby wrote: post #14
abc_lisper wrote: post #12

The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?

You could just look him up in the S-1 to answer the question. I have talked to him a couple of times and although I have no idea what the sum is yes, he made enough over the years to retire.

Thats cool.
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