The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
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Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#2Yegge's post was very interesting reading, and I took similar learnings away from it. I was at Amazon at the time, however, and there were things that certainly weren't true any more:
>3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
API first... except if you want to be a number of certain new services that somehow managed to get away with not presenting an API, even though an API would make every service team's life easier.
> 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Except, similar to above, where teams apparently decided they didn't want to think that way at all and management just let them.
> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
Unless your exception is perceived providing value to the company. Then you'll get lauded, and everyone is told they'll need to use your js laden, web only interface, and to hell with any automation.
Mostly those exceptions just codified further in my mind about just how right the Bezos email Yegge paraphrased actually was.
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#3Something like Conway’s Law was also recently cited by Elon Musk (jump to 3:30)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/dbttaw/everyd...
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#4> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#5Yegge's post was very interesting reading, and I took similar learnings away from it. I was at Amazon at the time, however, and there were things that certainly weren't true any more: >3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service inte…
How do services talk to each other without an API? Is it something like "put a non-well-documented object into a queue?"
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#6> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.
This is Yegge's over-the-top style of humor, none of these are actual quotes from the email.
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#7I love some of Amazon's executive policies. From what I've read, everyone has to write a multi-page paper before executive meetings, and everyone has to read it, so the meeting goes smoothly with everyone understanding the issues. I hate how no one reads anything in most organizations.
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#8> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.
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Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#9> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.
I strongly believe that Steve was exaggerating for effect here. In my 17 years at Amazon I have never seen or heard of a threat of this nature. The overall intent of the email was to tell teams to decouple, decentralize, and to own their own destinies.
Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
#10Yegge's post was very interesting reading, and I took similar learnings away from it. I was at Amazon at the time, however, and there were things that certainly weren't true any more: >3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service inte…
How do services talk to each other without an API? Is it something like "put a non-well-documented object into a queue?"
Some methods I've commonly seen in Enterprise Duct Tape:
Screen scrape the other service and do data exchange via a Selenium script.
Directly interact with the other service's database.
CSV files and nightly batch jobs.