131–140 of 147 posts
“Paxos as a service” Ok. I have just spent 5 minutes noodling on that one and … I love it even if I cannot work out how to make it work … Definitely coming back to that
Isn't etcd or Zookeeper essentially Paxos as a service? Or maybe I'm missing exactly what's meant by this.
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Possibly a better alternative than, say, Bridgewater when Ray Dalio was in charge. Adherence to principles was part of a high percentage of decision making conversations, but since is book is so big, they might be best compared to theological arguments in the middle ages, with different specialists arguing with different quotes from different parts of the book. All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power…
> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization. This has the ring of truth. Has anyone solved this problem? Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)
I suspect alignment to long-term profits weirdly solves it at larger scales, but that kind of unbridled greed is weirdly hard for large organizations anyway.
The thing it wants is usually continuation of certain hierarchies, and singular long-term goals toward anything tend to disrupt that.
There’s a reason why leadership and the leadership principles are mocked. They vary from okay to kinda dumb to just outright silly.
> they could probably come up with several services which Amazon already has internally
I feel like the myth that AWS is just internal Amazon stuff exposed externally has done so much heavy lifting despite never really being true.
I have principles-fatigue after going through a number of companies that promise to abide by certain good sounding principles only to backtrack at the slightest pushback. I would actually trust a company more if it had no defined principles. Perhaps just honesty and transparency.
Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.
This myth that Amazon is customer obsessed like what part of Amazon are you looking at?
Even now, I can search for a product, think "Oh, good, something here should work", and hit the "Get it tomorrow" filter. I watch the results change and show a subset of results...
... none of which I can "get tomorrow".
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Amazon DOES follow them very closely, it's quite unlike any other company in that aspect.
I'd challenge most Amazon employees to be able to even name all the principles.
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It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through. I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6. But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promot…
Meh, sure it's up to him but if his management chain isn't interested, then it's basically impossible. Best to recognize the reality and plan accordingly Signed, a guy who saw this happen to talented L5s like you.
My plan was always to stay four years for the initial offer, build a network of potential clients (I worked in AWS ProServe), use the comp to pay off debt and stack money (I sold my AMZN stock the moment it vested) and move on. While I was there I became the second highest contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” and published my own projects to the official AWS open source repository.
I also used the pivot from “enterprise dev” to “cloud consultant specializing in cloud native solutions” to stay permanently remote as I moved to my next company and relocate to state tax free Florida after COVID lifted.
I knew going in I didn’t have the stomach to put up with Amazon’s bullshit or BigTech in general. When GCP was recruiting for similar positions, I neither wanted to work for another large tech company and definitely didn’t want to be in an office.
On the other hand, I tell all younger people to do whatever it takes to get into a large public tech company and make as much money and get as many RSUs as they can.
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Valve? Though I have no idea how they're going now with the anarchy-as-an-organisational-structure thing these days.
I remember in the 2010s reading about them and also reading that there are de facto hierarchies within Valve for given projects, even if they aren’t explicitly laid out.
People could self-organize, on-demand, for a task, and structure whatever hierarchy was appropriate, based on somewhat optimal resource allocations for that task.
(Example: Person A might normally be the most experienced at facilitating the group's coordination, but A is providing key technical expertise for this task. Person B isn't critical path on this task, and has facilitating skills and interest in that role, so B volunteers for that role for the duration of the task.)
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It’s captured audience who will not push back as hard as they maybe should. That and depressing wages of course
I saw this myself. When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”. For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will),…
My favorite one is leaders "Are Right, a Lot". The others are all generally "meta" about deciding what to do and how to do it, but that one actually calls out the concrete results of actions. It feels pretty meaty, and actually is a way to grade leaders. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, as a team lead, who recently very much was not right about something. But fortunately it's "a lot" and not "always".
It's not "are right from the start, a lot", it's "are right, a lot", kind of works in hand with the Disagree and Commit LP