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Employee #1: Amazon

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Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#41

Post by almostApatriot1 »

mywittyname wrote: post #7
AstralStorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this was more honorary than anything. It sounds like he didn't necessarily have the skills necessary to be a true executive, but putting him on a team where he's managed by someone else would seem like a slap in the face. This was a decent way to keep him compensated fairly for his past contributions. I've seen at other companies where people like this are moved into "R&D" so they can keep working on cool pro…

Sounds like he was too soft for Bezos.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#42

Post by __derek__ »

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.

In THE EVERYTHING STORE, which I happen to be reading, it's noted that Bezos told Kephan early on that he would have his job as long as he wanted it. This was Bezos's compromise, basically: stick to the letter of his promise while doing what he had to do for the company. As others have noted, it was not an example of the Peter Principle because it moved SK out of the hierarchy.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#43

Post by phonon »

giarc wrote: post #28
BatFastard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unquestionably! Lets say he had a typical 5%, no conservatively lets guess 1%. So 1% of 366 billion! Let you do the math. On the other hand if he had 10% which would not be unreasonable, he would be very rich.

A quote from a 2011 Geekwire article. " Jeff was working on it full-time already, and his wife, Mackenzie, was writing checks every once in a while. But that was it. I didn’t get founder’s stock." 0. http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

Nope.

http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

"So, after five years were up — and my stock was all vested — I probably would have left a little earlier if that had not been the issue.

So, did you hang on to all of the shares because Amazon hit a rough patch just after you left?

“I don’t know what the effect on morale inside the company was since I wasn’t there. But I did do a lot of selling during those times, because from the outside, without knowing what was going on inside the company anymore, I didn’t know if it was going to be a casualty of that era or not, so I cashed out quite a bit of my position. But I did hold on to some of it, and I continue to.”"

Probably between 1 and 2%, I would guess. Some of which he cashed out when the stock was at a low. So between what his current shares are worth now and what he cashed out, probably at least $100 million.

EDIT: His foundation has $53 million in assets, so that should give an idea...

http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/651/65121...

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#44

Post by nocarrier »

skaphan wrote: post #39
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-...

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular.

The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For example, there was an add macro but not a subtract macro, so to do A-B, you had to say ${add A -B}. I might have the exact syntax wrong since it's been 20 years.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#46

Post by giarc »

phonon wrote: post #43
giarc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quote from a 2011 Geekwire article. " Jeff was working on it full-time already, and his wife, Mackenzie, was writing checks every once in a while. But that was it. I didn’t get founder’s stock." 0. http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

Nope. http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl... "So, after five years were up — and my stock was all vested — I probably would have left a little earlier if that had not been the issue. So, did you hang on to all of the shares because Amazon hit a rough patch just after you left? “I don’t know what the effect on morale inside the company was since…

Looks like you are right. I didn't see that part as I didn't notice it was a 4 page article.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#47

Post by skaphan »

nocarrier wrote: post #44
skaphan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For exa…

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#48

Post by pault »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #17

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 o…

I taught myself to code in the early 2000s, coming from a graphic design background, through javascript and actionscript[1]. It took me years of sitting in my bedroom after work, reading dense paper manuals with very few resources for clarification. The mailing lists were often intimidating and took days to get an answer, if it all. You can imagine how stressful that was when working on a deadline and hoping that someone responded to your question about some obscure error message before the project was due. I remember being intensely jealous of my coworkers who were learning to code around 2010 and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth!

[1] Say what you will about actionscript, it was an extremely helpful platform for beginners. I probably would have given up without the easy installation and IDE support. Javascript had essentially no debugging tools (firebug didn't exist until 2006; browsers were a nightmare of inconsistency, and debugging meant dumping vars via document.write()) and I didn't have the technical skill to get a java development environment up and running at the time.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#49

Post by sliverstorm »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #11
protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Where does an awesome CTO get promoted to? It kind of seems like the end of the road, with the possible exception of CEO, but that position is probably occupied.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#50

Post by philodespotos »

skaphan wrote: post #47
nocarrier wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For exa…

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

Lucid Emacs is now XEmacs. Work would've begun right around 1989, so it's likely you just never crossed paths with it. =)
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