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The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

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Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#41

Post by kylek »

cm2012 wrote: post #7

I 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.

Not sure about execs, but this happens in engineering meetings (regarding new features being implemented or other semi-major changes). Whoever is initiating the meeting writes up a paper describing the terminology, the nature of the change and why it's needed, how it will be implemented etc. The entire dev team (+ maybe other dev teams within the group), management (the initiator's boss + 1 level above, maybe other dev team managers too) start the meeting with hard printouts of the paper, armed with red pens. The meeting "starts" with ~15 mins or so of silence for everyone to review the paper in the room from start to finish. Then the paper is reviewed end to end and torn up on the way. Often there are multiple of these meetings (i.e. first one went badly or if things change along the way of building/implementing it and questions come up)

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#42

Post by darksaints »

At least as of 3 years ago when I left, the software systems that drove the mandate towards SOA were still massive systems that communicated almost purely through a monolithic Oracle database. It was the software system(s) that was responsible for all automation and accounting at fulfillment centers. This is one of those rare times where I actually think a full rewrite from scratch would have been a better idea.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#43

Post by defen »

xyzzyz wrote: post #40

> While the third point makes all the difference in the world, what Amazon really did get right that Google didn’t was an internal communication system designed to make all the rest possible. > Having teams acting like individual APIs and interacting with one another through interfaces over the network was the catalyst of a series of consequent actions that eventually made possible the realization of AWS in a way tha…

> Google has worked this way since time immemorial.

Do internal Google services exclusively use the Google Cloud Platform APIs? The implication is that internal Amazon services exclusively use AWS APIs. I've never worked at either company though, so I don't know if it's true. Perhaps someone could clarify.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#44

Post by rob-olmos »

leoh wrote: post #5
Twirrim wrote: post #2

Yegge'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?"

Faxes, like in US health care. With staff to handle it at the endpoints.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#45

Post by solarengineer »

jeffbarr wrote: post #9
Waterluvian wrote: post #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.

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.

An ex Netflix person, who has since moved to Amazon, spoke at a client place three weeks ago. He casually mentioned things such as "we forgive the first time, and we fire the second time". From how he spoke, we felt that this may be the norm in Silicon Valley and related places.

I have much respect for what he has achieved, so I didn't interrupt to question such a fear-inducing mindset.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#46

Post by ianmobbs »

arkitaip wrote: post #27

If you use an adblocker like uBlock Origin, you can add the following rule: news.ycombinator.com##.pagetop Unfortunately it removes ALL of the top navbar but I've found it really useful to get around HN's damaging and useless gamification metric.

What?

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#47

Post by maxlybbert »

Waterluvian wrote: post #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.

Very few managers in large companies can throw around threats like that, and the ones who can realize it just makes them look unhinged like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Incidentally, a couple of years ago, I was a contractor for Amazon for a very short time. One thing that stood out was that customers would email Bezos directly, or problems would bubble up to him in some other way, and he would respond by forwarding the email to an appropriate email list. Bezos’s email would be just a question mark, but he always got a fast and complete reply. Once people knew he was paying attention, they would do anything to resolve the problem. He didn’t need to formulate an actual question, or even a general “what’s this about?”, just a literal question mark would do the trick.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#48

Post by jcrites »

leoh wrote: post #5
Twirrim wrote: post #2

Yegge'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?"

Calling parts of your application "services" means that you're already thinking in terms of the "services/API" metaphor. If you're not using services, you might be, for example:

- Building one large application (monolith). Parts of the application communicate with each other via function calls. Everything runs in one large process. You can go quite a long way with this approach, especially for parts of the application that are stateless. (You can also build components of the application using a service/client metaphor within the process as well.)

- Multiple separate applications might communicate with the same database, file system, or some other data store. Before we had distinct distributed systems components taking on the role of queues, event buses, and things like that, it was common to represent queues using folders or database tables. These approaches are still seen today, though they're uncommon in new applications.

Re: The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

#49

Post by aglavine »

Waterluvian wrote: post #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.

It is corporate language for "this is our first and most important priority and should be noticed and followed by anyone"
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