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If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

jamesshore.com

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Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#61

Post by numbsafari »

Sevii wrote: post #17
lubujackson wrote: post #2

What an amazing article on "de-FAANGing" the perverse org/incentive structure of most startup/tech places. Would love to see more of this type of leadership in the real world.

I like how he says he doesn't need FAANG level people. Then his next paragraph describes working at FAANG. "We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers. (In theory, anyway, we’re not perfect.) So we’re looking for people who have peer leadership skills, who are great at teamwork, who will take ownership and make decisions on their own.…

> FAANG level people

"FAANG" isn't a "level", it's just a cluster.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#62

Post by philbo »

joeldo wrote: post #27

> There’s more details here than I can explain today, but you can use the QR code to find a detailed article, including the documentation we use for the skills. Why not just provide a clickable link given this is an article on the web?

The clickable link is in the right margin just underneath the (first) QR code image:

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2024/update-on-software-e...

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#63

Post by yazaddaruvala »

emmelaich wrote: post #43
vamega wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relational databases are not the preferred storage mechanism at Amazon. If a team wants to use an OLTP relational database it’s possible that it will be a decision they will need to defend at any kind of design review. Of course there are relational databases running OLTP workloads, but it’s far away from the norm. There was a program a while ago to shift many RDBMS systems onto something else.

So they do joins in code rather than SQL? Wouldn't that risk hiding scaling problems?

Amazon Retail has multiple systems to allow you to basically use SQL across databases (eg Datapath).

I’m not sure about AWS.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

blululu wrote: post #54
gwern wrote: post #31

OP is an example of how AI-generated images are usually clutter. Not only do the images not add anything meaningful to the text, and arbitrary parts of the images could be deleted or randomized without affecting the reader's understanding, most of them could be randomly shuffled without anyone noticing. (Which makes them worse then clipart/stockart: if an article swapped the 'hacker hoodie' stockart with the 'neural…

Came here to say exactly this. The ”author” didn’t even bother to use a decent quality image generator. The first image I saw maxed out my AI slop filter and I stopped reading. Made me wonder how much of the article was written by ChatGPT.

[deleted]

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#65

Post by drcwpl »

blululu wrote: post #54
gwern wrote: post #31

OP is an example of how AI-generated images are usually clutter. Not only do the images not add anything meaningful to the text, and arbitrary parts of the images could be deleted or randomized without affecting the reader's understanding, most of them could be randomly shuffled without anyone noticing. (Which makes them worse then clipart/stockart: if an article swapped the 'hacker hoodie' stockart with the 'neural…

Came here to say exactly this. The ”author” didn’t even bother to use a decent quality image generator. The first image I saw maxed out my AI slop filter and I stopped reading. Made me wonder how much of the article was written by ChatGPT.

Agree wholeheartedly, it was unfortunate that the author did not use a good image generator, or even correctly prompt Dall-E to get better images, his take on using AI then became rather flimsy. I gave up at this point!

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#67

Post by mnahkies »

infomaniac wrote: post #57
Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does not use relational databases This is false, at least in my very thin exposure to the company: I interviewed for a team last year which was maintaining EC2 SSH keys using MySQL.

I watched an interesting talk from the RDS team about how they dogfood RDS the other day https://www.pgevents.ca/events/pgconfdev2024/schedule/sessio...

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#68

Post by pyrale »

xwolfi wrote: post #59
saghm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon does a good job of training new hire on the 'Amazon way'. Amazon does 6 pagers, they do design docs. Amazon does SOA. Amazon does not use relational databases. Everything has an API. Because of the 'Amazon way' and the training they do new team members understand at least some of the context and expectations. As a counterpoint, a huge part of Amazon's culture (or at least, AWS's) in my experience was the emp…

Which is the only way to learn tbh, you can receive as much positive reinforcement imaginable, nothing prepares you for a large scale incident like living through one, building the connections you need to solve it, getting the shame of your life, and losing sleep over your failure.

Nothing teaches you to swim like being thrown in the middle of the atlantic.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#69

Post by heeton »

weinzierl wrote: post #66

Interesting, but not surprising, that Agility only made place 5, way behind Quality . It will soon be a quarter of a century since the Agile Manifesto has been published. It would be sad if we hadn't progressed since then.

The article uses “Internal Quality” which has a specific definition for them. And their definition of agility is not derived from the manifesto or Agile.

Indeed, they list Quality immediately followed by customer happiness (“loveability”) which is aligned with XP, the practice supported in the article.

The agile manifesto isn’t the only way to deliver good results in software.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#70

Post by switch007 »

> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers

I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system.

Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely

Has anyone worked at a true inverted company where centuries of classical power structures are thrown out the window?

I feel it can never be properly implemented unless in eg a cooperative

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