I’m a L7 SDM in AWS. I’ve been at Amazon 10 years and honestly love huge parts of the culture: the data driven attitude, moving fast, anyone-does-any-job mentality.
However, I’m just not having fun anymore. My org is stacked with Microsofties and we’re moving so slow. Spending more time in meetings discussing a feature then it would take to actually deliver the feature. I look around and it’s increasingly difficult to find pockets of the Amazon that feel like “home.”
I’m looking at moving on but honestly not sure where to go. I want the good parts of the old Amazon culture. I want to ship software, emphasize ownership, and not get stuck in red tape.
Everyone complains about Google’s culture being too slow and not actually interested in delivering. Facebook looks like everything about the Bay Area that keeps me from moving there. I can’t really get behind Snap. Any former Amazonians move on and find greener pastures? (I’m staying in Seattle.)
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On the technical side you dive into designs to understand and probe. You need to know how it works in depth, your engineers made the right decision, and you pull in the right advisors. You get to white board and problem solve. You’re the operations leader and person who picks up the phone when your service is down. You guide your team through the outage. You own communication to upper management and sometimes customers.
As a product owner, you own the “working backwards” process and how that translates to tech. You talk to customers (with a PM) and get to come up with product ideas. (Of course, anyone on the team can!)
And, most importantly, you need to protect that your team can deliver. You need to shield them from interference all around and ensure any dependencies align. In good orgs managers/teams understand we’re all in this together for the customer and there’s a sense of cooperation. Sometimes that trust evaporates when people do not feel safe/aligned/etc. And then this part of the job gets long and tiring.
(With all of that there’s no time to code. But that’s why we have smart SDEs too.)
Amazon is a great training ground for people to create their own startup, but I haven’t really been bitten by that bug. And I’m not exactly ready to pour nights and weekends into someone random’s dream for no pay and little equity payoff.
I don’t need 50 people or the same pay. But I need some translation of mental challenge. And I’d like to get compensated for my skills in one way or another.
It’s a really fun role.
It’s pretty fun.