Amazon

A fun project to work on.

I am kind of shocked by how poorly the organization is run. Red flag: "we run like a startup"... I've worked at startups and big companies, and nobody runs like that. They just mean, "we're incompetent".

A major problem I see is that there are too many different groups, and their focus within each is too narrow. If there's a cross-group issue, then good luck; nobody will pay attention to you outside of your group. There are clear bugs that I've reported, significant things with easy fixes, and other straightforward performance issues that simply were not addressed because they weren't directly inside my team (they were "adjacent", so to speak).

There's a tradeoff between safety and aggressiveness. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

• SpaceX (Starlink specifically) moves quickly, but they just push things forward warts-and-all (they do very little evaluations before deploying).
• Government contractors move slowly, but they do all the validations and have a high success rate, but end up taking a long time.

So, both strategies have their advantages. Kuiper chooses the worst of both. They jump forward trying to move quickly, and then try to back-fix all the issues they would have caught if they had done preliminary validations. Often these issues are of little importance and should not gate anything... but the individual incentive is to do "stuff", even if it's not helpful as a whole. In other words, it's easier to rise within your organization if you're showing you're doing "something", even if it's ultimately unproductive as a whole. This is probably also why they're so overstaffed - it looks better to grow an organization to be "growing", rather than to just do your work.

As a result of these kinds of cultural/organizational issues, Kuiper as a whole is simply not able to execute.

Still on my contract there, so posting anonymously for obvious reasons. They want me to join as a permanent employee, and I'm split on this. Although I come off very negative here, I'm sure, there is a lot of good stuff going on too. It's just frustrating to see how badly run everything is, and how trivially easy it would be to improve many things if the structure was improved.

Flatten organization