Amazon

I really enjoy working with my specific team at Amazon. They're very fun, and we have good camaraderie.

Another thing I like about working at Amazon is that everything I do is something I'm trying for the first time. Work is usually not boring because there is always a new challenge to solve.

At Amazon, there is a belief that it is best to keep teams scrappy, and that this will contribute to the company's success because it will make people continue to invent and simplify.

I personally have not found this policy to have this intended effect.

One of the most immediate things I noticed working at Amazon is that the internal tooling is horrifically maintained. It makes most of your job like pushing a boulder uphill, as method after method that you take to find a solution turns out to be a dead-end or not feasible because of some tech-debt quick hack that some other team or your team took, which now limits the range of options you have available.

I think this is due to customer obsession: everything that does not pertain to a customer-related launch is de-prioritized into obscurity.

I feel also that there is a sense of willful blindness at the company, a curious double-think where work-life balance is strongly encouraged, and all management is advocating for it. However, the timelines that are set are so aggressive that they push developers to the limit and make it impossible to achieve.

At its heart, I don't think this is an intentional blindness. Rather, I think it comes from the simple fact that technical unknowns tend to slow a project, not speed it up, and high-level management is working with more levels of uncertainty than lower-level teams.

Management should not only be listening to our customers, but also listening to what teams on the ground say is achievable and what is not.

When engineers push back on goals, they should take it seriously and interrogate why they are pushing back, instead of dismissing concerns off-hand.