Will Ye
Will Ye
Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io)
5mo
Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story…
I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down!
However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment?
It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue.
But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away.
Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?
Lmao this is great because on my "virtual on-site" final round of interviews at Amazon, the fire alarm of the person who was interviewing me went off. She switched to audio on the call and continued to try to work through the little coding challenge as she was shouting implementation details above the echo-y wails of a fire alarm raging in a crowded stairwell. Baffled, concerned for her safety and bewildered by her priorities, I hung up and pretended the call had dropped. No offer. No interest
My apartments fire alarm went off during my virtual on-site with Amazon too. There was about 10 minutes left and the interviewer said I should go and he had what he needed. Got an offer the next day!
Exactly. I’ve been here for two years, not a long time by any means, and I don’t personally know a single instance of anyone getting pipped.
I’ve never felt pressured to work overtime, haven’t had to race to meet an unreasonable deadline, and I’ve been rated exceeds on both of the performance evals I’ve been though.
The Amazon I’ve experienced is much different than the one I read about before joining.
It can be drastically different from team to team.
After I joined Amazon in 2007, I referred a friend from Uni who joined a few years later.
I had a fairly laid back experience - after a good start, I became depressed and burned out, but somehow none of my managers seemed to care all that much since I was at least getting some stuff done, until I finally got put on a PIP several years in - which I think was probably deserved, although the handling around it was crap. And even then, when that manager moved to a new team, my new manager told me I was doing fine and not to worry about it.
My friend, on the other hand, who was the most diligent and hard working of my entire friends group in Uni, was assigned to a different team a few desks over. She fell afoul of stack ranking (the idea that you should rank everybody in a team and fire the worst) and was pressured until she quit.
I also heard a bunch of horror stories from devs across the company - unreasonable deadlines, regular Sev-2s and firefighting when on-call, a manager evading blame for a disastrous project launch and dropping it all on one engineer.
I think the main problem that I saw was that there wasn't much training for managers on how to be a good manager, and bad managers never seemed to face consequences.
I finally quit after eight years (funnily enough, after ending up working for the manager who made my friend quit) and I'm a hell of a lot happier nowadays. Amusingly, I'm still facing tight deadlines and sometimes random overtime, but I have a great boss who is willing to fight against these things for me, and that makes a big difference.
So, here's an interesting question: I recently got an email from a recruiter for Amazon saying I could interview for whatever org and whatever team I wanted. What are some sane, reasonable teams? Which teams are the most insane and unreasonable?
There is no easy way to answer this question. The best you can do is talk to people working on that group and ask the question. However, even with this knowledge there is no guarantee, because Amazon is always changing and doing reorgs, so what is a great group today can become a nightmare tomorrow.
Assuming it was a fire drill -- back in the olden times before the new normal, when I worked at the office, fire drills were mandatory exercises. That's the whole point of them: you don't get to ignore them. We were always told in no unclear terms that we were expected to take part in the drill, no exceptions, and people even got told off if they took the time to shut down their computers or go back for backpacks or whatever, because "in a real fire there's no time for that".
I suppose people working in critical positions were cut some slack. I can't imagine doing interviews is one of those positions.
Keep in mind the only people using LinkedIn as anything other than "resume holder" or "mediocre job board" are also the type of people to think "Agree?" is some sort of enlightening prompt.
it's a marketing hack, LinkedIn's algorithm boosts posts with lots of comments and engagement. So people post those artificial questions at the end which are basically preaching to the choir
the fact people actually fall for it is depressing
I like that we've come to a point where people are shitposting on LinkedIn as a counter-point to these insipid:
> "TODAY I interviewed a SINGLE mom that had her BABY on her lap and apologized when it started crying. I gave her the JOB on the spot because motherhood is HARD. Let's all give single mom a break and be more human in the process! :clap: :clap:"
I've unfollowed so many people at this point because I use it as an address book for coworkers and recruiters and these virtue signalling posts are not even trying to look human.
As it happens, many years ago I worked for Amazon and encountered a small microwave fire in the break room. I dealt with it myself, but I realized I had no idea what the appropriate way to notify somebody about a fire. I inquired and discovered that in the event of a fire, the correct behavior would have been to return to my desk and file a Sev-2 incident with the Facilities team. This should in theory page someone who could respond to the building being on fire. I asked if they meant Sev-1, but they said Sev-1 would be reserved for a fire that was impacting website traffic.
If anyone's curious, the correct response to a fire, presuming you couldn't immediately extinguish it, is to pull the fire alarm and evacuate the building.
> “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down!
That is also:
- Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility (We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers)
- Deliver Results (Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle)
- Bias for Action (We value calculated risk taking)
- Think Big (They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers)
- Are Right, A Lot (They have strong judgment and good instincts)
- Ownership (They never say "that's not my job")
- Dive Deep (No task is beneath them)
Clearly, Will Ye Will Ye is operating at an Amazon final-stage boss level, if only they knew [0]!
Don't blame the leadership, as apparently this is exactly what they need to be doing: To paraphrase [High Output Management], the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
Will Ye Will Ye Engineering @ Cohere (cohere.io) 5mo Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here’s the story…
I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: “Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!” Uh oh, our team’s application has gone down!
However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. “Will! There’s a fire! Help!” I heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum — restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment?
It was at that time I remembered Amazon’s famous leadership principle “Customer Obsession”. There are customers who depend on my team’s application — I can’t let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend’s pleas, and started debugging the production issue.
But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! “I’m proud of you for being obsessed with our customers,” he said, and gave me a $5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away.
Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I’m so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I’ll never forget. Agree?