I agree with most of the principles and find them meaningful rather than "deliver excellence" platitudes.
But some some principles clearly apply only to the workers and not management. Earn Trust, Have backbone and Frugality especially.
> Amazon is a startup at scale
That's a PR slogan.
> It shouldn't just be about the stock price, y'know?
Amazon is a for-profit company. Workers engage in frugality, stockholders enjoy the billions.
> because people challenged authority
Amazon is quite data-driven when it comes to engineering but very vertical and disciplinarian.
Try challenging Bezos, or talking about unions, for example. Remember point 6 of the SOA memo?
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5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
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The company is well know for firing easily, both directly and through stack ranking.
Well, yes... but anyone who doesn't use service-oriented architecture should be fired, right? (=
I mean... we've all seen some of the shit Amazon put out back in the day, the one-offs, the impossible to maintain or integrate with shit some team in a silo built... easy to have silos when every team has to be small. I don't know, I really feel like the SOA memo wasn't so much a threat as just a joke to bring home the point that not using SOA is dumb and impossible to work with.
And I honestly felt like Amazon was a startup at scale. Man, I really loved my time there. Met some of the best people I ever worked with.
I agree with most of the principles and find them meaningful rather than "deliver excellence" platitudes.
But some some principles clearly apply only to the workers and not management. Earn Trust, Have backbone and Frugality especially.
> Amazon is a startup at scale
That's a PR slogan.
> It shouldn't just be about the stock price, y'know?
Amazon is a for-profit company. Workers engage in frugality, stockholders enjoy the billions.
> because people challenged authority
Amazon is quite data-driven when it comes to engineering but very vertical and disciplinarian. Try challenging Bezos, or talking about unions, for example. Remember point 6 of the SOA memo?
---
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. 7) Thank you; have a nice day!
---
The company is well know for firing easily, both directly and through stack ranking.